Updated 5 September 2026
What a text to speech API really costs
Fourteen pricing tiers from five providers, all read from their own pricing pages today, all converted to the one unit that lets you compare them: dollars per 1,000,000 characters. Then a slider, so you can see the bill at your volume instead of theirs.
Quick facts
- Cheapest standard voices: Amazon Polly Standard and Google Cloud Standard, both $4 per 1M characters.
- Cheapest neural voices, metered: OpenAI tts-1 at $15, then Amazon Polly Neural and Google Neural2 at $16.
- Newest generative tiers: Polly Generative, OpenAI tts-1-hd and Google Chirp 3: HD all sit at $30.
- Most expensive per character: Google Studio at $160 and ElevenLabs Creator at an effective $181.82.
- Best free allowance: Google Cloud, 4,000,000 standard characters every month, with no 12-month cut-off.
- FreeTTS: free API key with no card at 10 req/min; PRO $19/mo for 1,000,000 characters ($19 per 1M); Creator $39/mo for 5,000,000 ($7.80 per 1M).
What a month of speech actually costs
Prices read from each provider's own pricing page on 5 September 2026| Provider | Tier | Per 1M characters | Cost at 250,000 | Billing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Cloud | Standard / WaveNet | $4.00 | $1.00 | Pay per character — First 4M characters a month free, ongoing |
| Amazon Polly | Standard | $4.00 | $1.00 | Pay per character — 5M characters a month free for the first 12 months |
| OpenAI | tts-1 | $15.00 | $3.75 | Pay per character |
| Amazon Polly | Neural | $16.00 | $4.00 | Pay per character — 1M characters a month free for the first 12 months |
| Google Cloud | Neural2 | $16.00 | $4.00 | Pay per character — First 1M characters a month free, ongoing |
| Amazon Polly | Generative | $30.00 | $7.50 | Pay per character |
| OpenAI | tts-1-hd | $30.00 | $7.50 | Pay per character |
| Google Cloud | Chirp 3: HD | $30.00 | $7.50 | Pay per character |
| FreeTTS | PRO | $19.00 | $19.00 | Monthly plan — $19/mo for 1,000,000 characters |
| Amazon Polly | Long-Form | $100 | $25.00 | Pay per character |
| FreeTTS | Creator | $7.80 | $39.00 | Monthly plan — $39/mo for 5,000,000 characters |
| Google Cloud | Studio | $160 | $40.00 | Pay per character |
| ElevenLabs | Creator | $182 | $66.00 | Monthly plan — $22/mo for 121k credits; 1 credit ≈ 1 character |
| ElevenLabs | Pro | $165 | $99.00 | Monthly plan — $99/mo for 600k credits; 1 credit ≈ 1 character |
At 250,000 characters a month, FreeTTS PRO costs $19.00 and the cheapest alternative on this table is Google Cloud Standard / WaveNet at $1.00. The gap is rarely the point: what changes the bill is whether you need a commercial licence, a rate limit you can build on, and voices you would actually publish. The FreeTTS API is free to start — a key, no card, 10 requests a minute.
What the price per character does not tell you
Four things move the real bill more than the headline rate, and none of them appear in a price-per-character comparison.
1. Whether you are allowed to publish it
The metered cloud APIs include commercial use in the usage price. Subscription tools usually gate it: ElevenLabs grants a commercial licence from its $6 Starter plan and explicitly withholds it on the free tier. On FreeTTS the licence comes with PRO and Creator; free-tier audio carries a short tag and is not licensed for commercial work. If you are building anything you will monetise, the licence is the price, not the rate.
2. The free tier's expiry date
Google's free allowance renews every month forever: 4,000,000 standard characters and 1,000,000 Neural2. Amazon's looks larger at 5,000,000, but it is first-12-months-only, so a project that outlives its first year wakes up to a bill it never had. Read the footnote, not the number.
3. Rate limits, not volume
Most people who outgrow a free tier outgrow the requests per minute, not the character count. It is the difference between a batch that finishes overnight and one that finishes next week. The FreeTTS free key allows 10 requests a minute, PRO 200, Creator 1000.
4. Whether a plan bills you for what you did not use
A metered API charges for the characters you send. A monthly plan charges for the month. At 60,000 characters, metered neural voices cost about a dollar; the same month on a subscription costs the whole subscription. The calculator above reflects that: plan rows bill by whole months, because you cannot buy a third of a plan.
Where FreeTTS sits, honestly
On raw rate we are not the cheapest and do not claim to be: $4 standard voices from Amazon or Google will always undercut a plan. FreeTTS PRO is $19 for 1,000,000 characters, which is $19 per million, roughly the price of Polly Neural. What comes with it is the part that usually decides: 2,253 voices across 149 locales including 87 HD voices, 95 expressive styles, WAV and OGG output, SRT subtitles, the commercial licence, and no separate cloud account, billing project or card to set up before your first request.
Creator is where the arithmetic turns: $39 for 5,000,000 characters is $7.80 per million, under half of Polly Neural and a twentieth of ElevenLabs Pro, with 1000 requests a minute.
Questions we get a lot
Where the numbers came from
Every figure on this page was read from the provider's own pricing page on 5 September 2026 and converted to dollars per 1,000,000 characters. Nothing is estimated. Where a provider sells credits or tokens rather than characters, the table says so and states the conversion, so you can check the arithmetic instead of trusting it.
- Amazon Polly pricing — Standard $4, Neural $16, Generative $30, Long-Form $100 per 1M characters.
- Google Cloud Text-to-Speech pricing — Standard and WaveNet $4, Neural2 $16, Chirp 3: HD $30, Studio $160 per 1M characters.
- OpenAI API pricing — tts-1 $15, tts-1-hd $30 per 1M characters.
- ElevenLabs pricing — Creator $22 for 121k credits, Pro $99 for 600k credits; free tier 10k credits with no commercial licence.
- FreeTTS pricing — PRO $19 for 1,000,000, Creator $39 for 5,000,000.
Microsoft Azure is not in the table. Its pricing page renders the figures in JavaScript and serves placeholders to anything reading the page directly, so there was no primary source to quote. A guessed number on a pricing comparison is worse than a missing row.
Prices move. If you are reading this long after September 2026, follow the source links before you plan a budget on it.
While you're here
- The FreeTTS API — POST text, get an MP3 back. Free key, no card.
- Can you use TTS commercially? — the licence terms of 15 providers, side by side.
- Best free text to speech tools — the tools, not the APIs, tested.
- Text to speech free trials compared — trial length, card rules and downloads for 12 tools.
- Words to minutes calculator — turn a character allowance into minutes of audio.
- Text to speech with emotion — 95 styles, free to try in the browser.