I make Speakvora, a speech API with offline voice bundles, so read this with that in mind. I tried to keep it fair.
I wanted to know what text to speech costs at the price-list level, so I read the pricing pages of nine providers on October 8, 2026. All numbers below are list prices per million characters. They change, so check them before you decide.
| Provider and model | Per 1M characters | At 10M characters |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Polly Standard, Google Cloud Standard | $4 | $40 |
| OpenAI tts-1, Deepgram Aura-1, Fish Audio, Inworld Flash | $15 | $150 |
| OpenAI tts-1-hd, Rime Mist v3 | $30 | $300 |
| ElevenLabs Flash / Turbo | $40 | $400 |
| ElevenLabs v2 and v3 | $80 | $800 |
At 10 million characters a month that is $40 at the cheap end and $800 at the expensive one. These models do not sound the same, so this is cost only.
The part price lists hide
Most apps say the same lines again and again: greetings, confirmations, error prompts. If you generate each line once and keep the file, you are not paying per play at all. A million characters is very roughly 15 to 20 hours of speech, so even at ElevenLabs v3 prices, 300 distinct 60-character prompts is 18,000 characters, about a dollar and a half.
Where per-character billing really hurts is when the text is different every time, or when your code calls the API on every request instead of caching. If that is you, fix the caching before you switch providers.
When pay-once makes sense
The other case is where you need audio to work with no internet, or you want a fixed price for a standard set of lines for one industry. That is what our one-time bundles are for (audio from $14). It is the only part where I would say we sell something the big providers do not.
I put the full table, with the source link and the date I read each page, here: https://speakvora.com/cheapest-text-to-speech-api
What I would not claim
Our voices are AI-generated and we are smaller than the big names, with fewer models and languages. Listen to samples before you pick on price.
What do you pay per million characters today, and do you cache the audio?
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