What happened to PlayHT
In July 2025, Meta acquired PlayHT in an acqui-hire deal. The entire team moved to Meta Superintelligence Labs. The API went dark on July 26, weeks before the announced December shutdown. By December 31, the platform was fully offline.
If you were a paying user, the shutdown hit hard. Reports surfaced of $950+ auto-renewal charges during the shutdown period. AppSumo lifetime deal holders lost $1,000+ when their deals were voided. PlayHT kept accepting payments even after the acquisition announcement, with zero customer support after Meta took over.
The short version: PlayHT is gone for good, so you need a TTS provider that is still shipping. The strongest fit for most former PlayHT users is AltSpeak (200+ voices, 100+ languages, up to 50,000 characters per generation, free 10,000 credits with no card). ElevenLabs wins if voice cloning was your reason for being there. Murf fits if you mostly narrated video.
PlayHT was a real tool. 829 voices across 142 languages, voice cloning, a full API. Losing all of that mid-project hurts. So here is what actually replaces it, ranked by what you were using PlayHT for.
What to look for in a replacement
Before jumping to alternatives, think about what you actually used PlayHT for. The API? Voice cloning? Language coverage? The answer changes which tool fits.
None of these are perfect PlayHT clones. All of them are still operating.
AltSpeak
We built AltSpeak because we were tired of overpaying for a text box and a generate button. 200+ voices, 100+ languages, up to 50,000 characters per generation, and a paid plan that starts at $5 per month. You can start free with 10,000 credits and no card, where 1 credit equals 1 character.
Voice quality holds up. Free MP3 exports run at 22kHz; paid plans push that to 44.1kHz and 48kHz, with WAV on Starter and up and FLAC lossless on Pro. Across 100+ languages it speaks with native pronunciation, not translated-sounding speech. If PlayHT was your workhorse for multilingual content, this is the closest match on language coverage and export quality.
Pricing is flat and readable: Starter $5/mo for 35,000 credits, Creator $11/mo for 100,000, Pro $63/mo for 700,000. Annual billing saves up to 33%, two months free. No voice-locked tiers, and every paid plan includes commercial rights.
ElevenLabs
ElevenLabs is the category leader. Its Creator tier runs $22/mo and plans scale up from there, covering 74 languages, and its voice cloning is the best you can buy commercially.
The quality is real. Their proprietary model produces output that is hard to tell from human speech. If voice cloning was your main PlayHT use case, ElevenLabs is the direct upgrade.
The honest downside: it gets expensive fast at high volume, and credits still burn on failed generations. They also retired dozens of voices in February 2026 with little warning.
Murf.ai
Murf is built around video production. Its Creator plan is $29/mo, or $19/mo on annual billing, scaling to $66/mo on the top tier. The draw is a built-in video editor that syncs voiceovers to a timeline so you never leave the tool.
If you used PlayHT mainly for video narration, Murf is worth a look. If you just want an API or raw audio export, it is more tool than you need.
The bigger lesson
PlayHT was a VC-backed startup that sold to a bigger player. Acqui-hires often mean the product dies and users get left mid-project with no migration path.
When you build on a TTS API, think about what happens if that provider disappears. Whatever you pick, make sure you can export your audio and are not locked into a proprietary format. You can try AltSpeak free and keep everything you generate.
Yes. Meta acquired the Play.ht (PlayAI) team in July 2025, the API went dark on July 26, 2025, and the consumer service went offline on December 31, 2025. Accounts, stored audio, and API endpoints were deleted at shutdown, so there is nothing left to log into in 2026. You are picking a replacement, not waiting it out.
It depends on the one job Play.ht did for you. For a cheap raw API, Google Cloud TTS and Amazon Polly start near $4 per 1 million characters on standard voices. For voice cloning, ElevenLabs leads. For video narration on a timeline, Murf. For low-cost multilingual studio voices in a browser, AltSpeak runs $5 to $63 per month with commercial rights on every paid plan.
Google Cloud Text-to-Speech and Amazon Polly are the cheapest credible options, with standard voices near $4 per 1 million characters and free tiers to start. The catch: they are raw APIs with no editor or browser studio, so they fit developers who write code, not creators who want to type a script and hear it. Our cheapest text-to-speech API guide breaks down the per-million math.
AltSpeak runs Inworld TTS-2 hero voices, including Lauren, Graham, Hades, Ashley, and Carter, plus Google Chirp3-HD for breadth, which adds up to 200+ voices across 100+ languages. You get up to 50,000 characters per generation, exports in MP3, WAV, FLAC, and telephony formats, and commercial-use rights on every paid plan. Where Play.ht left you mid-project, AltSpeak is a browser studio you can keep working in.
AltSpeak Creator is $11 per month for 100,000 credits, about half ElevenLabs' Creator at $22 per month (the $11 you may see advertised is a first-month promo, not the standing price). AltSpeak Starter is $5 for 35,000 credits, Pro is $63 for 700,000. Annual billing saves up to 33% with two months free, and every paid plan includes commercial rights.
No. Play.ht deleted accounts and stored audio when it shut down, so there is no live export to pull from. The practical move is to re-export the source scripts you still have and rebuild them in a new tool. Our Play.ht migration guide walks through that process step by step, then this post helps you pick where to rebuild.