A free ElevenLabs alternative without monthly credits
ElevenLabs makes some of the most expressive AI voices there are, and its free plan is a good way to try them: 10,000 credits a month, which its pricing page puts at about 10 minutes of speech. The catch is in the terms: the free plan has no commercial license, and if you publish what you made with it, ElevenLabs asks you to credit it with elevenlabs.io or 11.ai in the title.
If you need more than a few minutes, or audio you may use in your own projects, the free SuperClonica engine voices text without limits on your own computer, and the catalog adds narrator and character voices you can try online. This guide compares the two honestly.
Try a voice online first
On the page of any voice in the catalog, paste a line you voiced with ElevenLabs, 30 to 100 characters, choose the language and press Voice it. In a few seconds you can compare, with no account.
Voice as much as you want, offline
Install the engine once with python -m pip install superclonica-cpu; it runs on Windows, macOS and Linux on an ordinary processor, and after the one-time model download it works offline. Voice a whole script with one command: superclonica --text-file script.txt --voice F2 --lang en --normalize --output script.mp3. There are no credits and no monthly cap: a long text simply takes a while, and a graphics card only makes it faster.
What you may do with the audio
The ten stock voices of the Supertonic 3 model, M1 to M5 and F1 to F5, may be used commercially under the OpenRAIL-M model license. Voices trained from your own recording, or from someone who agreed, may be used commercially too. Character voices from the catalog are for fan and parody use only, and some catalog voices are paid, bought once.
When ElevenLabs is the better choice
ElevenLabs has more ready voices, finer control of emotion and delivery, instant cloning from a short sample, more languages including Chinese, plus dubbing, sound effects and music in one place. If you need a few minutes of the most expressive voice possible and pay for a plan, it is a strong pick. Choose SuperClonica for long or frequent voicing, for offline work and privacy, and for audio you may use without a subscription.
For apps and bots
If you call ElevenLabs from code, the SuperClonica speech API is billed by time instead of characters; our ElevenLabs API alternative guide compares the prices and shows how to switch a request over.