Quick TTS vs Speechify: Is Speechify Free, and Do You Need It?
Speechify is the biggest name in text to speech: cloud voices, a browser extension, mobile apps, a $29/month Premium tier. Quick TTS is a free browser-only tool that pastes and plays. If you searched for a Speechify free alternative, here is the fair read.
The short answer
Speechify's free plan is real but deliberately thin, and Quick TTS is the better fit when you want unlimited text read aloud with no account and no subscription.
- Quick TTS is free and ad-supported, with no sign-up, no character limit, four engines, and nothing sent to a server.
- Speechify Free lists "10 robotic sounding voices" and "Text to speech features only", capped at "Listen at speeds up to 1.5x".
- Speechify Premium is "$29 /Month" and adds "1000+ high quality, natural voices", "60+ different languages" and "Listen at 5x faster speeds".
Those quotes are from their pricing page.
Is Speechify free?
Speechify has a free plan, but almost everything people associate with the product sits behind Premium.
- The free row is short. Their pricing page describes it as "10 robotic sounding voices" and "Text to speech features only". The good voices, the AI features and fast playback are Premium lines on the same page.
- No free quota is published. The free column states no character, word, minute or monthly limit at all. Whatever the cap is, you discover it by hitting it.
- Voice cloning is the odd exception. Their voice cloning page advertises "100,000 characters per month". That is their claim on their own marketing page, not something we measured, and the page does not say where the cloning runs.
Where Speechify genuinely wins
Several of these are jobs Quick TTS cannot do at all.
- Word-by-word highlighting. Their Chrome extension page promises you "Read along as each word highlights in sync with the audio". For dyslexic readers and ESL learners that visual sync is the whole point. Quick TTS shows the current segment and nothing finer.
- An extension that reads the page you are on. Same page: "Play audio with a sidebar player on any website or directly inside articles". Quick TTS is a destination site. You bring text to it.
- Cloud voice breadth. "1000+ high quality, natural voices" across "60+ different languages" on Premium. No model that fits in a browser tab competes on raw count.
- Playback up to 5x. "Listen at 5x faster speeds" on Premium. Our speed slider stops at 2x, which is a real ceiling if you speed-listen.
- A library that follows you. Their online reader page says "Signing in keeps your documents, voices, and preferences saved, so you can pick up exactly where you left off on your phone, laptop, or tablet". Quick TTS keeps nothing between sessions.
- AI features over your document. Their pricing page lists "AI Summaries & Chats", AI Podcasts and a Voice AI Assistant under Premium, plus "Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive Integrations". Those are server features. We have none of them and are not building them.
Where Quick TTS wins
- Your text stays in your browser. None of the Speechify pages cited here claims that synthesis happens on your own device. Quick TTS generates every word locally through your system voices, Piper via WebAssembly, or Kokoro and Supertonic HD via WebGPU. For a draft contract or an unpublished manuscript, that difference is the whole decision.
- No account and no quota. No email, no password, no trial clock. Paste a full novel and listen to all of it.
- Four engines, all free. System voices, Piper for neural speech in 13 languages on anything with WebAssembly, Kokoro's 28 English voices, and Supertonic HD at 44.1 kHz across 31 languages. Supertonic needs WebGPU and a one-time ~380MB download, then it is cached. Speechify's free voices are the ones its own page calls robotic.
- Broader free file import, with local OCR. We read PDF, DOCX, DOC, EPUB, ODT, RTF, HTML, TXT and Markdown, plus images, and we OCR scanned PDFs in the browser. Speechify's reader page says "You can upload any document format such as PDF, DOCX, TXT, EPUB and read them aloud", and its "Scan & Listen" OCR sits in the Premium column of the pricing page.
- You get the audio file. Download WAV or MP3, or a multi-part ZIP for long texts. Speechify's reader page offers a "Download button to save the audio to your device" too; its pricing page lists no download line in either column.
- 32 localized site languages. The interface, not just the voices.
Things Quick TTS can't do that Speechify can
The honest gap list, with nothing softened:
- Read faster than 2x.
- Read the web page you are currently on. We have no browser extension.
- Highlight individual words as they are spoken.
- Clone your voice.
- Summarize a document, chat with it, or turn it into a podcast.
- Sync a document library across your phone and laptop.
- Give you a native iOS or Android app with downloaded offline audio.
- Offer a thousand voices, or any language our four engines do not cover.
Most of that list is settled rather than pending. Accounts, paid tiers and server-side synthesis are out of scope by design, and the last one is what makes the privacy claim on this site true. The FAQ has the detail.
Pricing, honestly
Quick TTS is free. Ads pay the hosting bill. There is no Pro tier and no plan to add one, because the models are open source and run on your hardware, so one more listener costs us almost nothing.
Speechify's pricing page lists Premium at "$29 /Month" and advertises "SAVE 60%" on annual billing. That is a legitimate business model, not a complaint. Still: their free tier is a sales funnel, ours is the product.
Which one fits your use case
Skip the feature grid and answer one question: what do you need while it reads?
- Word-level highlighting for dyslexia or language learning is Speechify. Our segment display is not a substitute.
- Listening to the article already open in your browser is Speechify's extension. We would make you copy and paste.
- Confidential text, drafts, contracts, medical or legal notes is Quick TTS. Nothing is uploaded, so there is nothing to leak.
- A long book or PDF heard end to end for free is Quick TTS. No cap, no upgrade prompt partway through.
- Proofreading your own writing by ear is Quick TTS. Paste, listen, catch the sentence your eyes kept skipping.
- A language outside our engines, or 3x playback on a commute is Speechify Premium. Those are real limits on our side.
- Comparing more than these two is what the full comparison page is for. It covers NaturalReader, TTSMaker and TTSReader alongside Speechify, and the Quick TTS vs NaturalReader post is the closer head-to-head if OCR and mobile apps are what you are weighing.
Try Quick TTS
Open Quick TTS, paste your text, pick Supertonic HD if your browser supports WebGPU or Piper if it does not, and press play. If you turn out to need the highlighting, the extension or the 5x speed, then go pay Speechify. They built those features and they work. For everything else, this is free, needs no account, and never sends your words anywhere.