Prices for article audio are hard to compare. One vendor charges per character, another per article, and some don't publish prices at all. The price on the plan is also rarely what you pay in a real month, because corrections and busy weeks add up.
This post walks through the maths for your own site, with Readerr's public prices as the worked example. The method works for any plan metered in characters.
01How long are your articles?
Most text-to-speech plans count characters: every letter, digit, punctuation mark and space in the text that gets read. So start with your own average.
- Take ten recent articles of the kind you publish most. Don't pick only the long features or only the short news items.
- Add up their words and divide by ten.
- Multiply by six, because an average word plus the space after it is about six characters. An article of 850 words is roughly 5,000 characters.
Numbers and abbreviations don't raise the count. Readerr counts the characters of your article text. Turning numbers and abbreviations into words for the voice does not add to the bill, so an article full of figures costs the same as its length on the page.
Parts of the page that aren't the article, such as navigation or share buttons, are not read and not counted. If you use Readerr's WordPress plugin, it shows an estimate of the text length in the post editor.
02From characters to articles per month
With an average length, a plan's character allowance becomes a number of articles. Readerr's plans assume 5,000 characters per article, so scale the article counts if yours are much longer or shorter.
| Plan | Month | Characters | ≈ Articles | Per article |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Start | €15 | 100k | 20 | 75¢ |
| Portal | €49 | 750k | 150 | 33¢ |
| Newsroom | €199 | 4M | 800 | 25¢ |
| Enterprise | Custom | 10M+ | 2,000+ | - |
- A yearly plan always costs the same as ten months. The characters still come as a monthly allowance.
- Start covers 1 site and is priced for one small site, not for volume: 15 cents per thousand characters.
- Portal and Newsroom cover up to 3 and up to 10 sites, at about 6.5 and 5 cents per thousand characters.
- Enterprise is priced for your volume, with 10 million characters or more and no limit on sites.
Three sites, three different answers:
Not sure which plan fits?
Move one slider: articles a month and number of sites.
03What counts as a change
This is the part most price lists leave out. Articles change after they are published: a typo, a corrected figure, an updated headline. At Readerr:
- Any change to the article text makes a new recording and uses characters again, a single typo included. The whole article is read again, so a 5,000-character article corrected twice uses 15,000 characters in total.
- Changing the headline counts too.
- Changing the voice for an article makes a new recording.
- Tags, categories and the featured image don't. The text the voice reads stays the same, so nothing is recorded again.
The habit that costs most: publishing first and editing a few minutes later. If your desk works that way, count each article at least twice.
Back to the three regional sites. If about 1 article in 10 gets a correction after publishing, that is 13 more recordings, and the month uses about 725,000 of Portal's 750,000 characters. One busy week would take it over.
Scheduled posts. The WordPress plugin can make audio for scheduled posts before they go live, so an editor can listen first, and it is off by default. When it is on, every change to a scheduled post's text, headline or voice is a new recording, but several saves made while the post is still waiting in the queue count as one.
04The end of the month and running out
Readerr's allowance works in monthly periods. Unused plan characters don't carry over to the next period.
- When the characters run out, articles published from then on go out without audio.
- After the next period starts, or after a top-up, new articles get audio again.
- An article that went out without audio gets it once it is saved again.
Top-ups come in three sizes and stay valid for 30 days from purchase, and what you have not used carries into the next period:
Per thousand characters, top-ups cost 30, 24 and 20 cents. That is more than on Start, and several times the price of characters on Portal or Newsroom. For example, Start with a 100,000-character top-up costs €15 for the plan and €20 for the top-up, for 200,000 characters, while Portal costs €49 for 750,000.
If you buy a top-up every month, check what a bigger plan gives you for the difference.
05Free players: who pays
Some text-to-speech players cost nothing to install. It is worth asking how they are paid for. The common answers:
- Ads played in the audio. Your readers pay with their attention, and you don't choose what they hear next to your journalism.
- A voice built into the reader's device instead of a recording. It sounds different on every phone, and you can't listen in advance to what your readers will hear.
- A small monthly limit before a paid plan starts.
None of these is wrong in itself. Readerr has no ads in the audio: you pay for the plan, and your readers hear only your article.
06Try the maths on real articles
The trial gives you 7 days and 25,000 characters, about 5 articles, with no card needed. Use it to check your own numbers:
- Add audio to a few typical articles.
- Correct one of them after it is published.
- Watch how the characters used in the period change.
If you don't buy a plan after the trial, the player disappears from your articles. When you know your numbers, pick a plan on the pricing page, or start the free trial.