Last updated: 28 June 2026
Amazon Polly vs ElevenLabs: TTS Pricing Comparison
Amazon Polly is 98% cheaper starting at $0.004/1k chars. Here's the full breakdown of pricing, quality, latency, and language support.
Price Comparison
| Characters | Amazon Polly Standard | Amazon Polly Generative | ElevenLabs Starter | ElevenLabs Creator |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 | $0.04 | $0.30 | $2.00 | $1.82 |
| 100,000 | $0.40 | $3.00 | $20.00 | $18.20 |
| 1,000,000 | $4.00 | $30.00 | $200.00 | $182.00 |
Feature Comparison
Amazon Polly
Best for: High-volume, cost-sensitive applications already running on AWS.
Strengths
- ✓ Cheapest pay-as-you-go option
- ✓ AWS ecosystem integration
- ✓ Free tier (5M chars/mo for 12 months)
- ✓ SSML support
ElevenLabs
Best for: Content creators, audiobook producers, and applications where voice quality is the top priority.
Strengths
- ✓ Highest quality voices
- ✓ Professional voice cloning
- ✓ Emotional expressiveness
- ✓ Voice design from text prompts
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Amazon Polly or ElevenLabs cheaper for text-to-speech?
Amazon Polly is cheaper, starting at $0.004 per 1,000 characters with Amazon Polly Standard. That’s 98% less than ElevenLabs Creator at $0.182 per 1,000 characters.
How much does Amazon Polly TTS cost compared to ElevenLabs?
Amazon Polly pricing starts at $0.004 per 1k chars (Amazon Polly Standard), while ElevenLabs starts at $0.182 per 1k chars (ElevenLabs Creator). For 1 million characters, that’s $4.00 vs $182.00.
Which has better voice quality, Amazon Polly or ElevenLabs?
Based on TTS Arena benchmarks, ElevenLabs scores higher on voice quality. Amazon Polly’s best model scores 4.1/5 while ElevenLabs’s best scores 4.5/5.
Amazon Polly vs ElevenLabs: which is faster?
ElevenLabs has lower latency. Amazon Polly’s fastest model has 200ms time-to-first-audio, while ElevenLabs’s fastest is 180ms.