Last updated 20 October 2026 for Vois Studio 2.6.0. Competitor prices checked 20 October 2026.
Per-character and per-minute voice tools charge more as a book gets longer, and retakes can count too. An 80,000-word novel is roughly 450,000 characters and about nine hours of audio. A local studio on a subscription, such as Vois Studio, has no per-character meter, so the cost of a long book is the plan.
This post covers cost. For the production steps, from script to export, see the complete Vois Studio 2.6 guide.
How many characters is an audiobook?
Metered tools bill by characters or minutes, so start with your manuscript's numbers. Here's a worked example for an 80,000-word book.
To get the ratio, we downloaded three public-domain novels from Project Gutenberg (Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein and Moby Dick), collapsed line breaks to single spaces, and counted words and characters, spaces and punctuation included. They came out at 5.57 to 5.71 characters per word.
| Estimate for an 80,000-word book | |
|---|---|
| Characters (incl. spaces) | 80,000 x 5.57 to 5.71 = about 446,000 to 457,000, so about 450,000 |
| Listening time | 80,000 words at about 150 words a minute = about 533 minutes, roughly 9 hours |
Treat both as estimates. 150 words a minute is a rough English planning rate, not a measured narration speed; real takes vary by voice and pace. Your word processor's character count gives your own number, and each vendor decides whether spaces and punctuation count.
What do metered tools charge for a book this long?
Three common pricing models, applied to the same book. Prices are as shown on each vendor's page, checked 20 October 2026, before tax.
| Tool | Billing unit | One pass of the example book | Plan figures |
|---|---|---|---|
| ElevenLabs | Credits: 1 per character on V2 Multilingual voices | About 450,000 credits | Creator $22/month, 121,000 credits; Pro $99/month, 600,000 credits; Scale $299/month, 1.8M credits |
| Murf Studio | Voice generation time | About 9 hours | Creator "From $19/mo", 24 hours; Business "From $66/mo", 96 hours |
| Murf API | Per 1,000 characters | About $4.50 (Falcon, $0.01) to $13.50 (Studio-quality, $0.03) | Pay as you go |
| WellSaid | Downloaded audio minutes | About 533 minutes | Starter USD 19/month, 20 min/month; Pro USD 49/month, 180 min/month, or USD 396/year for 2,160 min/year |
What that means in practice, tool by tool.
On ElevenLabs, one pass fits inside a month of Pro, with about 150,000 credits left for retakes. On Creator it's nearly four months of credits. Credits are shared with every other ElevenLabs product, and unused paid credits roll over for up to two months. The pricing page says credits are "charged per generation request, not per download", with "a limited number of free regenerations" when the content and settings don't change.
On Murf Studio, generation time is "the sum of generated speech length of every text block" and gets used again whenever you change a block's text; changing the voice, style, pitch, pauses or pronunciation for the same text doesn't use any. Murf's FAQ example describes 24 hours as a yearly allowance on a yearly plan, and the page doesn't say which billing period the "From" prices refer to.
On WellSaid, paid plans have unlimited generation, so retakes don't count; you pay for the minutes you download. Unused minutes reset each billing cycle. Starter and Pro include English voices and MP3 downloads; other languages are Enterprise-only, and WAV starts on Business.
Where they offer more: Murf's API cost for one pass of this book is lower than a month of any Vois Studio paid plan, if you're comfortable working through an API. WellSaid doesn't charge for retakes, and its voices are modelled on licensed recordings from voice actors. ElevenLabs lists 74 languages on its pricing page. For the wider picture, see the true cost of credit-based voice platforms and cost per finished minute.
What does a subscription change?
Vois Studio generates on your Mac or Windows computer. Paid plans have unlimited generation and unlimited export, with no character, minute or credit meter:
| Plan | What it includes for a book |
|---|---|
| Subscriber | Sonic, Fast, Expressive and Multilingual, voice cloning, the CLI, unlimited export |
| Pro | Everything in Subscriber, plus Craft and Omni for plain-word direction, and Voice Design |
| Free | Non-commercial use only: 10 generations a day, 10 exports a month of English Sonic audio. Not for a book you sell |
Subscriber and Pro are flat monthly or yearly subscriptions; the current prices are on the pricing page. So a nine-hour book and a twelve-hour book cost the same, and so does the second edition. The trade-offs, plainly: generation runs on your hardware, so speed depends on your computer; Craft needs about 9 GB of memory on a Mac and 11 GB on Windows; and every Vois Studio export carries an inaudible watermark.
The same logic applies to other long-form work, such as a daily video channel: faceless YouTube without API costs.
Why do retakes matter so much?
A book is never generated once. You'll fix a misread name, rewrite a sentence that doesn't work aloud, change a character's voice, or redo a chapter after an editor's notes. On a metered tool, each of those uses the meter again, unless the tool exempts it.
In Vois Studio, changing a line and pressing Generate Audio remakes only the changed lines and keeps your edits on the rest. You can go back to an earlier take (right-click a clip, then Takes) and lock lines you're happy with so they aren't replaced. Fix a name once in the pronunciation dictionary and it's used on every later generation.
Where can you publish an AI-narrated audiobook?
Check this before you narrate a single chapter, because the cost question doesn't matter if your store won't take the file.
ACX doesn't accept externally generated AI narration through its standard upload. See ACX audiobook requirements and AI narration.
Spotify for Authors and Kobo Writing Life accept audiobooks you narrate with a synthetic voice, each with a disclosure field. Apple Books and Google Play Books accept AI narration only from their own systems. See where you can publish an AI-narrated audiobook.
Vois Studio's ACX Audiobook export profile targets -20 LUFS with a peak of no more than -3 dB. That's a technical target, not permission to upload: use the format the store that accepted your book asks for.
Can Vois Studio export a whole audiobook?
Yes. Vois Studio 2.5.3 improved long exports:
- Exporting a very long project, such as a whole audiobook, now saves the complete recording instead of stopping partway through.
- A WAV export larger than 4 GB is saved as RF64, the standard format for WAV files of that size.
- Checking a long audiobook's loudness with mastering on uses far less memory.
- Cancel stops an export within about a second, and nothing is saved.
- Generating a long script no longer slows down as lines finish, and the failed count lists every line that failed, with its reason.
Exports with loudness normalisation reach the target within 0.3 LU when the recording allows, and say so when it can't without going over the peak limit. For the full production route, see manuscript to audiobook and the export profiles guide.
Sources
Checked 20 October 2026: ElevenLabs pricing, Murf pricing, WellSaid pricing, WellSaid homepage, Vois Studio pricing. Character counts: Project Gutenberg plain-text editions of Pride and Prejudice (#1342), Frankenstein (#84) and Moby Dick (#2701).
Related
- The complete Vois Studio 2.6 guide
- The true cost of credit-based voice platforms
- Cost per finished minute of audio production
- Where you can publish an AI-narrated audiobook
- ACX audiobook requirements and AI narration
- Faceless YouTube without API costs
- Vois Studio vs ElevenLabs
- Vois Studio vs WellSaid
Count the characters in your manuscript tonight, then price the book on every tool before you generate a single line.
The Vois Team