Dubbing API Pricing Comparison: Pinch vs ElevenLabs vs Rask.ai (2026)
A transparent comparison of AI dubbing API pricing in 2026. Compare real API rates, lipsync costs, features, and limitations across Pinch, ElevenLabs, Rask.ai, and HeyGen for video and audio dubbing.
Why pricing matters for dubbing APIs
When you’re evaluating a dubbing API, the sticker price per minute is only part of the story. Subscription requirements, watermark policies, API access restrictions, and volume discounts all affect your real cost.
There’s also a trap that catches almost everyone comparing these tools: the price on the marketing pricing page is usually the subscription price, not the API price. For several providers these are wildly different numbers. HeyGen’s web app meters video translation in credits that work out to cents per minute; HeyGen’s API is a separate pay-as-you-go bill at $2.00–$4.00 per minute. ElevenLabs’ widely-quoted $0.50/min is their legacy v1 dubbing model; their current default dubbing engine is $2.20/min, and Dubbing Studio — the version with an actual editor — costs more still.
This guide compares API list prices, like for like, as of August 2026.
What you’re actually comparing
Before the numbers: “dubbing” means two very different products depending on who you ask.
- Audio-only dubbing — the speech is translated and re-voiced, the video is passed through untouched. The mouth still moves in the original language. Cheaper, and fine for podcasts, voiceover, screen recordings, or anything where the speaker isn’t on camera.
- Lipsynced video dubbing — the speaker’s mouth is regenerated to match the new audio. This is what you need for talking-head content, interviews, ads, and courses where a face is on screen.
Comparing an audio-only rate against a lipsynced rate is the single most common error in dubbing cost estimates, and it can be off by 4–8×. Here’s who does which:
| Provider | Audio dubbing | Lipsync | Editor / studio | API |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pinch | Yes | Yes — included in the base rate | Dubbing Studio | All users, no subscription |
| ElevenLabs | Yes | No — not offered in Dubbing | Dubbing Studio (legacy v1, maintenance mode) | Paid tiers |
| Rask.ai | Yes | Yes — bills as 1× standard / 3× enhanced | Web workflow tools | Creator Pro and up |
| HeyGen | Yes | Yes — Speed or Precision tier | Studio (avatar-first) | Separate pay-as-you-go account |
ElevenLabs is explicit about this in their own help center: lip sync is not part of Dubbing. They offer it elsewhere in the product via third-party models (Veed LipSync, OmniHuman, Sync), but not as part of the dubbing pipeline. So any ElevenLabs dubbing price you see is an audio-only price.
Pricing overview
API list prices, per minute of media, August 2026:
| Provider | Audio-only dub | Lipsynced dub | Subscription required? | Watermarks? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pinch | $0.50/min | $1.00/min | No | Never |
| ElevenLabs (Dubbing v2) | $2.20/min | Not available | Paid plan | Free tier only |
| ElevenLabs (Dubbing Studio) | ~$1.65–$1.82/min | Not available | Paid plan | Cheaper tier is watermarked |
| ElevenLabs (Dubbing v1, legacy) | $0.50/min | Not available | Paid plan | $0.33/min watermarked |
| Rask.ai | ~$0.78–$2.40/min | 1× standard, 3× enhanced | Yes ($60+/mo) | On free trial |
| HeyGen (API) | $2.00/min | $2.00/min Speed · $4.00/min Precision | No (separate PAYG) | No |
Pinch’s lipsynced rate is half the cheapest lipsync in this table and a quarter of the best one.
Lipsync: who actually does it, and what it costs
This is where the cost gap opens up, so it’s worth being precise.
HeyGen sells lipsync at two quality tiers, and prices the difference into their own rate card: Precision lipsync costs exactly 2× Speed lipsync ($0.0667/sec vs $0.0333/sec). That ratio is a fair signal of what you get. In our testing, Speed mode holds up on easy footage — a person facing the camera, well lit, speaking at a moderate pace. It degrades on hard footage: fast speech, heads turned in profile, a hand or microphone partially covering the mouth, beards, low light, or multiple speakers in frame. On those shots Speed mode tends to either produce visible mouth artifacts or leave the mouth essentially unsynced. HeyGen’s Precision lipsync is genuinely high quality and handles much more of this — but it lands at $4.00/min, 4× Pinch’s lipsynced rate.
Rask.ai meters lipsync by multiplying your minute consumption rather than charging a separate rate. Standard lipsync bills 1 minute of video as 1 minute. Enhanced lipsync bills 1 minute of video as 3 minutes (currently beta pricing, subject to change). So a Business-plan minute that costs $1.00 effectively becomes $3.00/min with enhanced lipsync on.
ElevenLabs doesn’t do it. Their dubbing output is the original video with new audio; the mouth movement is unchanged.
