Free text-to-speech for articles: what "free" actually means

Search for free text-to-speech and everything is free. Almost none of it is free in the way you mean, and the interesting part is not whether a tool charges but where it stops. Generating speech costs real money per character, so every free tier has a ceiling somewhere. Finding it before you invest an evening is the whole skill.

The four things "free" usually means

1. Free because your device does the work

Your browser and your phone both ship a speech engine. Browser read-aloud extensions and your operating system's accessibility features use it, which makes them genuinely, permanently free with no account and no limit.

The trade is voice quality and persistence. Built-in voices have improved a lot, but they are still recognisably synthetic over long stretches, and nothing is stored — close the tab and you start over. For a paragraph you need read back, unbeatable. For a forty-minute feature, most people stop.

2. Free up to a character or word count

The most common model. You get some number of characters a month on the good voices, then it stops. This is honest when the number is stated plainly, and it is often buried, because characters are a unit nobody thinks in.

Translate it before you judge it. Speech runs somewhere around 850–900 characters per minute of audio, so a million characters is roughly 18 to 20 hours. Ten thousand is about eleven minutes. A typical long-form magazine article is eight to ten minutes, so 10,000 characters is one article and change.

3. Free trial, then a subscription

A countdown with a card on file. Nothing wrong with it, but it is not a free tier, and it is worth knowing which you signed up for. The tell is whether you were asked for payment details before using anything.

4. Free tier, priced tier above it

A permanent allowance with a paid plan for people who need more. No card, no countdown, a stated limit. The limit is usually smaller than in model 2, because it has to survive indefinitely rather than convert you before it runs out.

Questions that reveal the ceiling fast

• Is a card required to start? If yes, it is a trial, whatever the page calls it.
• What is the limit in minutes of audio? If a tool only states characters or words, convert it. If it states no number at all, that is its own answer.
• Does replaying cost anything? Synthesis costs money; streaming existing audio costs almost nothing. A tool that charges you twice for the same article is charging for something it did not do again.
• Are the good voices in the free tier? A common shape is a free tier restricted to the voices nobody wants, which makes the free tier a demo of the problem rather than the product.
• What happens at the limit? Ideally nothing breaks — new audio pauses, your existing library still plays.

Our numbers, in those terms

So this page is not just advice we exempt ourselves from:

• No card, no countdown, no trial. It is a free tier.
• 20 minutes of new audio per week, resetting Monday — roughly two long-form articles, or five or six shorter pieces.
• Replays are unlimited and free forever. Once an article is audio, listening again costs nothing.
• All six voices are in the free tier. There is no crippled voice list.
• At the limit, new audio pauses until Monday and your library keeps playing. Nothing is deleted and nothing is charged.
• A paid plan is planned at $6 a month for 2 hours a week. It does not exist yet, and the free tier stays when it does.

The ceiling is a number we can keep indefinitely rather than one designed to run out while you are still deciding. That is the trade in model four, and it is the one we picked on purpose. The full breakdown is on the pricing page.

Which model you actually want

It depends entirely on whether you plan to leave your desk. Model one is genuinely free and fine for reading a paragraph back to yourself in the chair you are sitting in.

Getting through long reads on foot or in the car is a different job. It needs voices you can tolerate for an hour and audio that persists, and both of those cost someone money — so the question becomes whose limit is honest. Pick the tool that states its ceiling in units you think in, puts its good voices in the free tier, and keeps playing with your screen off. A free tier you cannot use while walking is not a bargain.