Free ElevenLabs Alternatives: Free Text-to-Speech Plans and Free Local Voice Tools
ElevenLabs sets the bar for AI voices, but its free plan is small: 10,000 credits a month, which its pricing page puts at about 10 minutes of speech, with no commercial licence and no instant voice cloning until you pay for the Starter plan ($6 a month). If you need voiceovers for product videos, narration for a course, a voice for an app or just a way to listen to documents, there are free plans that go further, and free tools you can run on your own computer with no limit at all. We checked every free tier below on the tool's official pricing page in October 2026, removed the tools that have shut down, and noted the limits that matter: how much you get, whether you may use the audio commercially and what you need to sign up.
Quick answer: for the most free characters, use a cloud API: Google Cloud Text-to-Speech (up to 4 million characters a month) or Azure AI Speech (0.5 million a month). For quick voiceovers with no sign-up and commercial rights, use TTSMaker (20,000 characters a week). For a free tier with ElevenLabs-style expressive voices, try Cartesia or Fish Audio, but their free plans are not for commercial use. For unlimited free speech on your own hardware, run Kokoro (Apache-2.0) or Piper.
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Free ElevenLabs Alternatives Compared
Sources: each tool's official pricing page, homepage or repository, checked 28 October 2026 (default view of each page). Free plans change often; check the terms before you publish audio commercially.
What ElevenLabs' Free Plan Includes in 2027
On the ElevenLabs pricing page, the Free plan costs $0 and gives 10,000 credits a month, shared across text to speech, speech to text, sound effects, voice design and music. With the Multilingual v2 model one character costs one credit, so that is roughly 10,000 characters. The commercial licence and Instant Voice Cloning start on Starter, which the pricing FAQ lists at $6 a month for 30,000 credits, and unused credits only roll over on paid plans. So the free plan is a good test drive, but not enough for a product video series, a podcast or anything you publish for a client.
The Best Free ElevenLabs Alternatives in 2027: Hosted Free Plans
1. Google Cloud Text-to-Speech: the largest free monthly allowance
Google Cloud Text-to-Speech gives every account a monthly free allowance per voice type: 4 million characters for Standard and WaveNet voices, and 1 million characters each for the newer Chirp 3 HD, Neural2 and Studio voices. Above that you pay per character (for example $30 per million for Chirp 3 HD). The catch is that you must enable billing, and you are charged automatically once you pass the free amount, so set a budget alert. It is an API, not an editor: ideal if you want to add a voice to your own app, less so for a non-technical founder who wants a quick voiceover. Instant custom voices are not part of the free usage.
2. Amazon Polly: big free tier for older AWS accounts, credits for new ones
Amazon Polly lists a free tier of 5 million characters a month for Standard voices and, for the first 12 months, 1 million characters a month for Neural voices, 500,000 for Long-Form and 100,000 for Generative voices. Its pricing page also explains that since 15 July 2025 new AWS customers receive up to $200 in Free Tier credits instead, with a free plan that lasts 6 months and credits that must be used within 12 months. After that, Neural voices cost $16 per million characters. A good choice if your product already runs on AWS.
3. Azure AI Speech: 0.5 million free characters every month
Microsoft's Azure AI Speech has a Free (F0) tier with 0.5 million characters of neural text to speech per month, plus 5 hours of speech to text. Like Google and AWS, it is a developer API that needs an Azure account. For a startup that wants a steady, free voice for notifications, onboarding or accessibility features, it is one of the most generous options that does not expire.
4. TTSMaker: free voiceovers with commercial rights and no sign-up
TTSMaker is the simplest tool on this list: paste text, pick one of hundreds of voices in many languages, solve the small code check and download an MP3 or WAV. The free version allows 20,000 characters per week (some voices are unlimited), with a per-conversion limit that depends on the voice, and the site states that you have full commercial usage rights for the audio it generates. Generated files are deleted within 30 minutes, so download them straight away. The voices are less expressive than ElevenLabs, but for explainer videos and social clips it is hard to beat for $0.
5. Crikk: free text to speech on the web, iPhone and Android
Crikk turns text, PDFs, books and photos into audio. Its free plan is $0 forever with 20,000 characters a month, up to 5,000 per conversion and 317 free voices in 74 languages; you can listen without an account, but saving an MP3 needs a free account. The old claim of unlimited free generation no longer applies. Pro costs $7 a month (regular price $14) and adds more expressive voices and API access.
