Alternatives comparison
ElevenLabs Alternatives, Priced Per Finished Hour
The cheapest credible ElevenLabs alternative that publishes its prices is Fish Audio, at roughly $3.30 per finished hour of narration against about $9.82 on ElevenLabs Creator. Below that, only APIs and local open-source models compete. Above it sits Murf, which on the figures we could find is likely more expensive than the tool you would be leaving. And PlayHT, for years the standard answer to this question, no longer exists.
Breakdown Outline
Quick verdict One name on this page is gone Cost per finished hour, every route Fish Audio, and its two meters Murf sells the same brand at 24x apart Two tools that are not really alternatives When not to switch at all What we could not confirm FAQMethodology: published rates, converted to one unit
This is a public-data comparison built from vendor pricing pages read this month, not a hands-on audio benchmark. We did not generate samples in every product, so nothing here ranks audio quality.
- The unit. No voice vendor sells you an hour. They sell credits, characters, tokens, minutes and monthly plan caps. Every figure below is our arithmetic converting a published rate into one finished hour of narration, at an estimated 900 characters per minute — about 150 words a minute at roughly 6 characters a word. That estimate is ours, not a vendor figure, and the full derivation lives in what an hour of AI narration actually costs.
- Where a number is missing, it stays missing. Several vendors in this category do not render prices to us. We say so rather than filling the gap from secondhand articles.
- Income caution. A cheaper voice tool lowers production cost. It does not produce views, sales or monetisation approval.
Quick verdict
Fish Audio
$11 a month for up to 200 minutes, about $3.30 per hour. Roughly a third of the ElevenLabs Creator rate, with cloning and commercial use on paid tiers.
An API
Murf Falcon publishes $0.01 a minute (about 60 cents an hour); OpenAI tts-1 works out near 81 cents. No editor, no cloning your own voice.
Kokoro, run locally
82M parameters under an Apache 2.0 licence, so commercial use is permitted and per-character cost is zero. You pay in setup and hardware.
PlayHT
The domain does not resolve. We removed it from this page and from our ElevenLabs vs PlayHT comparison.
One name on this page is gone
This is worth stating plainly rather than quietly deleting, because it is the single most useful thing we can tell you about this category. We attempted to load play.ht and www.play.ht directly and both failed DNS resolution outright — not a timeout, not a 403, the hostname does not resolve. That is our own test, run this month.
Public reporting describes a Meta acqui-hire in July 2025 and a wind-down at the end of 2025. We label those dates as reported rather than verified, because there is no first-party page left to read them from. What we can assert is narrower and more useful: the domain is dead, and any roundup still listing PlayHT as a live option has not been checked since. Vendor risk in this category is not hypothetical — keep your scripts in a format you own, and know which second provider you would move to before you need one.
Cost per finished hour, every route
Sorted cheapest first. Subscription rows use each plan's own stated allowance; API rows use the published rate converted at 900 characters a minute. Card processing, hardware and engineering time are excluded throughout.
| Route | What the vendor publishes | Cost per finished hour | Own voice cloning? | Verified at source? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kokoro-82M, run locally | Apache 2.0 licence, no per-character charge | $0 plus hardware | No (fixed voice set) | Yes — licence on Hugging Face |
| Murf Falcon API | "$0.01 / min" | $0.60 | No | Yes — murf.ai/api |
| OpenAI tts-1 | "$15.00 / 1M characters" | $0.81 | No | Yes — OpenAI pricing |
| OpenAI tts-1-hd | "$30.00 / 1M characters" | $1.62 | No | Yes — OpenAI pricing |
| Fish Audio Pro | $75/mo, "Up to 1,620 minutes generation" | $2.78 | Yes — 5 voice slots | Yes — fish.audio/plan |
| Fish Audio Plus | $11/mo, "Up to 200 minutes generation" | $3.30 | Yes — 1 voice slot | Yes — fish.audio/plan |
| MiniMax speech-02-hd via fal.ai, a third-party host | "$0.1 per 1000 characters" | $5.40 | No | Partly — fal.ai rate, not MiniMax's own |
| Fish Audio Max | $749/mo, "Up to 6,250 minutes generation" | $7.19 | Yes — 15 voice slots | Yes — fish.audio/plan |
| ElevenLabs Pro | $99/mo, 600,000 credits at 1 credit per character | $8.91 | Yes | Yes — elevenlabs.io/pricing |
| ElevenLabs Creator | $22/mo, 121,000 credits | $9.82 | Yes | Yes — elevenlabs.io/pricing |
| ElevenLabs Starter | $6/mo, 30,000 credits | $10.80 | Yes — instant cloning | Yes — elevenlabs.io/pricing |
| Murf studio, Creator plan | Reported at $29/mo for 2 hours a month | ~$14.50 (unconfirmed) | Yes | No — murf.ai/pricing did not render |
Two things fall out of that ordering. The first is that the spread among priced routes is about 24x, from 60 cents to $14.50, and every row produces an hour of clean synthetic speech. The second is that the ranking has almost nothing to do with which tool is marketed as the budget option: Fish Audio, which older roundups file under "experimental", is the cheapest hosted tool here with cloning included, while Murf, filed by those same roundups under sensible value, is the dearest row on the only figures we could find.
