Cheapest unlimited text to speech in 2026: real prices, real limits, checked on 6 September 2026
“Unlimited” is the most abused word in text-to-speech pricing. Some tools mean no monthly cap but a ceiling per generation; some hide a fair-use quota in the small print; some charge a flat price under a fair-use policy; one runs in your browser and really has no meter at all. This page puts them next to each other with the number that matters — the cost of one finished hour of audio — and says plainly where a flat price beats per-character billing and where it does not. Every price was read on the vendor's own pricing page on 6 September 2026 and links to it; anything that could not be verified there is marked as such rather than copied from a third party.
Three different things that all get called “unlimited”
Unlimited with a cap per generation. EasyVoice sells “Unlimited characters” on its $9.99 Pro plan, but each request is limited to 50,000 characters and a fair-use quota of 10,000,000 characters a month applies. Voice Delta says “no word limit, no character limit, no generation limit” and caps a single run at 100,000 characters. Crikk's $97 lifetime plan is unlimited for its free voices and 1,000,000 characters a month for its pro voices, 24,000 per file. None of that is dishonest, but you should know which number applies to your script before you pay.
Flat price with a fair-use policy. That is kreawave. The Unlimited plan (€30 a month, or €300 a year) has no monthly allowance; a fair-use policy applies and is set out in the Terms of Service linked from every pricing card. The Pro plan (€15 a month, or €150 a year) includes 24 hours of audio a month. There is no per-character billing on either: the meter exists internally, but it never turns into a bill.
Metered, with no unlimited plan at all. ElevenLabs, TTS.ai, Cartesia, Fish Audio and Murf sell credits, characters, minutes or hours. Their entry plans are cheap and their bills grow with your output. The table converts each one to a cost per hour so the comparison is on the same axis.
Genuinely unmetered, because it runs on your machine. Unlimited TTS synthesises in your browser (Web Speech, WebGPU or WASM) and charges nothing; Voice Delta ships a Windows desktop app that generates offline on your CPU. The trade-off is that the quality and the speed are those of your own hardware, not of a GPU farm.
How the per-hour column is calculated
One hour of finished audio is roughly 58,000 characters of text. That is the rate kreawave meters with internally, and it is applied to every character- or credit-based plan in the table, with 1 credit = 1 character where the vendor says so (ElevenLabs states it for its V2 multilingual models). Where the vendor publishes minutes or hours directly (Fish Audio, Murf) those figures are used as they are. Where the vendor does not publish an equivalence, no number is invented: Cartesia does not say what a credit is, Voice Delta publishes no monthly cap, and Crikk's lifetime price cannot be turned into a monthly cost without guessing how long you will use it.
No exchange rate is applied. They publish in dollars, we publish in euros, and the gaps are large enough that the rate does not change the ranking. kreawave's prices include Spanish VAT; check whether a competitor's headline price does.
ElevenLabs alternative with a flat price
If the question is specifically “which ElevenLabs alternative has a flat price”, the honest short list is small: EasyVoice ($9.99 a month with a 10,000,000-character monthly fair-use quota), Voice Delta ($10 a month or $100 once, capped per run), Crikk ($97 once, pro voices metered) and kreawave (€15 or €30 a month, flat price). Everyone else in the table, ElevenLabs included, meters your output. What you give up against ElevenLabs is the same for all four: less expressive control, and in kreawave's case no voice cloning yet. The side-by-side with ElevenLabs goes through those trade-offs in detail, and the flat-rate breakdown shows the per-hour arithmetic for kreawave's own plans in full.
When kreawave is NOT the cheapest
You generate a few clips a month. Below about an hour a month, a free tier beats any subscription: ElevenLabs gives 10,000 credits a month free, EasyVoice 5,000 characters a day, TTS.ai a free tier limited to 5,000 characters per generation, Fish Audio 8,000 credits a month. kreawave's own welcome credit is 10 minutes, one-off, and the €1 trial buys one hour for 24 hours. For occasional use, pay nobody.
You can self-host. Open-weight engines such as Chatterbox or Kokoro run on your own GPU for the cost of electricity, and Unlimited TTS runs in the browser for nothing. If you have the hardware and the patience for setup, the cheapest unlimited text to speech is the one you run yourself. kreawave's pitch is not that it is cheaper than free; it is that €0.62 an hour on Pro, or €0.25 an hour on Unlimited at 120 hours a month, is cheaper than a per-character bill for anyone producing hours a week who does not want to operate a GPU.
You need round-the-clock, automated generation. Unlimited is a flat monthly price for people producing audio, not a batch engine; Voice Delta's desktop app or a self-hosted engine is the tool for that. Hour packs (€32 for 40 hours, never expiring) cover spikes.
You need cloning, emotional direction or an API on a cheap plan. kreawave has no voice cloning yet, no acting controls, and the REST API is included with Unlimited only. EasyVoice includes API access on its $9.99 plan and Cartesia is an API-first platform from $5 a month.
