What is actually free for AI voice, music and sound effects in 2026

I'm Sharan Ramakrishna, and I build AIKIZI, one of the tools in this list. I've put it in as one entry with its real limits, and I've tried to make the rest of the post useful even if you never open it.

When I need a voice line, a door slam or thirty seconds of music for a video, the first question is always the same: what can I make for free, and what am I allowed to do with it? The answers are spread across pricing pages, help centres and FAQ footnotes, and they change. So here is what I found on each vendor's own page on 12 November 2026. Where I could not read a page, I left the tool out rather than repeat a number from a blog.

The short version

Two tools I wanted in this table are not there. I could not load the Google Cloud Text-to-Speech or Stable Audio pricing pages when I checked, so I have no number I can stand behind for either.

Voice: the free tiers are bigger than you think, but they are not the same thing

There are two kinds of free text to speech.

The first is a creator tool: you type, pick a voice, press a button and download a file. ElevenLabs is the obvious one. Its free plan gives 10,000 credits a month, and text to speech uses one credit per character, which the pricing page puts at about 10 minutes of speech. The catch most people miss is not the size. It is the licence. ElevenLabs' help centre says plainly that the free plan "does not include a commercial license", and that anything you share from it must credit ElevenLabs. If your video is monetised, the free plan is not for it.

The second kind is a cloud API. Amazon Polly's pricing page gives a free tier of 5 million characters a month for standard voices, and 1 million characters a month for neural voices for the first 12 months. Azure's free F0 tier gives 0.5 million neural characters a month. Those are large numbers. They also assume you are writing code: you call an API, you handle the audio, and you live inside a cloud account with its own sign-up. If you are a developer building narration into an app, start here. If you want to make one voiceover for a video this afternoon, they are a long way round.

What I would check before choosing:

• Characters or minutes? One minute of English speech is roughly 900 characters. Japanese and other scripts do not map the same way, so test with your own text.
• The voice quality you actually get on the free tier. Polly separates standard and neural voices, and the free amounts differ.
• The licence. This is the line that decides whether the free tier is usable for your project at all.

Sound effects: count seconds, not generations

ElevenLabs bills a sound effect at 200 credits per generation, so its free plan holds about 50 generations a month if you spend the credits on nothing else. That works for trying the model. It runs out quickly when you are building a library of UI blips or footsteps, where you want many short takes and throw most of them away.

Two things matter more than the headline number:

1. Length per take. On AIKIZI an effect can run up to 30 seconds. Most hits want one to three seconds; ambience wants the full length you will use.
2. Loops. For rain, room tone or an engine under a scene, a seamless loop saves an editing pass. AIKIZI has a loop switch for this; check whether the tool you pick offers one.

A tip that works on any of these tools: say what makes the sound, where it happens and how it moves. "A glass bottle rolling across a wooden floor, then stopping against a wall" gets you that bottle. "Bottle sound" gets you a guess.

Music: the free tiers are small and almost never commercial

Suno's free plan is 50 credits a day on its v6-mini model, and its pricing page lists no commercial rights on the free tier. ElevenLabs' Eleven Music costs 900 credits a minute, so the free plan's 10,000 credits hold about 11 minutes a month, and the help centre asks you to credit "Eleven Music" when you share it.

If you need music you can put in a client video, read the rights line before you read the song count. "Free" and "free to use commercially" are different promises, and the second one is rare.

Where AIKIZI fits, and its limits

AIKIZI is my product, so weigh this paragraph accordingly. This season, every signed-in AIKIZI account gets 20 minutes of generated audio a day (40 on Starter, Basic and Pro), made with ElevenLabs models: Eleven v4 for speech, the ElevenLabs sound-effects model, and Eleven Music. Voice, sound effects and music share the same minutes. A five-second sound effect uses five seconds; a 60-second track uses a minute; a voice line is sized from its text. The clock resets at midnight UTC. You sign in with Google and add no card. Files download as MP3.

The limits, plainly:

• It is a limited-time season, not a permanent plan. Free audio can end at any time, and the page says so when it does.
• If all accounts together reach the day's shared ceiling early, free takes pause until midnight UTC.
• Free takes are kept for 30 days. Download what you want to keep.
• Speech is up to 10,000 characters a take; sound effects up to 30 seconds; music from 10 seconds to 5 minutes.
• This season, voice and sound effects can go into your own commercial work. Music can be used commercially online and offline and released on streaming services, but not in film, TV, radio or games beyond indie size, and music prompts must not name artists, songs or labels. ElevenLabs' terms still apply, and AI-made audio may not be protected by copyright everywhere.

There is one page per audio type with the exact numbers: voice, sound effects and music.

How I would choose

• One voiceover for a video, monetised: you need a commercial licence. That rules out the ElevenLabs and Suno free plans. Look at a paid starter tier, or a free offer that states commercial use in writing.
• Narration inside an app you are coding: Polly or Azure. The free character counts are large, and you were going to write the integration anyway.
• A pile of short sound effects for a game jam: pick a tool that counts seconds rather than generations, and read the licence line.
• Background music for a personal, non-commercial project: the free music tiers above are made for this. Check how each one asks to be credited.

Whatever you pick, open the pricing page on the day you start. Every number above was correct when I read it, on 12 November 2026, and some of them will not be by the time you read this.