I do a lot of narration work, and for a long time I estimated two things by gut feel: how long a voiceover would run, and what the text-to-speech bill would be. Both were guesswork, and both were wrong often enough to annoy me. So I built two small tools and put them online for free.
What they do
Script Reading Time & Voiceover Length Calculator: paste a script and it shows words, characters (with and without spaces), and narration length at 130, 150 and 170 WPM. It also shows roughly how many characters a TTS tool will bill.
AI Voice (TTS) Pricing Comparison: enter N characters (or minutes) per month and it estimates the monthly cost across ElevenLabs, Murf API, WellSaid, Google Cloud TTS and Azure, cheapest first.
There is more in the hub: https://ai.infinityme.dev/tools/
How it's built
It's a static Next.js export, and everything runs client-side. The text you paste never leaves your browser, and I don't track it. No signup, no accounts, no affiliate links in these tools.
Lessons learned
- Pricing pages change constantly. Hardcoding numbers in components went stale fast. Now every price lives in one data file, each entry with a "checked" date, and the page shows that date. Updating means editing one file.
- Characters vs minutes billing confuses people. Some providers bill per character, others sell plans in minutes or credits. I had to pick a conversion (about 1,000 characters per minute) and state it clearly, otherwise comparisons look misleading.
- Estimates need honest margins. Real recordings include pauses and retakes, and regenerating a line costs characters again. The tool gives a number, but you should leave some slack.
Feedback welcome
If something looks off, or a price is outdated, tell me. Which TTS provider should I add next? Tell me in the comments, and tell me what else would make these useful for your workflow.
Top comments (0)