Text-to-speech, priced.
ElevenLabs bills characters, Gemini bills tokens, half the market quotes minutes — and the spread between the cheapest and priciest voice is 40×. Enter your monthly volume in characters or minutes and get every major TTS API ranked by what it would actually bill, free tiers included.
Most vendors bill per input character; Gemini TTS and gpt-4o-mini-tts bill by audio time, converted here through the pace field and marked ≈. Only free tiers that renew every month enter the math — Amazon Polly's 12-month trial quotas stay out so long-run costs aren't understated.
- Google Cloud Standard voices$4.00/1M free tier $0/mo
- Google Cloud WaveNet voices$4.00/1M free tier $0/mo
- Azure AI Speech Neural / Neural HD Flash$15.00/1M free tier $0/mo
- Google Cloud Neural2 voices$16.00/1M free tier $0/mo
- Google Cloud Chirp 3: HD voices$30.00/1M free tier $0/mo
- Google Cloud Studio voices$160/1M free tier $0/mo
- Amazon Polly Standard voices$4.00/1M budget $0.600/mo
- Deepgram Aura-1$15.00/1M standard $2.25/mo
List prices verified on vendor pages 2026-08-13. ≈ rows are time-billed models converted at your pace setting; gpt-4o-mini-tts additionally rests on OpenAI's own "~$0.015/min" estimate. Volume discounts, enterprise contracts, and regional prices not modeled.
Six usage profiles
Click one to load it. Verdicts are computed from the current rate sheet — they move when a vendor reprices.
Your volume against every rate
The scenario configured above, priced on all 22 verified rates. Rows keep the default-scenario order; the rank and monthly columns recompute live as you edit inputs.
| # | Model | Meter | $ / 1M chars | Free tier | Your volume | Src |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Google Cloud Standard voices budget | per character | $4.00 | 4M/mo | $0 | ↗ |
| 2 | Google Cloud WaveNet voices budget Cut from $16 to $4 per 1M chars | per character | $4.00 | 4M/mo | $0 | ↗ |
| 3 | Azure AI Speech Neural / Neural HD Flash standard East US list price — varies by region | per character | $15.00 | 500K/mo | $0 | ↗ |
| 4 | Google Cloud Neural2 voices standard | per character | $16.00 | 1M/mo | $0 | ↗ |
| 5 | Google Cloud Chirp 3: HD voices premium | per character | $30.00 | 1M/mo | $0 | ↗ |
| 6 | Google Cloud Studio voices premium Narration-grade studio voices | per character | $160 | 1M/mo | $0 | ↗ |
| 7 | Amazon Polly Standard voices budget | per character | $4.00 | 12-mo trial | $0.600 | ↗ |
| 8 | Deepgram Aura-1 standard Growth prepay drops it to $13.50 | per character | $15.00 | — | $2.25 | ↗ |
| 9 | OpenAI tts-1 standard Latency-optimized | per character | $15.00 | — | $2.25 | ↗ |
| 10 | OpenAI gpt-4o-mini-tts standard Steerable voices (“vibes”) | per minute ≈ | $15.11 | — | ≈$2.27 | ↗ |
| 11 | Google Gemini 2.5 Flash TTS standard Prompt-steerable LLM voices | per minute ≈ | $15.13 | — | ≈$2.27 | ↗ |
| 12 | Amazon Polly Neural voices standard | per character | $16.00 | 12-mo trial | $2.40 | ↗ |
| 13 | Deepgram Aura-2 premium Growth prepay drops it to $27 | per character | $30.00 | — | $4.50 | ↗ |
| 14 | OpenAI tts-1-hd premium Quality-optimized | per character | $30.00 | — | $4.50 | ↗ |
| 15 | Amazon Polly Generative voices premium | per character | $30.00 | 12-mo trial | $4.50 | ↗ |
| 16 | Google Gemini 2.5 Pro TTS premium | per minute ≈ | $30.25 | — | ≈$4.54 | ↗ |
| 17 | Google Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS premium Preview pricing | per minute ≈ | $30.25 | — | ≈$4.54 | ↗ |
| 18 | ElevenLabs Flash / Turbo premium ~75 ms latency | per character | $50.00 | 20K/mo | $6.50 | ↗ |
| 19 | MiniMax speech-2.8-turbo standard | per character | $60.00 | — | $9.00 | ↗ |
| 20 | ElevenLabs Multilingual v2 / v3 premium Flagship quality | per character | $100 | 10K/mo | $14.00 | ↗ |
| 21 | MiniMax speech-2.8-hd premium | per character | $100 | — | $15.00 | ↗ |
| 22 | Amazon Polly Long-form voices premium | per character | $100 | 12-mo trial | $15.00 | ↗ |
$ / 1M chars for time-billed models (marked ≈) is derived at the current pace setting — 1000 characters per minute by default. Free tier column shows monthly-recurring quotas; Amazon Polly's 12-month trial quotas are noted but never enter the math. Src links open the vendor pricing page each rate was verified on.
