Is it worth paying for…

Is it worth paying for Speechify?

Last reviewed September 2026. Pricing and plans change; check Speechify's own site for current figures.

Short answer: Speechify is worth paying for if natural neural voices, convenient web and PDF import, OCR or listening across devices matter to you. For plain text and simple PDFs, our reader uses local voices already available on your device.

Where the paywall sits

Checked September 2026: Speechify’s official pricing page shows Premium at US$29 per month in its monthly view. A yearly option is offered; check checkout for its current total. The free plan already offers text to speech with ten basic voices and speeds up to 1.5×. Premium advertises natural voices and speeds up to 5×. We have not repeated the older US$139 annual figure without verifying it in the current offer.

What the free version here does

Reads pasted text, UTF 8 TXT and text extracted from PDFs.
Offers local operating system voices, rates from 0.5× to 3×, pitch, pause and resume.
Highlights the current sentence and skips by sentence or paragraph.
Remembers your position when you reopen identical text, without storing the text itself.

Open Read aloud — free, no account

When paying might still make sense

Speechify’s neural voices generally sound more natural, and its web import, PDF workflow, scanning and device integrations offer more convenience. Browser voices differ across platforms, may be absent, and may require the tab to stay visible. Our tool has no OCR, web page fetch, EPUB import, audio download or neural voice model. Complex PDF reading order may need correction before listening.

How this one stays free

It runs entirely in your browser. There is no server to pay for, nothing is uploaded, and the code is open source. There is nothing to cancel because there was nothing to sign up for.

Speechify is a trademark of its owner. This page compares products and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Speechify.