Free Text to Speech for Commercial Use: What the Terms Say

A free text to speech plan and a commercial license are two different things, and most comparisons blur them. Some services write no separate restriction for the free tier. Others explicitly forbid commercial use of it and require a credit line in your title. The difference only shows up in the terms, not on the pricing card.

This guide reads the terms directly. It covers six services: ElevenLabs, OpenAI's TTS API, Google Cloud Text-to-Speech, Amazon Polly, Microsoft Azure Speech and Murf. Every quote below was taken from the official pricing page, help center or terms of service on 2026-09-23. Play.ht is not included because its pricing and terms pages could not be loaded on that date.

Can you use free text to speech for commercial use?

It splits cleanly into two groups. Creator-focused tools restrict what you make on the free tier. The three cloud platforms treat the free allowance as a billing discount and do not write a separate rule for it.

Service	Free allowance	Free output used commercially	Credit line required
ElevenLabs	10,000 credits a month	Not allowed	Yes, in the title
Murf (API)	$10 of credit a month	Treat as not allowed	None found
Google Cloud TTS	1M to 4M characters a month by voice tier	No separate restriction found	None found
Amazon Polly	5M Standard characters a month; Neural and Generative for 12 months	No separate restriction found	None found
Azure Speech	0.5M Neural characters a month	No separate restriction found	No brand credit, but AI voice disclosure
OpenAI API	No free tier found	Paid output is yours	None found

Note the wording on the cloud rows. None of the three terms say the free tier is allowed for commercial use. They simply do not carve it out. That is a meaningful difference from "explicitly permitted", and it is the most accurate way to describe them.

ElevenLabs: the free plan has no commercial license

This is the clearest rule in the group. The ElevenLabs help center says: "The free plan does not include a commercial license and cannot be used for any commercial purpose." Its terms of use say free users may "only use the Services for non-commercial purposes," while paid subscribers "may use the Services for commercial purposes."

There is also a credit requirement. If you publish something made on the free plan, or while signed out, the help center says you must attribute it by including "elevenlabs.io" or "11.ai" in the title. On a YouTube video, that means the video title itself.

Commercial rights start at Starter, $6 a month ($5 on annual billing) for 30,000 credits. Every paid plan carries a commercial license unless you are using beta services. Creator is $22 a month with a first-month discount shown at the time of checking, and Pro is $99.

The strongest point in its terms is what happens when you stop paying. The help center says: "Once your subscription ends, you will still have a commercial license to use whatever you generated during that subscription forever." Anything you create after cancelling falls back to the free-plan rules, which means non-commercial plus attribution.

If you need commercial rights, the lowest paid tier already includes them: ElevenLabs Starter: commercial license from $6/month linkAffiliate link: Fieldnotes earns a commission if you purchase through this link.

Google Cloud, Amazon Polly and Azure: no free-tier carve-out

All three bill per character and give a monthly free allowance. None of their terms add a non-commercial condition to that allowance, and none require a credit line.

• Google Cloud Text-to-Speech gives 4M characters a month free on Standard and WaveNet voices, and 1M on Neural2, Studio and Chirp 3: HD. You must enable billing to use it at all, and charges start automatically once you pass the free allowance. Spaces and line breaks count as characters. Google's service terms say it "does not assert any ownership rights in any new intellectual property created in the Generated Output," although whether classic Text-to-Speech voices fall under its "Generative AI Service" definition was not confirmed.
• Amazon Polly gives 5M Standard characters a month with no stated time limit, while Neural (1M), Long-Form (500K) and Generative (100K) are free only for the first 12 months. AWS's service terms say "The output that you generate using AI Services is Your Content."
• Azure Speech gives 0.5M Neural characters a month on the free tier. Of the three cloud platforms, Azure is the one where a disclosure rule was found: its code of conduct asks you to "Disclose when the output, decisions, or actions are generated by AI, including the synthetic nature of generated voices." That is a disclosure, not a brand credit.

OpenAI's API versus ChatGPT voice

These are governed by different terms, and mixing them up is a common mistake. Through the API, OpenAI's business terms state the customer "owns all Output" and assign OpenAI's rights in it to the customer. No free API tier for text to speech was found on the pricing page.

