How much does an audio guide cost? A realistic price breakdown

The audio guide cost for a museum or heritage site ranges from nothing at all to well over €100,000. Where you land depends on three decisions: what visitors listen on (rented handsets, an app or their own phone through a QR code), who writes and voices the stops, and how many languages you offer.

This guide breaks the cost down line by line, explains why vendor quotes differ so much, and ends with a five-year view you can put in front of a board or a funder. If you have not yet decided on the format, read audio guide vs app alongside it.

The short answer

The rest of this article explains where those numbers come from.

Traditional audio guide costs, line by line

Most published figures come from companies that sell audio guides, so treat them as ranges, not quotes. They still help you see which lines matter.

Script and content

Writing is often the largest single line. According to Musa, an audio guide provider, professional scriptwriting costs between $500 and $1,500 per stop, which puts a 30-stop tour at roughly $15,000 to $45,000 before anything is recorded. The price rises with research, expert review and the number of rounds of edits.

You can lower this line by writing in-house from material you already have: catalogue entries, wall labels, guided tour notes. Our guide on how to write an audio guide script explains the method.

Voice recording

A professional voice actor and a studio session add another line, charged per finished minute or per session. Re-recording a single stop later usually means booking the studio again, which is why traditional guides are rarely updated.

Translation

Every extra language multiplies the content cost. According to Convo, another audio guide provider, professional translation and recording run from $5,000 to $18,000 per language for a typical tour. Four languages can cost more than the original.

Hardware

If visitors listen on handsets you lend, you buy, charge, clean and replace them. Musa puts an entry-level hardware system at $50,000 to $120,000. Pathoura, a visitor-phone platform, estimates around £80 per device, plus racks and spares for the ones that break or disappear.

Maintenance

Software licences, repairs and content updates continue every year. Pathoura estimates £1,100 to £1,600 a year in maintenance for a traditional setup, before staff time at the desk.

Platform pricing models

Platforms where visitors listen on their own phone usually charge in one of three ways.

1. Subscription. A monthly or yearly fee for the platform, sometimes with limits on stops, languages or visitors. Musa, for example, starts at £500 a month.
2. Usage. You pay for what you produce or what visitors consume: per stop, per language, per listen.
3. Revenue share. The platform sells the audio guide to visitors and keeps a percentage of each sale.

Revenue share looks cheap at the start because you pay nothing upfront, but on a busy site it can become the most expensive model of all. If you plan to charge visitors, read how to make money from your audio guide before you sign.

What Muvo costs

Muvo is a QR audio guide platform: you write or record each stop in the browser, visitors scan a QR code and listen on their phone with no app. Prices at the time of writing, excluding VAT, are on the pricing page, which is always the up-to-date reference.

Recording in your own voice and translating by hand cost nothing on any plan. AI voice and AI translation use credits: one credit is one paragraph voiced, or one paragraph translated into one language. Credit packs start at €34.90 for 500 credits. The Help Center explains how credits work.

A worked example

Take 20 stops of about 90 seconds each, three paragraphs per stop, in four languages, all voiced with AI:

• Voice in the original language: 20 × 3 = 60 credits
• Translation into three more languages: 20 × 3 × 3 = 180 credits
• Voice for those translations: 20 × 3 × 3 = 180 credits

That is 420 credits in total, which fits in one 500-credit pack. If you record the original language yourself, you save the first 60.

The hidden costs nobody quotes

The price list is only part of the story. These costs rarely appear in a proposal but show up in your accounts.

• Staff time at the desk. Lending handsets means checking them out, taking deposits, chasing returns and answering questions. With visitors' own phones, that time goes to almost zero.
• Charging and cleaning. Batteries die, earphones need replacing and every device needs cleaning between visitors.
• Updates. A typo, a new loan or a room that closes all need the audio to change. If every change needs a studio and a developer, the guide slowly goes out of date.
• Signage. QR signs, labels and printing are cheap, but someone has to design and place them. Our guide to QR codes in museums covers sizes and placement.
• Translation review. Even AI translation needs a native speaker to read it once before it goes live.
• Low take-up. An app nobody downloads costs the same as one everybody uses. According to Nubart, only 2.47% of visitors download museum audio guide apps, a figure worth weighing before you pay to build one.

A five-year view

A one-off price hides what you really spend. This table compares a medium-sized project (around 20 stops, three languages) over five years. The ranges come from the vendor figures above and from Muvo's own prices; your quotes will differ.

The pattern is consistent: hardware and apps load the cost at the start and make every change expensive, while a QR platform spreads a small cost over time and makes updates nearly free.

How to budget for your board or a funder

If you are writing a budget for a board or a grant application, present it as outcomes, not just items.

1. Start with the goal. More visitors who understand the collection, access in more languages, an accessible version for blind visitors.
2. List one-off and yearly costs separately. Funders want to know what the project costs to launch and what you will pay to keep it running.
3. Include staff time. Writing, review and placing signs take hours, even if no invoice arrives.
4. Show how you will measure it. Number of listens, completion rate, languages used.
5. Plan the second year. A guide that cannot be updated loses value every season.

Our guide to grants for museum digitisation and audio guides lists programmes in the UK, the EU and the US.

How to choose

• If you have high footfall, staff at the desk and a budget for devices, handsets still work.
• If you need features that only an app offers, such as offline maps across a large estate, build an app and plan how people will find it.
• If you want visitors to listen within seconds, in several languages, and to update the content yourself, choose a QR platform.

Many venues combine two: a QR guide for most visitors and a handful of handsets for people without a smartphone. Hardware audio guides vs QR guides explains how to run both.