Written and maintained by CASRAI Editorial Board
Last updated
Speechify’s pricing looks simple on the surface — a free plan and a $29/month Premium tier — but the searches around it (student discounts, API pricing, “free trial” vs. “free plan”) suggest most people land on the pricing page still unsure what they’d actually pay. This page walks through every real cost variant: monthly and annual Premium, the student discount’s actual percentage, the separate API pricing for developers, and the one distinction that causes the most confusion — Speechify’s permanent free plan is not the same thing as a time-limited free trial of Premium, and conflating the two is why so many people expect a trial that doesn’t exist in the form they think it does.
How Much Does Speechify Cost?
The short answer: Speechify costs $0 on the permanent free plan, $29/month on Premium billed monthly, or $139/year on Premium billed annually (about $11.58/month) — verified against Speechify’s own pricing page as of August 2026. So does Speechify cost money? Only if you want Premium’s natural-sounding voices, faster playback speeds, OCR scanning, and the mobile/desktop sync that most people who search “speechify app cost” are actually asking about — the free tier itself never requires a card and never auto-charges you.
What does Speechify cost per month, broken down:
- Free: $0 forever, no credit card required
- Premium, monthly: $29/month
- Premium, annual: $139/year, which works out to roughly $11.58/month — Speechify markets this as “save 60%” against paying monthly for a year ($348), and the math checks out ($139 is exactly 60% below $348)
Tip: try code CASRAI at checkout for 15% off, if the offer is currently active for this program — codes vary by vendor and aren’t guaranteed.
Before we get into every plan and edge case: if what you actually need is polished, studio-quality narration or a cloned voice — rather than a tool that reads your own PDFs and articles back to you — ElevenLabs is built for that job specifically, and it’s worth knowing about before you commit to a subscription on price alone. More on exactly when that trade-off matters further down.
Speechify Premium Plans and Pricing
Speechify’s premium subscription is a single tier — there’s no “basic Premium” vs. “Pro Premium” split the way some competitors structure it. You get one feature set (expanded natural voice library, up to 4.5x playback speed, OCR text scanning for scanned PDFs and photos, offline listening, cross-device sync) at one of two billing cadences:
- Monthly: $29.00/month, cancel anytime
- Annual: $139.00/year (≈$11.58/month), billed once per year
If you’re asking “speechify premium cost” because you want the cheapest way in, annual billing is the answer — it’s less than half the effective monthly rate of paying month to month. The trade-off is the upfront charge: $139 all at once is a bigger ask than $29, even though it’s the better deal over a year of use.
The Speechify Free Plan: What You Actually Get
Speechify’s free plan is genuinely free — no credit card at signup, no time limit, no auto-conversion to a paid plan. As of August 2026, the free tier includes:
- Text-to-speech playback of articles, documents, and (with limits) PDFs
- 10 standard, more robotic-sounding voices
- Playback speeds up to 1.5x
What it doesn’t include is everything Premium adds: the larger library of natural-sounding voices, speeds up to 4.5x, OCR for scanned/photographed text, and offline downloads. For light, occasional use — a few articles a week — the free plan is a real, usable product, not a crippled demo. It becomes limiting fast if you read for long stretches daily, since 1.5x and a robotic voice are a meaningfully worse experience than what Premium unlocks.
Speechify Free Trial vs. Free Plan: The Actual Difference
This is the single most-confused part of Speechify’s pricing, and it’s worth being precise about. Two different things get called “free” and they are not interchangeable:
- The free plan is permanent, requires no payment method, and never expires. It’s the one described above.
- A free trial of Premium — offered at various points through Speechify’s own signup flow and its mobile app-store listings — gives you full Premium access for a limited introductory period, but typically requires entering payment details up front, and will auto-renew into the paid subscription (monthly or annual, depending which you selected) if you don’t cancel before it ends.
The confusion happens because “speechify free trial” and “speechify free plan” get used as if they’re the same offer. They’re not: one costs nothing ever and has permanently reduced features; the other gives you the full product temporarily and is designed to convert into a real charge. If you start a Premium trial specifically to test the better voices and higher speed, put a calendar reminder in before you forget — that’s the exact complaint pattern independent buying guides flag most often about Speechify’s signup flow. If you just want to try Speechify with zero commitment and zero risk of a surprise charge, use the free plan, not a trial.
Speechify Student Discount: Eligibility and How Much You Save
Speechify does offer a student discount, and the mechanics are specific enough to be worth stating plainly (confirmed directly on Speechify’s own site as of August 2026):
- Percentage off: verified students get 25% off Premium through student-verification partners UNiDAYS and Student Beans, bringing the effective annual price down from $139 to roughly $100.
- Eligibility: you verify your enrollment through UNiDAYS or Student Beans (typically a school email address plus, sometimes, additional ID confirmation) rather than by simply entering a “.edu” address at Speechify checkout directly.
- US K-12 students are treated separately from the above and can qualify for Premium at no cost at all through Speechify’s education program, subject to academic verification — this is a genuinely free upgrade, not a discount code, and is aimed specifically at younger students rather than college/university students.
If you’re searching for a “Speechify discount code” hoping for a promo code you type in at checkout, the actual mechanism is verification-based rather than code-based for the student offer — you link a UNiDAYS or Student Beans account rather than redeeming a text string. Non-student discounts do occasionally appear as limited-time promotional pricing on Speechify’s own site or through partner offers; those aren’t permanent and aren’t the same 25% student rate.
