How Much Does It Cost to Dub a Video? AI vs a Studio (2026)

A dubbing studio gives you a quote, and an AI dubbing tool gives you credits, minutes, or tokens. This guide turns both into dollars per dubbed minute, as of October 2026, with a worked example of the same job on each.

Quick answer

• Human studio: about $50 to $200 per finished minute, per language, and 2 to 6 weeks per language.
• AI dubbing: from a few cents to about $5 per dubbed minute on paid plans.
• One-time desktop app: nothing per minute after the purchase.
• Example: a 10-minute video into 5 languages costs $2,500 to $10,000 at a studio, or about $5 to $300 with AI tools.

What counts as a "dubbed minute"

Every vendor, human or AI, charges per minute per target language. A 10-minute video into 5 languages is 50 dubbed minutes, not 10. Keep that multiplier in mind, because it is where most budgets go wrong.

What a dubbing studio charges per minute

Professional human dubbing costs roughly $50 to $200 per finished minute per language, all in, according to published price guides from localization vendors. Broadcast and film work with full lip-sync adaptation goes higher. Simple voice-over (a translated voice laid over the original, without matching lip movements) usually costs 30% to 50% less.

That price bundles several jobs. UK agency Voquent publishes these starting prices:

• Translation: $4 per minute, translating the dialogue to fit the original timing
• Adaptation: $2.50 per minute, rewriting lines to fit the actor's lip movements
• Recording: $6 per minute, casting and recording voice actors in a studio
• Mixing: $6 per minute, mixing the new voices into the soundtrack
• On-screen text: $15 per item, translating and replacing a title or lower-third

Those are floors for large bookings. Short jobs cost far more per minute: one Voquent customer reported a quote of about $1,000 for a single one-minute video with one voice.

Talent alone shows why. Non-union voice actors commonly charge $250 to $350 per hour of session time. Under SAG-AFTRA's dubbing agreement with Netflix, performers earn a little over $100 an hour with a 2-hour minimum, plus 21% for pension and health and a 50% rights payment on top.

Turnaround is the other cost. Studios typically quote 2 to 6 weeks per language for corporate video, and months for entertainment with lip sync.

What you get for it: real actors who perform the scene, a director who checks every line, a translator who adapts jokes and idioms, and a mix engineer. For a film, a series, or a brand campaign where performance is the product, that is worth paying for.

What AI dubbing costs per minute

AI dubbing costs from about 5 cents to under $5 per dubbed minute, once each plan is converted to a per-minute price. The table uses the cheapest monthly plan that includes the feature, as of October 2026, and assumes you use the whole allowance. One short video on a monthly plan still costs the full plan price.

Tool	Cheapest fitting plan	Per minute, no lip sync	Per minute, lip sync
Voice Creator Pro	Cloud Starter $5/mo; desktop one-time from $54.99	About 5 cents on Starter (estimate below); $0 on desktop	Optional step in the same job
HeyGen	Creator $29/mo (600 credits)	About $0.19 (4 credits/min)	About $0.29 (Speed, 6 credits/min) or $0.48 (Precision, 10 credits/min)
Rask AI	Creator Pro $99/mo (100 min)	About $0.99	About $1.98 (Standard) or $3.96 (Enhanced)
Maestra	Premium $79/mo billed annually (100 cloning min)	About $0.79 with cloning	About $2.80 (lip sync from Business, $2/min extra)
ElevenLabs	Starter $6/mo to Pro $99/mo	About $2.23 to $2.70 (13,500 credits/min)	Not offered
CAMB.AI	Premier $75/mo (16 min)	About $4.69	Not listed

All six keep each speaker's voice: Voice Creator Pro clones every speaker automatically, Rask does it into 32 languages, and Maestra from its Premium plan.

Notes on each AI dubbing price

• Voice Creator Pro meters Cloud dubbing in tokens based on processing time. In our own logs, dubs of videos longer than 3 minutes used about 2,300 tokens per minute of video on average (from under 1,000 to about 4,000, depending on the video).
• At that rate, Starter's 250,000 monthly tokens cover roughly 100 dubbed minutes, and Premium's 1,500,000 cover several hundred. Very short clips use more per minute because of fixed start-up work. The desktop app has no meter.
• HeyGen's credits are shared with its avatar and video tools, and its proofreading step for translations starts on the $49 Pro plan.
• Rask's lip sync is only on Creator Pro and up, and it charges extra minutes for it (1 extra per minute for Standard, 3 for Enhanced). Its pricing page also showed two sets of prices and a "prices are changing soon" banner in October 2026.
• ElevenLabs charges 13,500 credits per minute on its current automatic dubbing model, about 2 minutes on Starter and 44 on Pro. It returns audio, with no lip sync.