Pinch charges $1.00/min for a lipsynced dub against $0.50/min for audio only, with no quality tier to choose between and no minute multiplier. If the lipsync pass fails, the dub is still delivered and billed at the $0.50 rate. It’s a single lipsync: true flag on the dubbing request. Our lipsync is built for exactly the difficult conditions above — off-axis heads, occlusion, rapid speech, multi-speaker scenes — because those are the shots that make or break a real dub, and it fails loudly rather than silently: if lipsync can’t run on your input, the API rejects the job up front with a lipsync_unavailable error instead of quietly handing you an un-lipsynced file.
Pinch pricing
Pinch uses a straightforward pay-per-use model:
- $0.50 per minute of input media for an audio-only dub
- $1.00 per minute with lipsync — one rate, no quality tiers, no minute multipliers
- No monthly subscription — you buy credits and use them when you need them
- No watermarks on any output, regardless of spend amount
- $5 free credits on sign up (no credit card required) — enough to dub 10 minutes
- API access included for all users
- No per-language surcharge — same price whether you dub into Spanish, Japanese, or any other supported language
- Dubbing Studio for browser-based work — confirm speaker identification, review the transcript, and generate without writing code
Example costs:
- 5-minute YouTube video → 1 language: $2.50 audio only, $5.00 lipsynced
- 30-minute podcast episode → 1 language: $15.00 (podcasts don’t need lipsync)
- 30-minute podcast → 5 languages: $75.00
- 100 hours of course content → 1 language: $3,000 audio only, $6,000 lipsynced
There are no tiers, no feature gates, and no volume minimums.
ElevenLabs pricing
ElevenLabs runs several dubbing products at once, and they’re priced very differently. The number you’ll see quoted in most comparisons is the cheapest and oldest one.
API list prices per minute:
| Product | Price/min | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Dubbing v1, watermarked | $0.33 | Legacy model |
| Dubbing v1, no watermark | $0.50 | Legacy model — the widely-quoted figure |
| Dubbing v2 | $2.20 | Current default automatic dubbing |
Dubbing Studio — the interface with transcript editing, speaker reassignment, and per-clip regeneration — is metered in credits rather than a flat per-minute rate:
- With watermark: 5,000 credits/minute
- Without watermark: 10,000 credits/minute
At list credit rates that works out to roughly $1.65–$1.82 per minute without a watermark ($22/121,000 credits on Creator; $99/600,000 on Pro), and about $0.83–$0.91/min watermarked. Note that ElevenLabs currently describes Dubbing Studio as being in maintenance mode, running the legacy v1 model and receiving critical bug fixes only.
Subscription tiers (credits are a shared pool across TTS, voice cloning, and dubbing):
| Plan | Monthly | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 10,000 |
| Starter | $6 | 30,000 |
| Creator | $22 | 121,000 |
| Pro | $99 | 600,000 |
| Scale | $299 | 1,800,000 |
| Business | $990 | 6,000,000 |
Important considerations:
- Credits are shared across all ElevenLabs features — dubbing competes with your TTS usage
- Unused credits don’t roll over on most plans
- Free tier output is watermarked
- No lipsync — output is audio-only, so on-camera content will be visibly out of sync
For an audio quality comparison between ElevenLabs and Pinch, see our detailed comparison with samples.
Rask.ai pricing
Rask.ai is a video localization platform sold as annual or monthly seats, with minutes rather than per-call pricing:
| Plan | Monthly | Annual | Minutes | API access |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free trial | $0 | — | 3 min total | — |
| Creator | $60/mo | $33/mo | 300 min/year | Limited |
| Creator Pro | $150/mo | $78/mo | 1,200 min/year | Production API + webhooks |
| Business | $750/mo | $500/mo | 6,000 min/year | Custom batch pipelines |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom | Dedicated API |
Effective per-minute rates, if you use your full allotment:
- Creator: $2.40/min monthly, $1.32/min annual
- Creator Pro: $1.50/min monthly, $0.78/min annual
- Business: $1.50/min monthly, $1.00/min annual
- Additional minutes beyond your allotment on Business: $3.00/min
Rask’s annual Creator Pro rate is the most competitive headline number in this comparison — but three things qualify it. Minutes are prepaid for a year, so the effective rate only holds if you actually consume the whole allotment. A real API with webhooks starts at Creator Pro. And enhanced lipsync triples your minute consumption, which pushes that $0.78/min to $2.34/min for lipsynced work.
HeyGen pricing
HeyGen is an avatar and video generation platform, and its pricing is the most commonly misquoted in this category because there are two entirely separate billing systems.