What separates the cheap rows from the expensive ones is not audio length and mostly not quality. It is whether you get to clone your own voice, and whether there is an interface to fix a mispronounced name in. If your workflow is a finished script going straight to an MP3 in a stock voice, you are paying for a studio you never open — the same conclusion we reached pricing AI video tools per finished minute.
Fish Audio, and its two meters
Fish Audio is the find of this update, and it is the one alternative where we could read the full ladder at source. Free is $0 for 8,000 credits and "Up to 7 minutes generation". Plus is $11 a month for 250,000 credits and up to 200 minutes. Pro is $75 for 2,000,000 credits and up to 1,620 minutes. Max is $749 for 25,000,000 credits and up to 6,250 minutes.
Now the interesting part. Fish Audio publishes two meters that do not agree. Alongside the plan caps it states that "Each minute of generation costs roughly 600 to 625 credits." Divide the credit allowances by that rate and you get roughly twice the minutes the plans advertise: 400 minutes on Plus rather than 200, and 3,200 on Pro rather than 1,620. Read through the credit meter, Plus falls to about $1.65 an hour and Pro to $1.41.
We used the lower plan figure throughout, the reading least favourable to Fish Audio. If the credit rate is the operative one, Fish Audio is roughly six times cheaper than ElevenLabs Creator rather than three. Either way the conclusion holds; we simply will not claim the better number without knowing which meter binds.
The Max tier deserves a separate flag, because it is the one place the two meters give opposite verdicts. By credits, Max gives 12.5 times Pro's allowance for 10 times the price — better value. By stated minutes it gives 3.9 times Pro's minutes for 10 times the price, which works out at $7.19 an hour against Pro's $2.78. That is a top tier costing 2.6x more per minute than the tier below it. Whichever way that resolves, there is no volume argument for Max over several Pro accounts, and we would not buy it without asking Fish Audio which meter applies.
Also worth knowing: Fish Audio lists "Commercial use" on its free tier, which is unusual — ElevenLabs restricts its commercial licence to paid plans. But the free tier is capped at about 7 minutes a month, so it is a trial, not a workflow.
Murf sells the same brand at 24x apart
Murf is the awkward case, and the honest answer depends entirely on which door you walk through. It publishes its Falcon text-to-speech API at "$0.01 / min" — one cent a minute, or about 60 cents per finished hour. That is a first-party figure from murf.ai/api, and it makes Falcon one of the cheapest routes in this comparison. Falcon is positioned as a low-latency model for voice agents rather than the studio product, so it is not a like-for-like swap for a narration workflow, but for high-volume automated speech it is very cheap indeed.
The Murf studio subscription is a different story, and we could not confirm it. murf.ai/pricing has now failed to render prices to us across three separate attempts on three separate days. Multiple third-party sources — including a competitor's comparison page — consistently report the Creator plan at $29 a month for two hours of generation, which would be about $14.50 per finished hour and roughly 48% more than the ElevenLabs Creator plan you would be leaving.
We are not stating that as fact, and it does not appear in our verdict. But the shape of it matters even if the exact figure moves: the same company appears to sell speech at rates about 24x apart depending on whether you buy the API or the interface. If you are considering Murf as a cheaper ElevenLabs, check which product the price you saw refers to before you switch — and confirm the studio allowance on Murf's own pricing page, which may well render for you even though it did not for us.
Two tools that are not really alternatives
Speechify is a reading app, not a voiceover tool
Speechify's headline consumer plan is $29 a month for a Premium tier whose published features are about listening: "Listen at speeds up to 1.5x" on free, 1000+ voices and 60+ languages on Premium, plus scanning, summaries and cloud integrations. It is built to turn documents into audio you consume, not exports you publish. Speechify does sell separate Studio and API products, but we could not load pricing for either. Unless you specifically want the reading workflow, it is not the tool you are shopping for here.
MiniMax we can only price secondhand
MiniMax Audio is genuinely well regarded and was the top pick on the previous version of this page. The problem is that we could not read a price at source: minimax.io/audio, minimax.io/price and two platform documentation URLs all returned either no pricing content or a 404. What we could verify first-party is the rate charged by fal.ai, a third-party model host, which publishes "$0.1 per 1000 characters" for MiniMax speech-02-hd — about $5.40 an hour. That is fal's price, not MiniMax's own, and MiniMax has since shipped newer Speech 2.8 models we have no rate for. Treat the row as indicative.
When not to switch at all
The saving is real but bounded by your actual volume, and that is the calculation most switching advice skips. At two hours of finished narration a month, moving from ElevenLabs Creator to Fish Audio Plus saves roughly $13 — worth having, but not worth a week of re-testing pronunciation and discovering your cloned voice does not transfer. At ten hours a month the same move saves around $65, and the arithmetic changes completely. Stay where you are if any of these is true:
- You publish under about two hours of finished audio a month and your current output already sounds right.
