AI Podcast Dubbing in 2026: What Works, What Costs What

Podcasts are harder to dub than video, which is not the order most people expect.

Video usually has one person talking at the camera. A podcast is two or three people interrupting each other, laughing over each other, going off on tangents for nine minutes. Every dubbing tool demos on the first thing.

Multiple speakers

If your show is solo, skip to the pricing.

If it is interviews, speaker separation is the whole game. The tool has to work out who is talking, keep them distinct, and not swap their voices halfway through episode 40. When it fails it fails unlistenably: two people in a conversation suddenly sounding like the same person.

Take your most talked-over episode and run five minutes of it through anything you are considering. Not a clean solo intro.

Your voice, over and over

For a one-off video, an approximate voice is fine.

For a podcast it is not. Listeners come back weekly and they know what you sound like. Close but not right is worse across 50 episodes than across one video, and if the clone drifts between episodes your Spanish feed has a host whose voice keeps changing.

Ask about consistency across a batch, not quality on a single sample.

Money, for a weekly show

A weekly show at 45 minutes an episode is about 195 minutes a month, in one language.

ElevenLabs. Automatic dubbing without a watermark costs 3,000 credits a minute. Creator at $22 gives 121,000 credits, around 40 minutes. Nowhere near one episode a week. Pro at $99 for 600,000 credits gets you roughly 200 minutes, so one language for one weekly show with nothing spare. Around $0.50 a minute. Voice quality is excellent, which is why people put up with the credit maths.

Rask. Creator is $60/month for 25 to 50 minutes, so one episode. Creator Pro at $150 gives 100 to 300. Business is $750 for 500 to 2,000. Extra minutes are $3 each.

Minutes count per output language. Two languages on a 45 minute episode is 90 minutes gone. Three languages on a weekly show puts you in Business tier.

HeyGen. An avatar company first, with dubbing hanging off it. Creator is $29/month, Pro $49, Business $149 plus per seat, all on credits.

Two problems for a show. It is a subscription rather than pay as you go, and unused credits expire after one cycle. And videos cap at 30 minutes on Creator and Pro, shorter than most episodes, so you would be splitting every one to fit.

If you already pay them for avatars, use the dubbing. It is not a reason to start.

Pinch. $0.50 a minute, no subscription, no watermark, $5 credit to start. A 45 minute episode is $22.50 in one language. A weekly show is roughly $97 a month.

Nothing charged when you skip a month. Shows run in seasons, go on hiatus, drop to fortnightly over summer. Every subscription above bills the same in August as in October.

Ten target languages, fewer than the others. If yours is missing, tell us which one.

We keep the original voice, preserve the background audio, and handle multiple speakers.

We do lip-sync, at $1.00 a minute instead of $0.50, but an audio show has nothing to sync. It only matters if you publish a video version.

The part nobody costs in

Everything above prices the dubbing. The rest is where podcast localisation actually dies.

You upload each dubbed episode, set up a separate feed or add the audio track to your existing distribution, write show notes in that language, sort the artwork. Then again next week, forever, while also making the show.

Most people quit here, not at the dubbing step.

Which is why our podcast service exists. You point us at the feed, we work the back catalogue, keep pace with new episodes, and set up the channel in the new language on Spotify, Apple or YouTube. Someone here listens to each one before it goes live. Quoted per project, because a 300 episode archive and a fortnightly interview show are not the same job.

To run it yourself, the self-serve version is the same $0.50 a minute.

Short version

Voice quality matters most and you publish weekly without fail: ElevenLabs on Pro. Do the credit maths first.

Already paying for Rask or HeyGen for video: use what you have, but check Rask’s per-language multiplier and HeyGen’s 30 minute cap against your actual episodes.

Seasons, hiatuses, any gap in your schedule: no subscription. You will pay through every quiet month.

Multiple speakers, or music under the whole thing: us.

Big back catalogue and no time: hand it to somebody, us or a freelancer.

Before you commit

Pick your worst episode. The guest on a laptop mic, everyone talking at once, the ad read in the middle. Run five minutes through every tool on your shortlist.

They all sound identical on a clean solo intro. That is not the episode that will break them.

Prices checked August 2026 against each provider’s own pricing page. Verify before buying.