How much does video dubbing actually cost?
Dubbing is quoted per finished minute, which sounds simple until you get three quotes that differ by two orders of magnitude for the same video. The spread is real and it is explainable: you are not buying the same thing each time. Here is what actually sits inside the price.
Everything is priced per finished minute
The unit across the whole industry is the minute of final output, not the hour of work and not the word count. A ten-minute video is ten units, whether it took the studio two hours or two days.
That matters for you in one specific way: talking fast does not save money, and dead air costs you. Trimming pauses and false starts before you send a file is the one free lever on the invoice.
The three tiers, and what separates them
Quotes cluster into three bands, and the gap between them is not mostly margin — it is genuinely different work.
- Professional studio dubbing. A casting process, a voice actor in a booth, a director, a sound engineer and a mix. This is what film and broadcast buy. It is priced in the tens of euros per finished minute and up, and the price climbs with the number of voices and the demands of the sync.
- Freelance voice-over. One voice actor recording from a home studio, usually without a director and with a light mix. Substantially cheaper than a studio, and the quality depends almost entirely on which freelancer you find. Turnaround is measured in days.
- Automated AI dubbing. Transcription, translation and synthesis run as a pipeline, with no human in the loop unless you put one there. Priced in cents to a few euros per finished minute, delivered in minutes.
The two-orders-of-magnitude gap between the top and bottom band is the entire reason independent creators can localise at all now. Ten years ago the only options were the top two, and both priced a regular publishing schedule out of reach.
What makes a quote go up
Within any tier, the same factors move the number. Knowing them lets you read a quote instead of just accepting it.
- Number of distinct speakers. Each voice is a separate casting decision in the human tiers, and a separate voice model in the automated one.
- Lip-sync requirements. Matching mouth movement is the single most expensive constraint in dubbing, because it forces the translation to be rewritten until it fits. Content where the speaker is off-screen or not in close-up avoids it entirely.
- Source audio quality. Background music, reverb and distant microphones mean transcription has to be corrected by hand, which is billable time in every tier.
- Turnaround. Rush work carries a premium everywhere except the automated tier, where the turnaround is already minutes.
- Language pair. Rarer target languages cost more in the human tiers simply because fewer people can do the work.
Working out your own number
Before asking anyone for a quote, do this arithmetic. It takes a minute and it tells you which tier you are actually shopping in.
- Add up the finished minutes you would want dubbed in a month — not your back catalogue, just what you would realistically localise going forward.
- Multiply by the number of target languages. This is the step people forget, and it is where budgets explode: three languages triples everything.
- Compare that monthly total against each tier. A creator publishing two 20-minute videos a month into two languages is looking at 80 finished minutes monthly — which is a rounding error at automated prices and a serious monthly invoice at studio prices.
What Voxia costs, concretely
For comparison against the numbers above, here are the actual figures rather than a vague "affordable". Voxia is sold as a monthly quota of processing minutes, billed through Google Play, with no commitment:
- Free — 15 minutes per month, no card required.
- Starter — 5.99 EUR per month for 150 minutes.
- Creator — 14.99 EUR per month for 500 minutes, plus 20 minutes of the higher-quality Voxia Pro voice tier.
- Studio — 35.99 EUR per month for 3000 minutes, plus 45 minutes of Voxia Pro.
Run the per-minute arithmetic on the Creator tier and you land around three cents per finished minute. That is the number to hold against "tens of euros per minute" when you are deciding whether localising is worth trying at all.
When paying more is the right call
Cheap is not automatically correct. Human dubbing is worth its price when the stakes are asymmetric: a brand campaign, a film, anything where a mispronounced name or a flattened joke costs more than the entire dubbing budget.
It is also the right call for content built on performance — drama, comedy timing, singing — where what you are paying for is interpretation, not translation. Automated dubbing does not interpret, and no price point changes that.
For everything else — tutorials, talking heads, podcasts, interviews, product explainers — the automated tier does the job at a cost that lets you localise everything you publish rather than agonising over which single video deserves it.
FAQ
Why do dubbing quotes vary so much for the same video?
Because they are quotes for different work. A studio quote includes casting, a directed recording session and a professional mix; an automated quote includes none of those. The price gap reflects a real difference in what you receive, not just margin.
Is dubbing priced per word or per minute?
Per finished minute, almost universally. Translation on its own is often priced per word, but dubbing is priced on the duration of the delivered audio, because that is what drives studio time.
What is the cheapest way to dub a video?
An automated pipeline, which lands in the cents-to-a-few-euros per minute range. The cheapest approach of all is to trim silence and false starts from your source first, since you pay for every minute of output including the dead ones.
Does dubbing cost more for rarer languages?
In the human tiers, yes — fewer available voice actors means higher rates. Automated dubbing is generally priced the same across its supported languages, since the cost driver is processing time rather than talent availability.
Do I need to pay extra for subtitles?
You should not have to. Transcription and translation already happen as part of producing a dub, so subtitle files are a by-product. Voxia returns both subtitle files with every dub at no extra cost.