- Your cloned voice is part of your brand and re-cloning it elsewhere is a real risk.
- You need dubbing, sound effects or a fix-it studio rather than raw text-to-speech — the extra is what the premium buys.
- You have not yet checked the commercial-use terms on the tool you are moving to.
And run the free tier of your candidate first. Fish Audio gives about 7 minutes a month, which is enough for one honest test on a real script.
What we could not confirm
Stated plainly rather than filled in from secondhand articles.
- Murf studio pricing. murf.ai/pricing returned no readable content across three attempts on three days. The $29 / two-hours figure is consistently reported by several third parties including a competitor page, which would not understate it, but it is not first-party and it is labelled unconfirmed everywhere it appears above.
- Which Fish Audio meter binds. Its plan minutes and its stated 600 to 625 credits per minute imply allowances roughly 2x apart, and about 6x apart on the Max tier. We used the lower figure. Fish Audio is cheaper than our table shows if the credit rate governs, not dearer.
- MiniMax's own rates. Four MiniMax URLs returned no pricing or a 404. The only rate on this page comes from fal.ai, a third-party host, and covers an older model than MiniMax currently ships.
- Speechify Studio and API. Both pricing URLs we tried returned 404. Only the consumer plans are described above.
- Characters per minute. The 900 figure underpinning every per-hour number is our estimate, not a vendor's. At 800 the hourly costs rise about 12%; at 1,000 they fall about 10%. It applies equally to every row, so the ranking is stable even though the absolute figures move.
- PlayHT's shutdown dates. We verified the domain is dead ourselves. The July 2025 acqui-hire and end-of-2025 closure are reported, not verified, and no first-party page survives to check them against.
Site-wide rule: a number we could not read at source does not get stated as a fact. Voice pricing in particular changes without announcement — verify before you commit.
FAQ
What is the cheapest ElevenLabs alternative in 2026?
Among hosted tools that publish their prices, Fish Audio. Its Plus plan is $11 a month for up to 200 minutes of generation, about $3.30 per finished hour against roughly $9.82 on ElevenLabs Creator. Below that you are into APIs and local models: the Murf Falcon API publishes $0.01 a minute, about 60 cents an hour, and OpenAI tts-1 works out near 81 cents. Kokoro, an Apache 2.0 open-source model, has no per-character cost at all beyond hardware.
Is Fish Audio really three times cheaper than ElevenLabs?
On the plan allowances both vendors publish, yes. The caveat is that Fish Audio publishes two meters that disagree: its plans state a maximum number of minutes, but its stated rate of roughly 600 to 625 credits a minute implies about twice as many minutes as the plans allow. We used the lower plan figure, which is the reading least favourable to Fish Audio. If the credit rate is the operative one, the gap is nearer six times.
What happened to PlayHT?
The domain no longer resolves. We attempted to load play.ht and www.play.ht directly and both failed DNS resolution, which is our own test rather than a report. Public reporting describes a Meta acqui-hire in July 2025 followed by a wind-down at the end of 2025, though we could not verify those dates against any first-party page because none remains. Treat any article still recommending PlayHT as out of date.
Is Murf AI cheaper than ElevenLabs?
It depends which Murf product you buy, and the gap between them is about 24x. Murf publishes its Falcon text-to-speech API at $0.01 a minute, roughly 60 cents per finished hour, which is far cheaper than ElevenLabs. Its studio subscription is widely reported at $29 a month for two hours of generation, which would be about $14.50 an hour and more expensive than the plan you would be leaving. We could not load murf.ai/pricing to confirm the studio figures, so we do not state them as fact.
Can a free or open-source voice model replace a paid plan for monetised content?
Open-source can, free tiers usually cannot. Kokoro-82M is published under the Apache 2.0 licence, which permits commercial use, so a local model carries no per-character cost and no licensing block for monetised video. Hosted free tiers are a different matter: ElevenLabs lists its commercial licence as paid-tiers-only, and the Fish Audio free tier is capped at about 7 minutes a month regardless. Check the licence before you publish, not after.
Final recommendation
Work out your monthly finished minutes first, then shop. Under about two hours a month, the saving from switching is roughly $13 and probably not worth the migration — stay put. Above that, Fish Audio Plus at $11 is the strongest hosted alternative on published prices, it includes a professional voice slot, and its free tier is enough to test a real script before you pay anything.
If you do not need to clone your own voice, go further and price an API properly. Sixty cents an hour on Murf Falcon or 81 cents on OpenAI tts-1 against $9.82 on a subscription is not a rounding difference — for a daily-publishing faceless channel it is the difference between voice being a line item and voice being an afterthought. Just cost the engineering time honestly, because there is no editor and no undo. And whatever you pick, keep a tested second option: this page previously recommended a vendor whose domain now fails to resolve, which is the most concrete argument for portability we can offer.
Related reads: comparison hub, what an hour of AI narration costs, ElevenLabs vs PlayHT, and what happened to it, building a faceless YouTube channel, and cloning your voice for audiobooks.