TTS Cost Calculator
Paste your text and compare text-to-speech pricing, quality, latency, and language support across leading AI voice providers.
🔒 We normalize pricing on a common basis so you can compare apples to apples.
Cost Comparison
| Provider ↕ | Pricing Model ↕ | Quality ↕ | Latency ↕ | Languages ↕ | Cost per 1K ↕ | Total Cost ↑ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Polly StandardFree tier | Pay-as-you-go | 200ms | 29 | $0.004 | $0.0000 | |
| Google StandardFree tier | Pay-as-you-go | 180ms | 75 | $0.004 | $0.0000 | |
| Azure Neural StandardFree tier | Pay-as-you-go | 150ms | 140 | $0.016 | $0.0000 | |
| OpenAI tts-1Free tier | Pay-as-you-go | 300ms | 50 | $0.015 | $0.0000 | |
| Deepgram AuraFree tier | Pay-as-you-go | 120ms | 30 | $0.030 | $0.0000 | |
| Google WaveNetFree tier | Pay-as-you-go | 220ms | 75 | $0.016 | $0.0000 | |
| Amazon Polly Generative | Pay-as-you-go | 250ms | 29 | $0.030 | $0.0000 | |
| OpenAI tts-1-hdFree tier | Pay-as-you-go | 350ms | 50 | $0.030 | $0.0000 | |
| OpenAI gpt-4o-mini-ttsFree tier | Pay-as-you-go | 250ms | 50 | $0.015 | $0.0000 | |
| Cartesia SonicFree tier | Pay-as-you-go | 65ms | 40 | $0.050 | $0.0000 | |
| ElevenLabs StarterFree tier | Subscription | 180ms | 32 | $0.200 | $0.0000 | |
| ElevenLabs Creator | Subscription | 180ms | 32 | $0.182 | $0.0000 |
Top 3 Cheapest Options
Direct links to official pricing pages
Compare More Than Price
Based on voice naturalness and output quality
Time to first audio in milliseconds
Total number of supported languages
Check which providers offer free tiers
The Definitive Guide to Text-to-Speech (TTS) API Pricing in 2026
Navigating the landscape of text-to-speech (TTS) API pricing is notoriously difficult for developers, product managers, and content creators. With the rapid advancement of generative AI voices, the market has exploded with options, but pricing models remain deliberately opaque.
Some providers, like Amazon Polly and Google Cloud, charge on a straightforward pay-as-you-go basis, billing you per million characters. Others, like ElevenLabs, have popularized the subscription quota model, where you pay a flat monthly fee for a set number of characters, creating a "use it or lose it" dynamic. Still others, like Cartesia and Deepgram, charge per character but compete heavily on latency and real-time generation speed.
This calculator was built to solve a single, frustrating problem: normalizing TTS costs across the entire industry. By pasting your specific text, audiobook chapter, or conversational AI prompt into the tool above, we instantly normalize all pricing tiers from the top providers into a single, comparative dollar amount. No math required, no hidden overage fees, just the raw cost to generate the audio you need.
Pay-As-You-Go vs. Subscription Models
The biggest divide in TTS pricing is between pay-as-you-go (consumption-based) and subscription models.
Pay-As-You-Go: Providers like OpenAI (tts-1 and tts-1-hd), Google Cloud (Standard, WaveNet, Neural2, Studio), Amazon Polly, Azure, Deepgram, and Cartesia all use this model. You are billed exactly for what you use, usually tracked down to the individual character. This is ideal for unpredictable workloads, bursty traffic, or applications where voice generation is a sporadic feature.
Subscriptions: ElevenLabs is the most notable provider using subscription tiers. Their plans start at $5/month for 30,000 characters and scale up to enterprise volumes. While subscriptions can offer a lower effective cost-per-character if you perfectly utilize your entire quota, they often result in wasted spend for low-volume users.
How Much Does a 10-Minute Video Cost?
To understand the real-world impact of these pricing disparities, consider the cost of generating voiceover for a standard 10-minute video.
At a standard speaking rate of 130 words per minute, a 10-minute narration contains roughly 1,300 words, translating to approximately 7,500 characters.
- The Cheapest: On legacy systems like Amazon Polly Standard or Google Cloud Standard, generating this audio costs about $0.03 (three cents).
- The Middle Ground: Using OpenAI's highly popular tts-1 model, the same text costs roughly $0.11.
- The Premium: Using Cartesia Sonic for ultra-low latency, it costs $0.38. Using ElevenLabs on a Creator plan, it burns 7.5% of your $22 monthly quota.
As you can see, the spread between the cheapest and most expensive option for the exact same text is over 50×.
Evaluating Quality and Latency
Cost is only one axis of evaluation. When selecting a TTS API, developers must balance pricing against voice quality (naturalness, expressiveness, emotion) and latency (time-to-first-audio).
Quality Benchmarks: In crowd-sourced blind A/B testing (such as the Artificial Analysis Speech Arena), ElevenLabs consistently holds the top position for conversational naturalness and voice cloning accuracy. Cartesia Sonic and Azure Neural also score exceptionally high. Legacy models like Google Standard offer the lowest cost but sound noticeably robotic compared to modern generative approaches.
Latency Constraints: For asynchronous tasks like generating audiobook chapters or podcast voiceovers, latency is irrelevant; quality and cost are the primary drivers. However, for real-time conversational AI agents, latency is the most critical metric. Cartesia Sonic was engineered specifically for this use case, boasting sub-100ms time-to-first-audio (TTFA). Deepgram Aura also competes heavily in the low-latency space.
Free Tiers and Credits: How to Start for Zero Cost
Before committing to a paid plan, almost every major provider offers a generous free tier for development and testing:
- Microsoft Azure: Offers an incredible 500,000 characters per month absolutely free on their Neural Standard voices, refreshing every month.
- Google Cloud: Provides 1,000,000 characters per month free on WaveNet and Neural2 voices, and up to 4,000,000 characters free on legacy Standard voices.
- Amazon Web Services (AWS): The Polly service includes 5,000,000 Standard characters or 1,000,000 Neural characters per month free, but only for your first 12 months.
- OpenAI: Provides $5 in free API credits for new accounts, usable across all TTS models.
- Deepgram: Provides $200 in free signup credits, which can be used across their speech-to-text and text-to-speech (Aura) APIs.
- Cartesia: Offers $5 in free credits for new accounts to test Sonic TTS.
- ElevenLabs: The free tier is limited to 10,000 characters per month (roughly 10 minutes of audio) and requires attribution.