The API is a standalone pay-as-you-go account. Your subscription credits do not work against it, and there’s a $5 minimum top-up. Rates are per second:
| Service | Per second | Per minute |
|---|---|---|
| Video Translation — Speed (audio only) | $0.0333 | $2.00 |
| Video Translation — Speed (lip sync) | $0.0333 | $2.00 |
| Video Translation — Precision (lip sync) | $0.0667 | $4.00 |
The web app meters the same features in subscription credits: 2 credits/min for audio dubbing, 5 credits/min for translation with lip sync. On Creator ($29/mo, 600 credits) that’s up to 120 minutes of lipsynced translation — a low effective rate, but capped, shared with avatar generation credits, and not reachable programmatically. If you’re building on an API, the API rate card is the one that applies to you.
The practical read: HeyGen’s Precision lipsync is high quality, and if you’re already using HeyGen for avatars the credit path is inexpensive at low volume. But for API-driven dubbing at scale, $2.00/min for lipsync that struggles on hard footage or $4.00/min for lipsync that doesn’t is a steep step up from $0.50/min all-in.
Cost comparison by use case
All figures below are API list prices with lipsync where the provider offers it, so the columns are comparable.
YouTube creator (10 videos/month, 8 min average, 3 languages = 240 billed min)
| Provider | Monthly cost | Lipsync? |
|---|---|---|
| Pinch | $240 | Yes, one rate |
| HeyGen API (Speed lipsync) | $480 | Yes, degrades on hard shots |
| HeyGen API (Precision lipsync) | $960 | Yes, high quality |
| ElevenLabs (Dubbing v2) | $528 | No |
| Rask.ai (Business, annual) | $500/mo | Standard only; enhanced pushes past the allotment to ~$1,160 |
E-learning platform (50 hours, 5 languages = 15,000 billed min, one-time)
| Provider | Total cost | Lipsync? |
|---|---|---|
| Pinch | $15,000 | Yes, one rate |
| HeyGen API (Speed lipsync) | $30,000 | Yes, degrades on hard shots |
| HeyGen API (Precision lipsync) | $60,000 | Yes, high quality |
| ElevenLabs (Dubbing v2) | $33,000 | No |
| Rask.ai (Business annual + overage) | ~$33,000 | Standard only |
At this volume every provider here, Pinch included, will negotiate. Treat these as list-price anchors for the conversation, not final quotes.
Developer building a multilingual product (sporadic, 30 min/month)
| Provider | Monthly cost |
|---|---|
| Pinch | $30 — pay-as-you-go, no subscription |
| HeyGen API (Speed lipsync) | $60 — pay-as-you-go, $5 min top-up |
| HeyGen API (Precision lipsync) | $120 |
| ElevenLabs (Dubbing v2) | $66 + a paid plan |
| Rask.ai | $150/mo (Creator Pro — the first tier with a real API) |
Beyond pricing: what to evaluate
Price is important, but it shouldn’t be the only factor:
- Lipsync under difficult conditions — Easy footage makes every lipsync model look good. Test the shots that are actually hard: someone turned away from camera, a hand or mic near the mouth, fast or overlapping speech, poor lighting, two people in frame. This is where providers diverge most, and where a cheap “speed” tier stops being a bargain.
- Translation quality — The cheapest option is worthless if the output sounds robotic. Always test with your actual content before committing.
- Voice preservation — How well does the original speaker’s voice carry through? This varies significantly across providers.
- API design — If you need programmatic access, evaluate the API documentation, error handling, and developer experience. A dub that silently degrades — returning an un-lipsynced file when lipsync was requested — is worse than one that errors.
- Background audio — Music and ambient sound handling differs. Some providers destroy background audio; others preserve it cleanly.
- Output format — Some providers only output audio tracks. Others return a complete video file with dubbed audio.
- Where the meter actually runs — Credits shared with unrelated features, minutes that expire, seat fees, and annual prepay all change your real cost per delivered minute.
Try before you commit
The best way to evaluate is to test with your own content — ideally your hardest content. Pinch offers $5 in free credits — enough for 10 minutes of audio-only dubbing or 5 minutes lipsynced, across any supported language. No credit card required.
- Try free in browser — Upload a file and hear the results
- Dubbing Studio — Review speakers and transcripts before generating
- API Quickstart — Start building in 5 minutes
- Full API Reference — Detailed endpoint documentation
Prices verified August 2026 against each provider’s published rate card: ElevenLabs API pricing, ElevenLabs pricing, HeyGen API pricing, HeyGen pricing, and Rask.ai pricing. Vendor pricing changes frequently — check the source before budgeting.
Try Pinch Dubbing free
Sign up and get $5 of free credits — enough for 10 minutes of dubbing. Upload a video in your browser, or integrate via our API.
No credit card required · $0.50/min · No watermarks