Reviews · scored on rubric v1
Cleanvoice review: cleanup by the hour, scored 78/100
Cleanvoice charges the way a laundrette does — per load, roll-over included — and that pricing honesty is half the score. The other half is that it fixes more than noise: fillers, mouth sounds and dead air go out with the same wash.
What Cleanvoice is
Cleanvoice is an upload service aimed at podcasters and course-makers: hand it a recording and it returns one with the background noise reduced, the “ums” and long silences trimmed, and a transcript if you want one. It competes less with live tools like Krisp than with the hours you currently spend doing this by hand in an editor.
Reading the row
Silence (8/10). Solid noise reduction, and the bundling matters: filler-word and dead-air removal in the same pass is time saved that a pure denoiser cannot offer. We hold back points because rebuilt speech tools (see Adobe Enhance) can beat it on outright rescue jobs.
Toll (9/10). Cloud processing; your machine idles.
Wallet (8/10). 30 free minutes, no credit card to start. Then either pay-as-you-go: $11 / 5 h ($2.20/h), $20 / 10 h ($2.00/h), $45 / 30 h ($1.50/h); credits valid 2 years — or subscriptions: $11/mo for 10 h, $28/mo for 30 h, $90/mo for 100 h, where unused subscription credits roll over up to 3× the plan limit. Per-hour pricing that scales to zero in a quiet month is rarer than it should be.
Fit (5/10). Upload-only. Nothing for the call you are on; this is post-production, priced and honest about it.
What it costs, verified
| Free | 30 free minutes, no credit card |
|---|---|
| Pay as you go | pay-as-you-go: $11 / 5 h ($2.20/h), $20 / 10 h ($2.00/h), $45 / 30 h ($1.50/h); credits valid 2 years |
| Subscriptions | subscriptions: $11/mo for 10 h, $28/mo for 30 h, $90/mo for 100 h |
| Roll-over | unused subscription credits roll over up to 3× the plan limit |
| Delivery | upload-based file processor (not live/real-time) |
The ledger, in public
Every Standard Score is the same arithmetic: five dimensions, fixed weights, rounded half-up. The methodology page holds the rubric; this table holds this tool’s entry in it.
| Dimension | Score | Points | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Silence ×0.35 | 8/10 | 28.0 | noise, filler words and dead air handled in one pass |
| Toll ×0.20 | 9/10 | 18.0 | cloud processing; zero cost to your own hardware |
| Wallet ×0.20 | 8/10 | 16.0 | $0.90–$2.20 per hour, from the 100-hour subscription to the 5-hour pack, scales honestly with actual use |
| Fit ×0.15 | 5/10 | 7.5 | upload-only; nothing for live calls |
| Candor ×0.10 | 8/10 | 8.0 | per-hour pricing is unusually easy to reason about |
| Standard Score | 78/100 | weighted sum ×10, rounded half-up (rubric v1) |
Cleanvoice will not save your next call. It will quietly refund you the hour you spend repairing the last one.
- Silence earned 28.0 of 35.0
- Toll earned 18.0 of 20.0
- Wallet earned 16.0 of 20.0
- Fit earned 7.5 of 15.0
- Candor earned 8.0 of 10.0
- Forfeited 22.5 of 100
What the score refuses to hide
Printed costs, as always:
- No live mode at any price — for meetings it is the wrong shelf entirely.
- Automated filler-removal has taste: on conversational shows, over-trimming can sand off a host’s rhythm. Preview before you publish.
- At heavy monthly volumes the arithmetic flips — 100 hours a month costs $90, where a flat-rate editor subscription may win.
- Your audio is processed on their servers; check that against any confidentiality obligations you carry.
Who should actually use it
Best for the weekly podcaster or course-maker with real but bounded volume — the 10-hour, $11-a-month shape. If your problem is a single catastrophic file, try Adobe Enhance’s free tier first; if your problem is live calls, this page was never going to be your answer and our main standings are.
Questions we actually get
- Does Cleanvoice have a free plan?
- A free allowance rather than a plan: 30 minutes of processing, no card required, verified July 30, 2026. After that it is credits or a subscription.
- Cleanvoice or Adobe Podcast Enhance?
- Enhance for outright rescue of bad recordings, and it is free for an hour a day. Cleanvoice when you also want fillers, mouth sounds and silences handled, with pricing that tracks your actual volume.
- Is there anything live?
- No — Cleanvoice is post-production only. Krisp and NVIDIA Broadcast are the live half of our table.