A free ElevenReader alternative for iPhone, with no hour limit

ElevenReader is ElevenLabs' reader app, listed on the App Store as ElevenReader: Read Books Aloud. It wraps a very large hosted voice library around a reading app and an audiobook store: 1,000+ voices in 30+ languages, thousands of free public-domain audiobooks, premium titles sold individually, and sync between the web and mobile clients.

Sandbook is a single iPhone and iPad app with the speech engine inside it. It bundles Kokoro-82M — an open-weight neural TTS model, in a download of about 276 MB with all 41 voices included — and runs every sentence on the device's GPU through Apple MLX at 24 kHz. 41 voices in six languages, no account, no purchase, no server doing the speaking.

If you read in several languages, or you want a catalogue to browse rather than files to bring, ElevenReader is the better product and this page will not argue otherwise. If the hour counter is what sent you looking, read on.

Most readers meter characters. ElevenReader meters time, and it is worth understanding why that is a different kind of limit. The free plan gives ten hours of text-to-audio a month — the vendor reckons that is about a 400-page book — and because the unit is listening time rather than text, reading at 2× does not stretch the allowance, it halves it. Ultra lifts the monthly cap on your own imports, and still meters premium titles at twenty hours a month and offline downloads at twenty hours a day and 150 hours a month under fair use. How the other free iPhone readers count is compared in where free iPhone text to speech stops.

Priced products, each at the counter it was read from on 14 September 2026:

• Ultra — $11/month (vendor website)
• Ultra — $99/year (vendor website) — Shown on the page as "$8.25/mo billed annually", badged "Save $33/year".
• Ultra Monthly — $11/month (US iOS App Store)
• Ultra Annual — $99/year (US iOS App Store)
• Plus Monthly — $10/month (US iOS App Store) — A Plus tier appears in the in-app-purchase list but not on the vendor's pricing page, which shows only Free and Ultra.
• Plus Annual — $96/year (US iOS App Store) — Not shown on the vendor's pricing page.
• 10 Hour Pack — $5 one-off (US iOS App Store) — Top-up packs — further evidence the unit of account is listening hours.
• 20 Hour Pack — $10 one-off (US iOS App Store)
• Book — $2.99 one-off (US iOS App Store) — Individual audiobook purchases; a second product, Book Purchase, is listed at $25.00.

Sandbook's equivalent list is one line long, and it is not a promotion: free, with no in-app purchase and no cap of any kind. That is a consequence of the architecture rather than a pricing decision — when the model runs on your own phone, there is nothing for anyone to count and nobody to bill.

Both apps use the word, and they do not mean the same thing. ElevenReader's offline mode is a download: you prepare audio in advance while you have a connection, on a paid plan, and those files are removed when you sign out of the app. Speech itself is generated on ElevenLabs' servers. It is a good feature — it is simply a different one.

Sandbook carries the model, the 41 voice embeddings and the phonemizer in the app bundle, so it can speak text it has never seen before with no connection at all. Paste a chapter on a plane and it reads it. Offline text to speech here means synthesis, not playback of something prepared earlier.

Said plainly, because you will find out anyway:

• Voices and languages. 1,000+ voices across 30+ languages against Sandbook's 41 voices in six languages. ElevenLabs builds speech synthesis for a living, and a library that size is not something an 82-million-parameter model running inside a phone is going to match. If you read in more than one language, this is not a close call.
• A catalogue. Thousands of free public-domain audiobooks and premium titles sold individually. Sandbook has no store and no catalogue at all — you bring your own files.
• Sync, and other devices. ElevenReader syncs between web and mobile and ships Android and web clients. Sandbook is for iPhone and iPad, and your books and reading positions stay on the one device.
• Faster playback, a sleep timer, bookmarks. Its free tier lists 4.0× speed, a sleep timer and bookmarks. Sandbook tops out at 2.5× and has neither of the other two.

One more gap belongs here even though we cannot source the other half of it. Sandbook's real-time reading pauses when the screen locks, because the speech model holds real GPU memory while it runs; only a chapter prepared ahead of time plays locked. That is its biggest single limitation against almost any reading app. No ElevenReader page we checked on 14 September 2026 states whether it plays with the screen off, so if listening with the phone in a pocket is what decides it for you, confirm it on the other side before you cancel anything.

It costs nothing, permanently, with every voice included from the first launch and no hour, character or minute count anywhere. It asks for no account, so there is nothing to sign out of and nothing to lose when you do. It shows no ads and does not track you, and your books never leave the device.

And it is built around a book rather than around a queue of audio. Sandbook rejoins the invisible line breaks a PDF layout leaves in the text and stitches hyphenated words back together before speaking, so a two-column paper reads as prose instead of line by line. EPUB books get word-by-word highlighting, tap-a-paragraph-to-read, auto-advance between chapters, per-book voice and speed, and they open where you stopped. Printed pages can be scanned with the camera too.

And you do not need an account to judge the voices: Sandbook's voices run in your browser too, so you can hear them before installing.