Prices checked on 6 September 2026; they change — verify on each vendor's site before you decide.
| Service · plan | Price as published | What actually limits you | ≈ Per hour of audio | Commercial use · API · where it runs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| kreawave Unlimited | €30 / month or €300 / year, VAT included | No monthly allowance, never billed per character. Files deleted after 7 days | €0.25 at 120 h a month; depends on how much you generate | Yes · REST API included · cloud (own GPUs) |
| kreawave Pro | €15 / month or €150 / year, VAT included | 24 h of audio a month. Hour packs: €6 for 5 h, €14 for 15 h, €32 for 40 h, never expire | €0.62 (€0.80 on the 40-hour pack) | Yes · no API on Pro · cloud |
| EasyVoice Pro | $9.99 / month ($24.99 / quarter) | “Unlimited characters” with a fair-use quota of 10,000,000 characters / month and 50,000 characters per request. Free: 5,000 characters / day | ≈ $0.06 at the fair-use quota (10,000,000 ÷ 58,000 ≈ 172 h) | Yes (“You own the audio you generate”) · API (OpenAI-compatible) on Pro · cloud |
| Voice Delta Pro / Lifetime | $10 / month or $100 one-time | “No word limit, no character limit, no generation limit”; up to 100,000 characters per run; non-refundable. Free: 5,000 characters / day on the pricing page, 1,000 on the home page | Not computable: no monthly cap published | Yes · API not mentioned · cloud web app + Windows desktop app that runs offline on CPU |
| Unlimited TTS | Free web app (donations); API paid, prepaid | “No character or word limit”; synthesis runs in your browser with Web Speech, WebGPU or WASM, so speed and quality are your machine's | $0 (web app) | Yes per its terms · API paid and prepaid, minimum $5 top-up, “best-effort” · local, in the browser |
| Crikk Pro | $97 lifetime | 24,000 characters per file; unlimited characters / month on free voices, 1,000,000 characters / month on pro voices (≈ 17 h). Free: 3,000 characters per file | Not computable: one-off price | Commercial use not stated on the site · separate API plans: $7 / month (2,000,000 characters) and $100 / month (“Unlimited generation”, 12,000 characters per request) · cloud |
| TTS.ai Pro | $29 / month | 2,000,000 characters / month (≈ 34 h); 100,000 characters per generation; 60 requests / min. No unlimited plan; Lite $5 for 200K, Starter $9 for 500K, Business $99 for 10M | ≈ $0.84 (≈ $0.57 on Business) | Yes on every paid plan · OpenAI-compatible REST API · cloud |
| Fish Audio Plus | $11 / month ($132 billed annually) | 250,000 credits / month, up to 200 minutes of generation, 15,000 characters per generation. Pro: $75 for 1,620 minutes. No unlimited plan | ≈ $3.30 (≈ $2.78 on Pro) | Yes on paid plans; free plan personal only · API pay-as-you-go · cloud |
| Cartesia Pro | $5 / month | 100,000 credits / month; credit-to-character equivalence not published on the pricing page. Startup $49 for 1.25M, Scale $299 for 8M. No unlimited plan | Not computable: credit equivalence not published | Yes from Pro (“Commercial use license”) · API platform · cloud |
| ElevenLabs Creator | $22 / month ($11 the first month) | 121,000 credits / month, 1 credit = 1 character on V2 multilingual (≈ 2.1 h). No unlimited plan; Pro $99 for 600,000, Scale $299 for 1.8M | ≈ $10.5 (≈ $9.6 on Pro) | Yes from Starter ($6) · API · cloud |
| Murf Creator | $19 / month, $228 billed annually | 24 hours of voice generation per YEAR. Business $66 / month ($792 / year) for 96 h / year. Unlimited only on Enterprise (custom price). Free: 10 minutes, no commercial rights | ≈ $9.50 (≈ $8.25 on Business) | Yes on paid plans · API sold separately, 1,000 characters for $0.03 · cloud |
| PlayHT | Official site not reachable on 6 September 2026 | play.ht returned no address (DNS) and play.ai did not resolve either; the $99 / month often quoted for it comes from third parties and is not verified here | Not verified | Not verified |
| LOVO | Official site not reachable on 6 September 2026 | lovo.ai/pricing returned HTTP 402 “Deployment Paused”; no official figure could be read | Not verified | Not verified |
Hear the voices before you compare prices
The cheapest plan is worthless if the voice is not good enough for your project. These play straight from the catalogue — no account, no card, no captcha.
- Asahi
“In the winter of nineteen forty four, the town fell silent beneath the snow.”
- Ash
“A single candle burned in the window of the house that had been abandoned for years.”
- Billie
“Every night at the same hour, someone knocked twice and then vanished before she reached the door.”
- Blair
“They said the war was over, but the fire had only just begun.”
- Bobbie
“Sure, I found a few options nearby that match what you are looking for, would you like me to list them?”
- Carey
“Officials confirmed this evening that the downtown bridge will remain closed while engineers complete a thorough safety inspect…”
What this page does not claim
kreawave is not the cheapest option for everyone (see above), is in open beta, has no voice cloning, and its audio is deleted 7 days after generation. The competitors' figures are what their pricing pages said on 6 September 2026: they will change, and this page will be wrong the day they do. Verify on each vendor's site before you decide.