🤖 AI Products · $11.58/mo

Can I vibe code Speechify?

Listen to anything — articles, PDFs, books — in natural voices.

🔴Not reallyest. a weekend

The pieces look buildable — extract text, call a TTS API, play audio — and a basic read-my-articles tool genuinely is a weekend project. What earns the no is everything that makes listening daily-driver viable: premium voice licensing at sustainable cost (TTS API pricing ruins the math fast at book length), cross-device position sync, offline mobile playback, and OCR on photographed pages. Build the article version for fun; the subscription survives on unit economics you can't match retail.

The one-shot prompt
Build a personal text-to-speech reader for articles. Save a URL (bookmarklet) or paste text; extract the readable content server-side; chunk it and synthesize with a TTS API into a single audio file cached in object storage (never re-synthesize the same article). Player page: audio controls with 1x–3x speed, paragraph-level highlighting synced to playback position, and resume-where-I-left. Library page with duration and listened-progress per article, plus a monthly cost counter showing TTS spend. Next.js + Postgres, honest about per-article cost in the UI.
Paste into Claude Code, Codex, or your agent of choice — then steer. Learn the moves in Prompt Engineering.
What you build

A read-later-with-ears tool: save articles, get them as TTS audio with synced text highlighting, playable at 1x–3x in the browser.

What you give up
  • Book-length listening at flat-rate cost — API TTS pricing bites
  • Mobile apps with offline audio and lock-screen controls
  • Their highest-end voices and celebrity options
  • OCR pipeline for scanned pages and photos
Why people still pay

Flat-rate unlimited listening in polished mobile apps is a pricing structure, not a feature — retail API costs can't reproduce it.

unit economicsmobile polishvoice licensing
Related
Actually build it

A prompt is the first move, not the whole game. Course 01 teaches you to take a prompt like this one to a shipped, working app — reviewing, correcting, and steering the agent the whole way.

Start Course 01 →