Far less than it used to, and almost certainly less than you have been quoted. An audio guide was once a capital project: scripting, a voice artist, studio time, handsets to buy and lend out, a developer to build an app. It is now a monthly subscription with nothing to install and nothing to hand over a desk.
A small attraction can have a fully narrated trail live this month, built in an afternoon, for less than the cost of a morning's agency time. The figures are below.
If you have started pricing this up, you will have found it strangely hard going. Most suppliers put their number behind a discovery call, and the ones who publish figures often leave the expensive part off the headline. So here is the whole picture, including ours.
Why it used to cost thousands, and why it does not now
The old cost sat in production and hardware. Somebody wrote the script. Somebody else read it in a studio. A developer wrapped it in an app, or you bought a rack of handsets and put a person on the desk to look after them. Every one of those was a real job with a real invoice, and every change meant doing some of them again.
What has changed is that the writing, the narration and the delivery now sit in one place, and the delivery device is already in your visitor's pocket. There is no app to build because the trail opens in a browser. There is no studio because narration is generated and reviewed. There are no handsets because there is nothing to lend.
What is left is a subscription and an afternoon of your time. That is the whole shift, and it is why a trail your predecessor priced at £40,000 and shelved is now something you can put live before the end of the month.
What suppliers charge in 2026
| Platform | Published price | Narration | Visitor needs |
|---|---|---|---|
| StorieD | £59, £99 or £199 a month. Two months free if paid annually | Included | Scan a QR code. No app |
| Pathoura | £0, £40, £199 or £399 a month, excluding VAT | Sold separately as credits, charged per hour of audio | Scan a QR code. No app |
| izi.TRAVEL | Free | You supply it | Download their app |
| SmartGuide | Not published. Quoted per visitor or per month | Varies by plan | Download their app |
| Nubart | Not published. Priced per printed card, with a minimum reorder in the thousands | Included in production | Scan a printed card |
Taken from each supplier's published pricing in August 2026. Where a supplier does not publish a figure we have said so rather than guess. We re-check this table each quarter, but confirm current rates before you commit to anything.
Two things are worth pulling out of that.
The first is that most of the market will not tell you the price without a conversation. That is a commercial choice rather than a technical necessity, and it is worth knowing that the figure can move depending on what the supplier thinks you can afford.
The second is that a headline price is not always the price. Where narration is sold as credits rather than included, a ten stop trail is a modest top-up and a two hundred stop museum guide is not. Ask every supplier the same plain question: does this figure include the audio itself, or do I buy that separately?
The costs nobody puts on the quote
Handsets are the clearest example. The devices are the line item. What follows is charging them each night, cleaning them between visitors, replacing the ones that leave in a coat pocket, and paying somebody to stand at a desk handing them out and taking them back. At a site running on two people and a rota, that last part quietly outgrows the purchase price inside a year and never goes away.
Then there is the cost of changing your mind. A stop closes, a room is reordered, a date turns out to be wrong. With studio-recorded audio that is a new session and an invoice. With a self-serve platform you edit it yourself in minutes.
And there is the cost of waiting. A trail that takes eighteen months to commission earns nothing for eighteen months. A Derbyshire town's heritage trail opened in 2026 after a five year project supported by a £1.26m Lottery grant. A fine trail, and five years of visitors who walked past without it.
Grant funding quietly favours the expensive answer, because a £700 solution is harder to write into a bid than a £70,000 one. Worth noticing before the funding shapes the project rather than the visitors.
What we would tell you to do
If your site is outdoors or route-shaped, meaning gardens, grounds, an estate, an abbey, a heritage railway or a town centre, and you want it working in English this season, build it with StorieD. You name your place and pick a theme, we surface the points of interest and draft the narration, and you edit every word before anything goes live. Ten stops, fully narrated, from £59 a month. No hardware, no app, no contract.
Free to build, pay to publish. You build the whole trail and walk it on your own phone before you spend anything, and your first month is free after that. If it is not right for your place you close the tab and owe us nothing.
One thing to know now rather than later: StorieD is English only at the moment. Other languages are on our list, and if that is what is stopping you, tell us, because that is how we decide what to build next.
We make one of the products in that table. Everything in it is checkable against each supplier's own pricing page, which is rather the point.
Two related questions come up almost every time. If the monthly figure is the sticking point, local businesses on the route will often cover it, and we have set out how trail sponsorship works and what to charge. If you are further along and wondering what the work actually involves, there is a step by step on how to make a self-guided audio trail. And if a visitor attraction is exactly what you run, here is how StorieD works for attractions.
Four questions that settle it
- Indoors or outdoors? Route-shaped outdoor sites suit QR and phone trails. A room-by-room object guide is a different product with different needs.
- How many languages, honestly? Ask this first, because it narrows the field faster than anything else.
- Is the narration in the price? Get the answer in writing.
- What happens if it does not work? A monthly subscription you can stop is a very different risk to thousands of printed cards or a five year grant project. At a small site, where the person driving this may have moved on within two years, that matters more than the monthly figure.
Walk one before you buy one
The fastest way to judge any of this is to stop reading about it and go and use one. Our Hereford trail is live, free, and takes ten seconds to start. No app, no download, just scan and go, which is exactly what your visitors would get.
Walk the Hereford trail, or have a look at Hammersmith if you want to see the same format in a city. Mark and I wrote and built both of them ourselves, which is where most of the practical detail on this page comes from.
Questions we get asked
Do visitors still need to download an app?
Not with a QR and browser trail. They scan and it opens. App-based platforms still need an install, and that is where most visitors quietly give up.
What is the cheapest option for an outdoor site?
A QR code linked to a browser trail. Nothing to buy, charge or replace. Your cost is the subscription plus the afternoon it takes to build.
How fast can one go live?
An afternoon on a self-serve platform if you already know your stops. Months for a produced guide. Years for a commissioned build.
What if we want to stop?
With StorieD your trail unpublishes and your build is kept, so if you come back next season you carry on rather than start again.
If you want a straight answer about whether this suits your site, email us at team@thesetupcrew.co.uk. Either way, your place is worth walking, and it costs a good deal less than it used to to say so.
About the author. Louise Stevenson runs marketing at StorieD, which she built with Mark Stevenson. They wrote, recorded and published the Hereford and Hammersmith trails themselves.