A Genuinely Free Audiobook Maker (No Trial, No Per-Book Fees)

Most ”free audiobook makers” are trials: a few thousand characters, then a subscription. This one is free the way open source is free — you run the pipeline on your own free-tier accounts, and there's simply nobody to bill you.

Why it can be actually free

Audiobook-maker apps pay for TTS compute on your behalf, so they must charge you. This project inverts the model: the pipeline is AGPL open source and runs on your accounts — Cloudflare R2's free 10GB for storage, free-for-personal-use neural voices for synthesis, optional pennies of LLM for summaries. There is no company in the loop with a burn rate.

Making your first audiobook

  1. npm run setup once (two Cloudflare values in .env, one command, ~2 minutes).
  2. Upload an epub/PDF/txt from the player's settings page on your phone.
  3. Listen: the first ~10-minute episode is ready in minutes, the rest of the book generates behind you.

What makes the output good

Chapter-sized episodes with AI one-line summaries; an intro episode where two AI hosts discuss the book; automatic language detection and voice switching; whole-book translation if you want to listen in another language; resume positions everywhere via standard podcast RSS.

listenwhilerunning is open source (AGPL-3.0) and runs on your own free-tier accounts.

Get it on GitHub → Live demo Hosted version waitlist

FAQ

Is there a catch — watermarks, limits, upsells?

No. AGPL-3.0 source, your own storage and keys. The only genuinely optional cost is LLM usage for summaries (cents).

Do I need to know how to code?

You need to run three commands in a terminal once. After that, everything happens in the web player.

Can I use the audiobooks commercially?

The pipeline is AGPL and fine to use; the default free TTS voices are personal-use only — swap in a commercial TTS provider (interface provided) for commercial audio.