CastReader
Verified Oct 15, 2026 ActiveReads webpages, PDFs, Kindle books and chatbot replies aloud with synced highlighting, and explains hard passages as it reads.
Listed on EffectHub ·
Pricing
- Pricing model
- Freemium
- Paid options from
- $3/mo
- Billing
- Monthly
Free needs no account and gives 20 minutes of listening and 3 AI explains a day with standard voices. Pro is $4.99/month or $35.99/year (shown as about $3/month billed yearly), with a 3-day free trial, no daily cap, premium voices and 120 minutes a month of your own cloned voice. The Voice API is billed separately at $8 per million characters.
Use tool ↗About CastReader
CastReader is a text-to-speech reader that works where many do not: besides webpages and uploaded PDF, Word and TXT files it reads Kindle Cloud Reader, WeChat Read, O'Reilly, Google Docs, Gmail, Notion and single ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini answers, highlighting each word as it speaks. Read and Explain talks you through a difficult passage, including across languages, and marks the source text on the page. It covers 28 languages, offers private voice cloning, and runs as a Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari extension plus iPhone, iPad and Android apps. A separate developer-preview Voice API sells cloned-voice speech by the character. It is run by Enid Ltd.
- Platforms
- Chrome extension · macOS · iOS · Android · API
- API
- Yes
- Last verified
- Oct 15, 2026
Verified sources
- Free $0 with 20 minutes/day and 3 explains/day; Pro $4.99/month; Pro Yearly $35.99/year, about $3.00/month billed yearly; 3-day free trial via Stripe (15 October 2026)castreader.com ↗
- Homepage lists 28 languages, Kindle/WeRead/O'Reilly reading, Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari for Mac, iPhone/iPad/Android apps, and a developer-preview Voice API at $8 per 1M characters (15 October 2026)castreader.com ↗
- Terms of Service v1.2, effective August 26, 2026, name the service provider as Enid Ltd (15 October 2026)castreader.com ↗
Is CastReader legit?
We don’t label tools safe or unsafe. Below are the records we checked ourselves, each with the date we read it.
- Domain registered
- Oct 22, 2025 (1 year ago)Registry record (RDAP), registrar Name.com, Inc., looked up Sep 11, 2026
- TLS certificate
- Issued by Let's Encrypt, valid until Nov 23, 2026Seen in our own connection to the site on Oct 15, 2026
- Last checked
- Oct 15, 2026The site answered
- Operated by
- Enid LtdOur research, card verified Oct 15, 2026
Pros & cons of CastReader
Kindle Cloud Reader support is the detail that matters - most read-aloud extensions cannot touch it, and that is precisely where people have a backlog they never get through. At $35.99 a year it undercuts the established readers, the account-free tier is generous enough for occasional use, and Read and Explain makes it useful for foreign-language and technical reading too.
Pros
- Works on Kindle Cloud Reader, WeChat Read, Google Docs, Gmail and Notion
- Free tier with 20 minutes a day and no account required
- Read and Explain marks what the AI is discussing on the page
- Extensions for Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari plus phone and tablet apps
Cons
- Operator Enid Ltd gives no registered address or country in its terms
- Free tier caps speed at 1.25x and limits long ebooks and PDFs
- Voice API is still a developer preview
Best for
- Readers with a Kindle backlog who want it read aloud in the browser or on a phone
- Students and language learners working through dense or foreign-language texts
- Heavy listeners who find Speechify too expensive
Not for
- Developers who need a mature, production TTS API with SLAs
- Users who need a company with a published registered address
Watch out: The roughly $3 headline is the yearly plan paid up front ($35.99); month-to-month Pro is $4.99.
Alternatives to CastReader
CastReader head-to-head
Side-by-side fact sheets against the competitors our research or their makers name — pricing, platforms, API and both verdicts on one page.
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