Amazon Polly is the default when you are deep in AWS, with engines spanning cheap-and-robotic to generative. SpeechifyAI beats Polly's Neural tier on price from $6 per 1M characters and adds professional voice cloning, which Polly does not offer outside a custom Brand Voice engagement.
| Capability | Speechify | Amazon Polly |
|---|---|---|
| Price (per 1M chars) | From $6 / 1M | Standard $4, Neural $16, Generative $30, Long-form $100 |
| Pricing model | Per character; no credits, no token math | Per character, tiered by engine |
| Voice quality | Proprietary neural voice models | Standard is robotic; Neural and Generative are far better |
| Voices | 1,500+ | 100+ voices across engines |
| Languages | 30+ | Broad coverage; available set varies by engine |
| Voice cloning | Professional voice cloning included | No general voice cloning; Brand Voice is a custom enterprise engagement |
| Latency | Sub-300ms first byte, streaming | Streaming; latency varies by engine |
| Commercial use / free tier | Commercial use on every plan; 50K chars/month free | Commercial use; 12-month AWS free tier |
Amazon Polly does not offer general voice cloning. The only path is Brand Voice, a sales-led custom engagement with a contract minimum and an enterprise review. SpeechifyAI includes professional voice cloning on Starter and above, with the cloned voice trained the same day on uploaded audio and used at the same per-character rate as the rest of the catalog on the same streaming endpoint.
Polly's Standard engine is $4 per million characters but the voices sound clearly robotic. The Neural engine sounds modern at $16 per million, the Generative engine is $30, and the Long-Form engine is $100, so the workload has to pick the right engine before billing. SpeechifyAI is from $6 per million characters across the catalog with consistent quality across every script type, no engine picker on the bill, no SSML tag counting against the rate, and streaming first byte under 300ms.
SpeechifyAI covers neural-grade TTS at from $6 per million characters across the catalog, with professional voice cloning included on Starter and above and no engine picker on the bill, streaming first byte under 300ms, and a 99.9% uptime SLA in the contract.