ChatGPT's voice feature is a separate product with a separate rule: "ChatGPT Voice Output is for non-commercial use only and may not be distributed or repackaged as a standalone audio recording." If you recorded audio from the ChatGPT app, it is not covered by the API ownership clause.

Murf: treat the free credit as evaluation only

Murf's terms allow commercial use of Murf-created voices in general, but its trial clause says: "Use of trials and betas is permitted only for User's self-evaluation during the period designated by Murf." Whether the $10 of monthly free API credit counts as a trial under that clause is not stated. The safer reading is not to publish anything made with it.

What a 1,000-word script costs

These figures assume about 6,000 characters for 1,000 English words including spaces, priced after the free allowance runs out. Recalculate with your own character count.

Service and voice	Per 1M characters	1,000 words
Google Standard or WaveNet	$4	$0.024
Amazon Polly Standard	$4	$0.024
Murf API Falcon	$10	$0.06
OpenAI tts-1	$15	$0.09
Azure Neural	$15	$0.09
Google Neural2 or Amazon Polly Neural	$16	$0.096
OpenAI tts-1-hd	$30	$0.18
Amazon Polly Long-Form	$100	$0.60
Google Studio	$160	$0.96

ElevenLabs is priced by subscription rather than per character, so it is better compared by how many scripts a plan covers. If one credit equals one character, Starter's 30,000 credits cover about five 1,000-word scripts, roughly $1.20 each. That credit-to-character ratio was not confirmed on the pricing page, so treat the figure as an estimate. OpenAI's gpt-4o-mini-tts and Google's Gemini voices are billed in tokens and are left out because no per-character rate is published.

YouTube, audiobooks and podcasts are a separate question

None of the six services list YouTube monetization, ads, audiobooks or podcasts as individually permitted uses in their terms. A commercial license from the voice provider does not mean the platform will accept the result. Murf's terms make that explicit in their limitation of liability, which names "THIRD-PARTY POLICIES (SUCH AS YOUTUBE REFUSING TO ALLOW MONETIZATION OF VIDEOS WITH SYNTHESIZED VOICES OR ACX DECLINING TEXT TO SPEECH BASED AUDIO BOOKS)". Check the publishing platform's own policy before you produce a full project.

What happens to your audio when you cancel

ElevenLabs is the only one of the six where a direct statement was found, and the answer is favorable: audio made while subscribed keeps its commercial license forever. OpenAI's business terms say the rights OpenAI grants "will cease immediately" on termination, but output ownership was assigned to you separately, and the terms do not spell out how the two interact. Murf's terms say you "lose the right to access or use the Services" on termination and do not say whether earlier output keeps its commercial rights. No direct statement was found for Google, AWS or Azure.

Frequently asked questions

Is Google text to speech free for commercial use?

Google Cloud's terms do not add a non-commercial restriction to the free monthly allowance and do not require a credit line. They also do not explicitly say the free tier is approved for commercial use. You must enable billing to use the service, and usage beyond the free characters is charged automatically.

Can I use text to speech for YouTube videos for free?

It depends on the service. On ElevenLabs' free plan, no: the free plan carries no commercial license, and monetized video counts as commercial. On the cloud platforms, the free allowance has no separate restriction. Either way, YouTube's own monetization policy decides whether the channel is accepted.

Do I have to credit the voice provider?

Only on ElevenLabs' free plan, where "elevenlabs.io" or "11.ai" must appear in the title of published content. Azure does not require a brand credit but does ask you to disclose that a voice is AI-generated.

Can I keep using audio after I cancel?

On ElevenLabs, yes, for anything made while you were paying. For the other services the terms do not state it directly, so keep a record of which plan you were on when each file was generated.

Bottom line

If you want to publish commercially without paying anything, the cloud platforms are the only group whose terms do not carve out the free tier, and Google and Amazon Standard voices cost about two cents per 1,000 words once you pass it. The trade-off is that billing must be enabled before you can use them at all, and charges start automatically past the free allowance.

If you prefer a creator-focused service, budget for the lowest paid tier from the start. ElevenLabs' free plan cannot be used commercially and requires a title credit, while its $6 Starter plan removes both and keeps the rights on what you made even after you cancel.

Whichever you pick, save the plan name and date alongside each exported file. Rights attach to when the audio was generated, not to what plan you are on later.

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