Fish Audio Freemium

Fish Audio is a text-to-speech and voice cloning service that lets you generate speech in seconds, clone a voice from a short sample, and browse a marketplace of over 100,000 community-shared voices.

What is Fish Audio?

Fish Audio is the product arm of the Fish Speech open-source project. That matters: the underlying models are public, so you can self-host if you want, while the hosted site adds a marketplace, an API and a simple web UI. It competes with ElevenLabs on price more than on polish.

Fish Audio features that matter

• Fast TTS: generates speech from text with low latency for its size.
• Zero-shot cloning: clone a voice from roughly ten seconds of audio.
• Voice marketplace: browse and use tens of thousands of uploaded voices.
• Open models: Fish Speech weights are public for self-hosting.
• API and SDK: REST endpoint plus Python and JS clients.

Product highlights

Where it wins is cost and openness. You can prototype for free, then either pay low per-character rates or run the model yourself and pay only for a GPU. The marketplace is a shortcut when you don’t need a bespoke voice.

Quality on the harder material — emotional delivery, long narration, tricky names — is still behind the best paid services, and cloning voices you don’t own rights to is your legal problem, not theirs.

Who should use Fish Audio

Good for indie game devs, YouTubers on a budget and developers who want an API they can self-host. If you need broadcast-grade emotion, expect to pay more and look at premium alternatives.

Common use cases

• Narrating YouTube videos and shorts cheaply.
• Dub indie games with many character voices.
• Prototype an audiobook before committing.
• Build a voice-enabled app with the API.
• Self-host TTS to keep audio on-premises.

Pricing and limits

There is a free tier with monthly credit, then credit packs and pay-as-you-go that undercut the big names on per-character cost. Self-hosting removes character bills entirely but needs a decent GPU.

Quick Summary

• Fish Audio does text-to-speech and voice cloning with open-source models.
• Zero-shot cloning from about ten seconds of audio.
• Free tier plus cheap credits; self-hosting is possible.
• Quality lags top-tier services on emotional delivery.
• Best for budget-conscious creators and developers.