Speechify API Pricing for Developers
Separate from the consumer reading app, Speechify maintains a developer-facing API platform with its own usage-based pricing (as of August 2026, published at speechify.ai — Speechify’s developer/API product line, distinct from the speechify.com consumer pricing page):
- Free tier: 50,000 TTS characters and 60 agent-minutes included, no credit card required
- Starter — $10/month: 1 million characters included, then $10 per additional million; 120 voice-agent minutes included, then $0.075/minute
- Pro — $99/month: 3 million characters included at $8 per additional million; 1,200 minutes included at $0.07/minute
- Scale — $499/month: 10 million characters at $6 per additional million; 6,000 minutes at $0.068/minute
- Enterprise: custom volume pricing and dedicated support
This API pricing is aimed at developers building text-to-speech or voice-agent features into their own product, not at someone who just wants to listen to articles — if that’s your use case, the consumer Premium plan above is the relevant price, not this table. Because API/developer pricing on any platform changes faster than consumer plans, confirm the current tiers directly before budgeting a project around them.
Speechify Studio Pricing
Speechify also sells “Speechify Studio,” aimed at longer-form audio/video voiceover production rather than reading your own documents aloud, with its own separate pricing page linked from the main Speechify pricing page. If Studio-style narration production is actually what you need — polished, produced voiceover rather than a personal reading assistant — that use case is exactly where a purpose-built voice platform tends to out-perform Speechify on quality, which is the trade-off covered in the next section. Confirm Speechify Studio’s current tiers directly on Speechify’s site, since this guide focuses on verifying the core Premium/free/student/API pricing above.
Who Speechify Is Actually Built For
Speechify is a reading tool first. It exists to take text you already have — a news article, a PDF textbook chapter, an ebook, a research paper — and read it back to you, faster and in a more natural voice than your device’s built-in accessibility reader, at a price ($11.58–$29/month) well below most alternatives that do anything comparable. For that job — commuting through your reading backlog, studying with dyslexia or ADHD accommodations, getting through long PDFs without eye strain — it’s a genuinely good, honestly-priced product, and the free plan is a real way to check it fits your habits before paying anything.
Where it is not built to compete is voice production. Speechify’s voices are optimized for clear, fast, comprehensible playback of your own text, not for generating broadcast-quality narration, expressive character voices, or a cloned voice that sounds convincingly like a specific person. If your actual goal is producing audio — a podcast intro, an audiobook narration, a video voiceover, a cloned brand voice — Speechify’s price advantage stops mattering, because it isn’t optimized for that output quality in the first place.
When Speechify’s Lower Price Isn’t Actually the Better Deal
This is the honest trade-off, stated plainly: Speechify is genuinely cheaper than ElevenLabs for the specific job of reading text aloud to yourself. ElevenLabs’ free tier (10,000 credits/month) and cheapest paid tier, Starter at $6/month (30,000 credits, commercial license, instant voice cloning), are priced for a different job entirely — generating narration, cloned voices, and produced audio output, not personal reading-assistant use. Its Creator tier ($22/month) and Pro tier ($99/month, 44.1kHz/192kbps studio-grade output, professional voice cloning) exist because that market — content creators and studios producing audio people other than the creator will listen to — needs quality and control that a reading app was never built to deliver.
So: if you’re choosing on price alone and your actual use case is “I need voiceover output good enough to publish,” picking Speechify because it’s cheaper will disappoint you — you’ll have paid less for a tool that wasn’t solving your actual problem. If your use case is genuinely “read my own PDFs and articles back to me,” Speechify’s price and feature set are the right fit and ElevenLabs would be overpaying for capability you don’t need.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Speechify cost money?
Not necessarily. Speechify’s free plan is permanent and requires no payment. It costs money only if you choose Premium, which is $29/month or $139/year.
What is the cost of Speechify Premium per month?
$29/month billed monthly, or the equivalent of about $11.58/month if you pay $139 upfront for the year.
Is there a real Speechify free trial, or just the free plan?
Both exist, and they’re different: the free plan is permanent and card-free; a Premium free trial (offered through some signup and app-store flows) gives temporary full access and typically requires card details up front, auto-renewing into a paid subscription if not cancelled.
How much is the Speechify student discount?
25% off Premium, verified through UNiDAYS or Student Beans, bringing the annual plan to roughly $100. US K-12 students can qualify for Premium entirely free through a separate academic-verification program.
Does Speechify have a discount code I can just enter at checkout?
The student offer works through verification services (UNiDAYS/Student Beans), not a typed promo code. Occasional promotional pricing does appear directly on Speechify’s own site from time to time, separate from the student rate.
What does Speechify’s API pricing look like for developers?
As of August 2026, Speechify’s developer/API platform offers a free tier (50,000 characters + 60 agent-minutes), then paid tiers starting at $10/month, scaling to $99/month and $499/month based on usage volume, plus custom enterprise pricing.
What’s the real difference between Speechify’s plans overall?
Free (basic voices, 1.5x speed, no cost) vs. Premium (full voice library, up to 4.5x speed, OCR, offline listening, $29/month or $139/year) is the entire consumer lineup — there’s no mid-tier. Studio and the API are separate products with their own pricing, aimed at production and developer use cases respectively, not at everyday reading.
