"How much does Speechify actually cost" sounds like a simple question, and then you open the pricing page and there's a free tier, a Premium tier, sometimes a promotional price, sometimes a lifetime option. This article breaks down what you're really paying for, what the free tier gets you, and how the maths compares to a pay-per-minute model like ReadLoud's.
The headline number
Speechify Premium costs about $139 a year at the time of writing. That number moves around: Speechify runs discounts, seasonal promotions, and has offered lifetime purchase options in the past. Treat any number here, including this one, as a snapshot, not a promise, and check Speechify's own pricing page before you commit.
Broken down, $139 a year works out to a little under $12 a month if you pay annually, though Speechify (like most subscription products) charges more if you pay month to month instead of committing to the year.
What the free tier gets you
Speechify's free tier exists mainly to let you try the product before paying. In general terms (exact limits shift over time, so don't take this as gospel), the free tier gives you a smaller set of voices than Premium and caps how much you can listen to, whether that's measured in words, minutes, or documents. It's enough to test whether text-to-speech fits into your day. It is not enough to replace daily reading for most people, which is the point: it's a funnel toward Premium.
If your listening is genuinely occasional, this free tier alone might cover you, and you may not need to pay anyone anything. If you find yourself running into limits every week, that's the signal you're a paying-tier customer, whether that payment goes to Speechify or somewhere else.
What Premium actually includes
Premium's core value is removing the free tier's caps and unlocking the full voice catalogue, which includes a large number of voices and, notably, celebrity voice options that Speechify has licensed. It also typically includes features like OCR, which lets you point a phone camera at a printed page or photographed document and have it read aloud, something genuinely useful for physical books, handouts, and scanned material. Native apps for iOS and Android, plus a browser extension, come with the subscription rather than being a separate purchase.
These are real, useful features. If you use OCR regularly, or you specifically want a celebrity voice, that alone might justify the subscription for you, independent of how many hours you listen.
The real question: cost per hour of listening
A yearly price is easy to state and hard to reason about, because it doesn't tell you what an hour of listening actually costs you. Here's the maths, using $139 a year as the reference point.
| Monthly listening | Cost per hour (Speechify, $139/yr) |
|---|---|
| 2 hours/month | ~$5.79/hour |
| 5 hours/month | ~$2.32/hour |
| 10 hours/month | ~$1.16/hour |
| 20 hours/month | ~$0.58/hour |
| 40 hours/month | ~$0.29/hour |
The pattern is obvious: the more you listen, the cheaper each hour gets, because you're spreading a fixed cost over more use. A subscription rewards heavy, consistent listeners and quietly penalizes occasional ones. Someone listening 2 hours a month is paying roughly 20 times more per hour than someone listening 40 hours a month, for the identical product.
The pay-per-minute comparison
ReadLoud charges by the minute of freshly generated audio instead of by the year. There's no subscription: one free minute with no account, 20 free minutes with a free account, then minute packs that never expire. Taste is 60 minutes for $9 ($0.15/min), Regular is 300 minutes for $36 ($0.12/min), and Binge is 1,000 minutes for $99 ($0.099/min). Listening at 2x speed still only costs the 1x rate, and anything you've already generated is cached, so replaying a passage is free.
Converting that to cost per hour of audio: at the Binge rate, an hour costs about $5.94. At the Regular rate, about $7.20 an hour. At the Taste rate, about $9 an hour. Unlike Speechify's number, this rate doesn't fall as you use it more, you always pay the same per minute. What makes it the cheaper option for lighter use isn't a lower per-hour rate, it's that you're never paying for hours you don't listen to in the first place, there's no fixed yearly cost sitting there regardless of use. As a reference point, 1,500 words is roughly 10 minutes of audio, and a 300-page book runs around 10 hours, so a single book at the Binge rate costs somewhere around $59 to $99 depending on length, one time, no renewal.
The break-even is roughly 10 hours a month. Below that, pay-per-minute wins because you stop paying for capacity you don't use. Above that, the subscription wins because the per-hour cost keeps dropping the more you listen. See the full break-even breakdown for the numbers side by side.
What ReadLoud doesn't have
To be direct about it: ReadLoud does not have native iOS or Android apps (it's a web app you can install to your home screen), no browser extension, and no OCR for photographed pages. If those specific features matter to your workflow, and you listen enough to make Premium worth it, Speechify's pricing is arguably fair for what it delivers. This isn't a case for "always switch," it's a case for matching the pricing model to your usage pattern.
Which model fits you
If you listen most days, for meaningful stretches, and use features like OCR or the native apps, the subscription is probably the better financial deal despite the sticker price, because your per-hour cost drops fast. If your listening happens in occasional bursts, a research paper this week, a newsletter backlog next month, nothing for three weeks after that, a subscription has you paying for silence. That's the case where minutes that never expire, bought only when you need them, cost you less over a year.
Try the free tier of either before paying anything. ReadLoud gives you 20 minutes with a free account, no card required, which is enough to judge voice quality and whether the reading experience works for you before you decide how you want to pay for the rest.