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Text-to-speech API pricing compared
Pay-as-you-go text-to-speech APIs range from $0.004 to $0.144 per minute of audio, a 40× spread. The middle of the market sits around $0.027 a minute.
Per-minute prices assume 900 characters of text per minute of speech for every vendor. Price only: quality, latency, languages and licences differ.
Pay-as-you-go prices
| API and voice tier | Per 1M characters | Per minute | Free each month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Cloud Standard voices Google lists these under legacy models. | $4 | $0.004 | 4,000,000 chars |
| Google Cloud WaveNet voices Listed at the same price and billing code as Standard. | $4 | $0.004 | 4,000,000 chars |
| Amazon Polly Standard | $4 | $0.004 | None |
| Murf API, Falcon | $10 | $0.009 | None |
| OpenAI tts-1 | $15 | $0.013 | None |
| Azure AI Speech Neural East US price; varies by region. | $15 | $0.013 | None |
| Deepgram Aura-1 | $15 | $0.013 | None |
| Google Cloud Neural2 voices | $16 | $0.014 | 1,000,000 chars |
| Amazon Polly Neural | $16 | $0.014 | None |
| Azure AI Speech Neural HD East US price; varies by region. | $22 | $0.02 | None |
| Murf API, Gen2 | $30 | $0.027 | None |
| OpenAI tts-1-hd | $30 | $0.027 | None |
| Google Cloud Chirp 3: HD voices | $30 | $0.027 | 1,000,000 chars |
| Amazon Polly Generative | $30 | $0.027 | None |
| Deepgram Aura-2 | $30 | $0.027 | None |
| ElevenLabs API, Flash / Turbo | $40 | $0.036 | 10,000 chars |
| Resemble AI Flex pay-as-you-go $0.00067 per second of audio, so text length doesn't matter. | Billed per second | $0.04 | None |
| ElevenLabs API, v2 Multilingual | $80 | $0.072 | 10,000 chars |
| Amazon Polly Long-Form | $100 | $0.09 | None |
| Google Cloud Studio voices | $160 | $0.144 | 1,000,000 chars |
Free allowances change the picture for small volumes. Google's free tier covers about 4,444 minutes a month of Standard or WaveNet voices and 1,111 minutes of its newer voices, so a low-volume project may pay nothing there. Amazon Polly's free tier for Neural, Long-Form and Generative voices lasts only your first 12 months, so it isn't counted here.
Subscription API plans
Cartesia sells monthly credit bundles instead of pure pay-as-you-go. Used in full, they work out to:
| Plan | Per month | Characters included | Per minute if fully used | Extra, per 1M characters |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cartesia Pro | $5 | 100,000 | $0.045 | $65 |
| Cartesia Startup | $49 | 1,250,000 | $0.035 | $45 |
| Cartesia Scale | $299 | 8,000,000 | $0.034 | $38 |
Token-priced models
Some newer models bill in tokens rather than characters:
- OpenAI gpt-4o-mini-tts: $0.60 per 1M text input tokens and $12.00 per 1M audio output tokens. OpenAI's pricing page gives no per-minute figure, so we can't convert it honestly.
- Google Cloud Gemini 2.5 Flash TTS: $10.00 per 1M audio output tokens; Google states 25 audio tokens per second, so about $0.015 per minute of audio plus text input.
- Google Cloud Gemini 2.5 Pro TTS: $20.00 per 1M audio output tokens, about $0.03 per minute of audio plus text input.
How many characters make a minute?
Vendors disagree, which is why we use one pace for everyone. Their own statements:
- ElevenLabs: "$0.08 ~$0.08/minute 10,000 ~10 min"
- Murf: "100K Characters ~ 1h 40m"
- Cartesia: "One minute of audio generation requires 750-800 credits. 1 credit equals 1 character."
- Amazon Polly: "1 million characters ~23 hours, 8 min"
At ElevenLabs' and Murf's pace a minute needs about 1,000 characters; at Amazon's, about 720. A vendor using the higher figure looks about 28% cheaper per minute for the same text. You can set your own pace in the text-to-speech cost calculator.
Unavailable vendors
- Play.ht: On 5 October 2026 play.ht and play.ai did not load: the domains no longer resolve, and their documentation site was gone.
- LOVO (Genny): On 5 October 2026 every LOVO site returned a "deployment disabled" error, and its API docs were marked inactive.
Sources
Read on 5 October 2026:
- Murf pricing
- Speechify Studio pricing
- WellSaid pricing
- Cartesia pricing
- OpenAI pricing
- Google Cloud pricing
- Azure AI Speech pricing
- Amazon Polly pricing
- Deepgram pricing
- Resemble AI pricing
- ElevenLabs API pricing
Prices on this page were checked against the official pricing pages on .