6. Fish Audio: expressive voices and cloning, free for personal tests
Fish Audio is one of the closest products to ElevenLabs, with emotional, real-time voices and voice cloning. Its Free tier needs no credit card and gives 8,000 credits a month, up to 7 minutes of generation, 500 characters per generation and 3 public voice slots. Its plan page marks enhanced voice cloning and commercial use as not included on Free, so treat it as a way to test voices before you pay, not as a free production tool.
7. Cartesia: a developer free tier with fast, natural voices
Cartesia builds low-latency voices for voice agents. Its Free plan gives 20,000 credits a month (about 27 minutes of text to speech), speech to text and $1 of prepaid voice-agent usage. The commercial use licence and instant voice cloning start on the $5-a-month Pro plan, which makes Cartesia the cheapest paid upgrade on this list if the free tests go well.
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8. Murf: $10 of free API credit
Murf's pricing page now opens on its API plans: a free trial with $10 of API credit, no credit card, and 150+ voices in 35+ languages. At its listed rate of $0.01 per 1,000 characters for the Falcon 2.1 model, that credit goes a long way for testing a voice agent. The free terms of the Murf Studio editor sit behind a separate tab, so we have not listed them here; check them before you plan a voiceover project.
9. Listnr: try 1,000+ voices with starter credits
Listnr is a voiceover studio with more than 1,000 AI voices in 142+ languages. Its Free plan costs $0 with no credit card, but it is a one-off 1,000 credits to start, enough to preview voices rather than produce content. Paid plans start at $19 a month for 20,000 credits.
10. Speechify and NaturalReader: free apps for listening, not voiceovers
If what you need is to listen to documents, emails and web pages rather than publish audio, the free versions of reading apps are enough. Speechify's free plan reads text aloud with 10 basic voices at up to 1.5x speed; its natural voices, scanning and AI summaries are in Premium ($29 a month). NaturalReader offers a free forever plan with no credit card for reading PDFs, documents and web pages; it sells a separate Commercial version for voiceovers you publish.
Free Local Alternatives to ElevenLabs: No Monthly Limit
If you have a decent computer, local models remove the monthly cap completely: the only costs are your hardware and time. These three are free to use; for a deeper comparison of self-hosted voice cloning models and their licences, see our guide to open-source voice cloning tools.
11. Kokoro: small, fast and free for commercial use
Kokoro-82M is an open-weight text-to-speech model with 82 million parameters and Apache-2.0-licensed weights, so you may use it in commercial products. Its model card says it matches larger models in quality while being much faster and cheaper to run, and you install it with one pip command (version 0.9.4, April 2025). It ships with built-in voices and does not clone voices; for narration and app voices that is often all you need.
12. Piper: fast local text to speech that runs on a CPU
Piper is a fast, local neural text-to-speech engine used by Home Assistant and the NVDA screen reader. Its original repository was archived on 6 October 2025, and development moved to the Open Home Foundation's piper1-gpl project under GPL-3.0, which released version 1.8.0 in September 2026 and is still updated. It runs well without a GPU, even on small devices, and offers many voices in many languages; each voice has its own model card and licence, so check the one you pick before commercial use. Its README says the project is looking for maintainers, which is worth knowing for long-term plans.
13. Chatterbox: free local voice cloning
Chatterbox from Resemble AI is the closest free local match for ElevenLabs' voice cloning. Its code and weights are MIT-licensed, it clones a voice from a short sample, comes in an English Turbo model and a Multilingual model with 23+ languages, and watermarks every file it generates. Resemble AI no longer sells it as a paid product, so there is no support contract, and you need a GPU for comfortable speed. Only clone voices whose owners have agreed.
ElevenLabs Alternatives That Shut Down or Changed
The 2025 version of this article recommended several tools that you can no longer use, or that no longer fit a free list:
- Play.ht: gone. Its domain no longer loads (checked October 2026). According to the voice platform AudioStack, PlayHT deprecated its voice API and TTS services after its acquisition, in a notice dated 30 July 2025.
- LOVO (Genny): lovo.ai and its Genny app showed a hosting error page instead of the product when we checked in October 2026, so we left it out.
- Uberduck: still online, but its pricing page now lists only paid plans (the cheapest one with a non-commercial licence) and does not describe what the free tier includes. It no longer fits a free list.
- Synthesia: an AI video avatar tool rather than a voice tool. Its free Basic plan includes 10 minutes of video creation or dubbing, videos carry a Synthesia watermark, and downloads start on paid plans.
- Edcafe AI: now an AI platform for classroom activities for teachers, not a text-to-speech tool.