For a full comparison of features rather than price, see our roundup of the best AI dubbing software.

Cost to dub a 10-minute video into 5 languages

The same 50-minute job costs $2,500 to $10,000 at a studio and $5 to about $300 with AI tools. The example is a 10-minute talking-head video with two speakers, dubbed into Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and Japanese, at October 2026 prices with monthly billing.

• Human studio: 50 minutes at $50 to $200 per minute comes to $2,500 to $10,000, in 2 to 6 weeks.
• ElevenLabs: 675,000 credits is more than Pro's 600,000, so the Scale plan, $299 (no lip sync).
• Rask AI: 50 minutes without lip sync, 100 with Standard, 200 with Enhanced, so $99 on Creator Pro or $249 for Enhanced (Business).
• Maestra: 50 cloning minutes on Premium for $79, or $259 with lip sync on Business at $2/min extra (annual prices).
• HeyGen: 300 credits with Speed lip sync, inside Creator's 600, so $29.
• Voice Creator Pro Cloud: about 115,000 tokens (up to about 200,000 for harder audio), inside Starter's 250,000, so $5.
• Voice Creator Pro desktop: a one-time purchase with no meter, $54.99 once, then $0 for every later job.

The studio route costs tens to hundreds of times more than the AI routes for the same minutes. Among AI tools the spread is still wide, mostly because of how each one meters minutes and whether lip sync costs extra.

A one-off job is not the same as a habit. If you dub a video like this every week, multiply the monthly plans by four and compare them with a one-time desktop purchase.

The hidden costs of dubbing a video

The per-minute rate is only part of the bill. These are the costs people find out about later.

• Every language multiplies everything. Translation, voices, review, and fixes all repeat per language. Pick your first languages from data (where your viewers are, who asks for it) before you dub into ten.
• Native-speaker review. AI dubbing is a strong first draft. For anything customer-facing, budget for a native speaker to read the translation and listen through. A studio includes this; AI tools leave it to you.
• On-screen text. AI dubbing translates speech. Titles, slides, burned-in captions, and labels in screen recordings stay in the original language. A studio charges per item to replace them; with AI, you re-edit the source or accept them as they are.
• Music and effects. Studios need a clean music-and-effects track (the soundtrack without dialogue), and building one adds cost. AI tools separate the voice from the background automatically, and Voice Creator Pro keeps the original music and sound under the new dialogue. Our guide on dubbing a video without losing the background music explains how.
• Lip sync as a surcharge. Some tools double or quadruple minute use for lip sync, or gate it behind a higher plan. Only pay for it where faces are on camera.
• Minimums on short videos. Studios and translators have minimum fees, so a 1-minute video can cost as much as a 10-minute one. AI plans do not, but a monthly plan bought for one short video is the same kind of trap.
• Revisions. Re-recording a line in a studio means booking talent again. In AI tools, regenerating uses more credits or tokens, though only for the line you fix if the tool regenerates per segment.
• Voice rights. Cloning a speaker's voice for a dub needs their permission. That costs nothing for your own voice, but budget the conversation for guests and presenters. Is AI Dubbing Safe and Legal? covers it.

When a dubbing studio is still worth the cost

AI dubbing is the right default for most creator, education, and business video: tutorials, courses, product demos, interviews, podcasts, and social clips. There, clear speech and the speaker's own voice matter more than an acted performance. A studio earns its price when:

• Performance is the product: drama, animation, and comedy, where an actor's timing and emotion carry the scene.
• The release is high-stakes: a broadcast, a theatrical release, or a national ad campaign, where one awkward line costs more than the whole dub.
• You need a language AI tools do not cover well, or a regional dialect the voices do not handle.

A hybrid is common: AI dubbing for the bulk of a library, a studio for the few flagship pieces, and a native-speaker review on everything.

How to keep the cost of dubbing down

1. Start with one or two languages and measure views before adding more.
2. Pilot on one representative video to learn your real per-minute cost and how long review takes.
3. Fix the translation before generating, not after. In Voice Creator Pro's video dubbing, the transcript and translation are both editable, and the dub and subtitles follow your edits.
4. Regenerate single lines, not whole videos. Per-segment regeneration keeps fixes cheap.
5. Skip lip sync where nobody is on camera, such as screen recordings, slides, and voice-over b-roll.
6. Match the pricing model to your volume. A monthly plan suits occasional dubbing. If you dub every week, a one-time purchase like the Voice Creator Pro desktop app stops the meter entirely.

For the dubbing steps themselves, see How to Dub a Video Into Another Language. Dubbing a course or a podcast? We have guides for online courses and podcasts and interviews.