The ElevenLabs plan sheet
Since the 2026 repricing the per-character rate is identical on every tier — $0.05/1K on Flash, $0.10/1K on Multilingual — so each plan includes exactly its face value of synthesis. What upgrading buys is the commercial license, voice cloning, and concurrency. Verified 2026-08-13 on the ElevenLabs pricing page.
| Plan | $ / mo | Multilingual chars | Flash chars | ≈ audio |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 10K | 20K | 10–20 min |
| Starter | $6.00 | 60K | 120K | 60–120 min |
| CreatorFirst month $11 | $22.00 | 220K | 440K | 220–440 min |
| Pro | $99.00 | 990K | 2.0M | 990–1,980 min |
| Scale | $299 | 3.0M | 6.0M | 2,990–5,980 min |
| Business | $990 | 9.9M | 19.8M | 9,900–19,800 min |
Included characters differ by model because Flash bills half of Multilingual — the audio column shows the range (Multilingual minutes – Flash minutes at ~1K chars/min). Overage bills at the same per-1K rate as the plan itself.
The math behind the ranking
Every rate is a US pay-as-you-go list price read off the vendor's own pricing page, stamped with its verification date. The engine normalizes three metering schemes into one monthly number:
/* per-character vendors (most rows) */
billable = max(0, chars − monthly_free_tier)
monthly = billable × rate_per_1M ÷ 1M
/* time-billed vendors (Gemini TTS, gpt-4o-mini-tts) — marked ≈ */
minutes = chars ÷ pace /* pace: 1,000 chars/min default */
monthly = minutes × rate_per_minute
+ (chars ÷ chars_per_token) × text_input_rate ÷ 1M Gemini TTS's per-minute rate is exact — Google publishes the conversion (25 audio tokens per second). gpt-4o-mini-tts rests on OpenAI's own "~$0.015 per minute" launch estimate, so its rows carry the ≈ mark twice over. Not modeled: volume discounts, enterprise contracts, regional price variation (Azure's figure is the East US list), and Amazon Polly's 12-month trial quotas.
Full methodology lives at /methodology/. Found a stale rate? Report it.
Three volumes, real numbers
Computed from the current rate sheet — recalculated on every data refresh.
Why TTS pricing resists comparison
Per-character vendors count everything you send: spaces, newlines, and SSML tags. Google bills every SSML tag except <mark> — a heavily annotated script costs measurably more than its visible text. Budget on the string you POST, not the words you hear.
Classic Cloud TTS bills per character ($4–$160 per 1M by voice tier). Gemini TTS is a different product billed per token, with a published conversion — audio is 25 tokens per second — which is what lets us print an exact $0.015/min for Gemini 2.5 Flash TTS. Same company, incomparable meters.
Vendors approximate 1K characters ≈ 1 minute (that's ElevenLabs' own rule of thumb); measured speech at a natural pace runs closer to 750–950. The pace field converts minutes to characters — nudge it down for slow narration and time-billed rows will look relatively better.
Monthly-recurring quotas (Google's 4M standard / 1M premium characters, Azure's 0.5M) renew forever and are real money at small volumes. Plan-included characters (ElevenLabs) renew but expire monthly. Trial quotas (Amazon Polly's first-12-months allotments) end — this calculator keeps them out of the math so year-two costs aren't understated.
Since the 2026 repricing, the per-1K rate is identical on every ElevenLabs tier — $22 Creator includes exactly $22 worth of Multilingual synthesis. Upgrading buys the commercial license, voice cloning, and concurrency, not a volume discount. The only real discount lever is the model: Flash bills half of Multilingual.
TTS pricing — answered.
The questions this calculator exists for, answered with the current numbers. Every figure recomputes when a vendor reprices.
Q · 01 How much does ElevenLabs cost? +
Q · 02 Is ElevenLabs cheaper than OpenAI TTS? +
Q · 03 What is the cheapest text-to-speech API? +
Q · 04 How many characters is one minute of speech? +
Q · 05 How does OpenAI TTS pricing work? +
Q · 06 Which TTS APIs have free tiers? +
Q · 07 How is Gemini TTS priced? +
Q · 08 What does a full audiobook cost to synthesize? +
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