- Crikk: still free, but no longer unlimited: the free plan is now 20,000 characters a month.
Which Free ElevenLabs Alternative Should You Choose?
- You need voiceovers for videos and social posts today, for free: TTSMaker (commercial rights, 20,000 characters a week).
- You are adding a voice to your app or product: Google Cloud Text-to-Speech or Azure AI Speech for a monthly free allowance; Amazon Polly if you are on AWS.
- You want ElevenLabs-level expressive voices and will pay once it works: test on Cartesia or Fish Audio for free, then upgrade for the commercial licence.
- You are building a voice agent: Cartesia's free tier or Murf's $10 API credit to prototype.
- You want no limits and have a good computer: Kokoro or Piper for narration, Chatterbox if you need cloning.
- You only want to listen to documents: Speechify, NaturalReader or Crikk's free apps.
How Founders Use Free Text-to-Speech Tools
For early-stage startups, a free AI voice is mostly a way to ship more content without a recording studio: narrated product demos, onboarding videos, course lessons, podcast intros and ads in several languages. A narrated demo video on a landing page is also a cheap way to test whether people want your product, the idea behind our 30-day validation sprint. Pair the voice with free visuals from our list of free Canva Pro alternatives and a page from the free Carrd alternatives, and you have a full launch kit for $0. These audio AI tools for startups cover paid options when you outgrow the free tiers.
If you are building a voice product, a TTS voice is one piece of a larger stack: our overview of AI agents for startup founders shows where it fits, the open-source Intercom alternatives cover the help desk behind a support bot, and GitHub Copilot alternatives help you write the code. Raising money for a voice AI startup? See our list of VCs for AI startups. And once your product is live, the F/MS AI SEO Tool helps you write the articles that bring users from Google and AI assistants.
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FAQ About Free ElevenLabs Alternatives
Is ElevenLabs free?
ElevenLabs has a free plan with 10,000 credits a month, about 10 minutes of speech. It does not include a commercial licence or instant voice cloning; both start on the Starter plan at $6 a month.
What is the best free alternative to ElevenLabs?
For the most free characters, Google Cloud Text-to-Speech (up to 4 million a month) or Azure AI Speech (0.5 million a month). For no-sign-up voiceovers with commercial rights, TTSMaker. For unlimited local use, Kokoro or Piper.
Which free text-to-speech tool allows commercial use?
TTSMaker states that you have full commercial usage rights for its free audio, and Kokoro's Apache-2.0 and Chatterbox's MIT licences allow commercial use. Fish Audio's and Cartesia's free plans do not include commercial use.
Is there a free ElevenLabs alternative with voice cloning?
Hosted free plans rarely include it: Fish Audio, Cartesia and ElevenLabs all keep cloning for paid plans or limit it. For free voice cloning, run Chatterbox locally, and only clone voices with the owner's consent.
Is Play.ht still available?
No. The play.ht domain no longer loads (October 2026), and according to AudioStack, PlayHT deprecated its voice API and TTS services after its acquisition in 2025.
Is Google Text-to-Speech free?
Google Cloud Text-to-Speech has a monthly free allowance: 4 million characters for Standard and WaveNet voices and 1 million for Chirp 3 HD and Neural2. You must enable billing, and usage above the allowance is charged.
Is Amazon Polly free?
Polly's pricing page lists 5 million free Standard characters a month and 1 million Neural characters a month for 12 months. New AWS customers since 15 July 2025 receive up to $200 in Free Tier credits instead.
Can I run an ElevenLabs alternative offline?
Yes. Kokoro, Piper and Chatterbox run on your own computer. Piper even runs well on a CPU; Chatterbox is best with a GPU.
Is Crikk still unlimited?
No. Crikk's free plan now gives 20,000 characters a month, up to 5,000 per conversion, with 317 free voices.
Where can I get a backlink by writing about my startup?
You can publish a guest post in one of the Fe/male Switch startup blogs, which rank in Google and in AI tools. Get a quality backlink.
About the Author
Violetta Bonenkamp, also known as MeanCEO, is an experienced startup founder with an impressive educational background including an MBA and four other higher education degrees. She has over 20 years of work experience across multiple countries, including 5 years as a solopreneur and serial entrepreneur. Throughout her startup experience she has applied for multiple startup grants at the EU level, in the Netherlands and Malta, and her startups received quite a few of those. She’s been living, studying and working in many countries around the globe and her extensive multicultural experience has influenced her immensely.
