TTS API pricing 2026: what 1M, 10M and 100M characters a month really cost

Most TTS pricing comparisons quote a rate per million characters and stop there. That rate is not what you pay: subscription fees, included usage and plan tiers change the monthly bill, and five different billing units are in use across the market. This post does the arithmetic for three real volumes, 1M, 10M and 100M characters in a month, picks the cheapest plan each provider sells at each volume, and puts each model’s blind-listening score beside its price.

The short version: among providers that publish a per-character price, SpeechifyAI is the cheapest at all three volumes, at $10, $91 and $631 a month. The next cheapest costs 1.5 times as much at 1M, 1.65 times at 10M and 1.9 times at 100M. And the cheap alternatives score far lower in blind listening, while Simba 3.2 sits in the top five of 92 models. Evidence, read 23 September 2026: pricing snapshot and leaderboard snapshot.

Monthly cost at 1M, 10M and 100M characters

Sorted by the cost at 10M characters. Elo is the blind-listening score from the Artificial Analysis Speech Arena, read 23 September 2026 and kept as our reviewed snapshot of the full board.

Cheapest self-serve plan at each volume, subscription fees included, US dollars, before tax. Azure is the East US price. Deepgram’s 100M figure uses its Growth rate, which needs $4,000 or more prepaid a year. Cartesia does not publish its overage rate, so its 10M figure is a floor. Deepgram Aura-2 is not on the Artificial Analysis board. Google’s Gemini TTS and OpenAI’s gpt-4o-mini-tts bill per token and are covered separately below. Every competitor figure and the page it came from: our reviewed pricing snapshot.

Price against quality

The cheapest alternatives are also the lowest-rated. Azure Neural (1,031), OpenAI’s tts-1 (1,086) and Amazon Polly Neural (890) cost 1.6 to 1.8 times what SpeechifyAI does at 10M characters and score 150 to 350 points lower in blind listening. Evidence, read 23 September 2026: pricing snapshot and leaderboard snapshot.

The alternatives rated above 1,200 cost more still, on the same pricing and leaderboard snapshots. At 10M characters a month:

• VUI Labs’ Luna (1,230) is $150, 1.6 times as much.
• Inworld’s Realtime TTS-2 (1,245) is $175, 1.9 times as much.
• Alibaba’s Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS-Plus (1,259) is $200, 2.2 times as much.
• Cartesia’s Sonic 3.6 (1,273), the top score on the board, is $299 before overage, at least 3.3 times as much.

Simba 3.2 is the only model in the board’s top five that costs under $15 per million characters, on Artificial Analysis’s normalized prices in the leaderboard snapshot. For how the top of the board compares on quality alone, see our TTS API comparison.

Token-priced models: Gemini TTS and gpt-4o-mini-tts

Google and OpenAI bill their newest TTS models per token, which cannot be turned into a per-character price from their own pages. Scores are from the leaderboard snapshot:

• Google Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS (Elo 1,260) costs $0.50 per million text-input tokens and $9 per million audio-output tokens through 31 December 2026, then $1 and $18. Gemini 3.8 Flash-Lite TTS (1,235) costs $0.50 and $6, then $1 and $12. Audio is metered at 25 tokens per second.
• OpenAI gpt-4o-mini-tts costs $0.60 per million text-input tokens and $12 per million audio-output tokens.

Neither vendor publishes how many characters a second of audio carries, so any per-character figure is an estimate. Artificial Analysis publishes one: $16.50 per million characters for Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and $11.00 for Flash-Lite, in line with Google’s 2027 rates (23 Sep snapshot). On that estimate, 10M characters a month costs about $165 on Gemini 3.8 Flash and $110 on Flash-Lite from January 2027, and about half that until then. That makes Gemini 3.8 Flash-Lite, at a score two points below Simba 3.2, the one model near the top that costs less than SpeechifyAI for the rest of 2026.

Free tiers

SpeechifyAI’s plans at each volume

Each SpeechifyAI plan is a monthly fee that buys a usage credit, then a per-character rate beyond it. The cheapest plan changes with volume:

Starter is the cheapest plan up to about 10.8M characters a month, Pro ($99, 13.5M characters included, then $8 per 1M) from there to about 63.5M, and Scale above that. The free plan covers 500,000 characters a month and pauses at the cap. Full details are on the pricing page, and how TTS pricing works explains per-character billing.

How each figure was built

For every provider and volume we took the vendor’s published plans, added the subscription fee to the usage beyond what the plan includes at that plan’s rate, and kept the cheapest result.

At 100M the plans change: Azure’s 80M commitment tier ($960, then $12 per 1M) comes to $1,200, Inworld’s Developer plan ($300, then $15 per 1M) to $1,500, Deepgram’s Growth rate ($27 per 1M, prepaid yearly) to $2,700, and SpeechifyAI’s Scale plan to $631. Alibaba’s own model page lists Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS-Plus at $20 per million characters; Artificial Analysis’s estimate is $27.60. Enterprise contracts, taxes and regional price differences are out of scope.

Start with the cheapest one that sounds right

Price only matters once the voice is good enough for your product, so listen before you commit. You can start free with 500,000 characters a month, no card, and run your own text through Simba 3.2 before you pay anything.