Leanvox

Posted on Feb 26

I Needed a Cheap TTS API. So I Built One.

#startup

ElevenLabs is great — until you get the bill. Here's how LeanVox delivers natural AI voice at $0.005/1K chars, with voice cloning, without the subscription.

Last year I was building a side project — nothing fancy, just an app that reads articles aloud. I tried a few TTS options and eventually landed on ElevenLabs because the voice quality was genuinely good. Sentences didn't sound robotic. Pauses landed in the right places. It felt natural.

Then I looked at the billing page.

At $0.165–$0.22 per 1,000 characters, my little app was going to cost me $300–$500/month at moderate usage. Before I had a single paying user. That wasn't going to work.

I looked at the alternatives. Google Cloud and Amazon Polly are cheap, but you can tell. OpenAI's TTS is decent but pricey, and they cap you at six voices.

So I built LeanVox. This is the thing I wish had existed.

What makes ElevenLabs expensive, exactly?

It's not a scam — ElevenLabs charges what the market will bear. But their pricing is structured for businesses, not developers building something to see if it sticks.

Here's the math. 5 million characters a month (~550 minutes of audio):

Provider	Price/1K chars	Monthly cost (5M chars)
LeanVox Standard	$0.005	$25
LeanVox Pro	$0.01	$50
ElevenLabs Starter	$0.167	$835
ElevenLabs Creator	$0.22	$1,100
OpenAI TTS	$0.015	$75
Google Neural2	$0.016	$80

$25 vs $835 for the same amount of audio.

What LeanVox actually is

Two tiers, no subscriptions:

Standard ($0.005/1K chars) — Natural speech, ~200ms latency, 10 languages
Pro ($0.01/1K chars) — Voice cloning from a 10-second clip, emotion tags, voice design from text descriptions

You buy credits. Purchased credits never expire. Free signup credits ($0.50) expire after 30 days.

The emotion tags are worth calling out:

"Are you serious? [gasp] I can't believe you did that. [laugh]
That's actually... kind of genius. [sigh] I hate you."

And it actually delivers those emotions naturally.

Feature rundown

Feature	LeanVox Standard	LeanVox Pro	ElevenLabs	OpenAI TTS
Price/1K chars	$0.005	$0.01	$0.165–$0.22	$0.015–$0.03
Voice Cloning	—	✓ 10s sample	Paid plans	—
Languages	10	23+	32	6
Emotion Tags	—	✓	Limited	—
Subscription required	No	No	Yes	No

How to use it

curl

curl -X POST https://api.leanvox.com/v1/tts/generate \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer lv_live_YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "text": "Hello! [laugh] This was easier than I expected.",
    "model": "pro",
    "voice": "af_heart",
    "language": "en"
  }'

Python

import requests

r = requests.post(
    "https://api.leanvox.com/v1/tts/generate",
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer lv_live_YOUR_API_KEY"},
    json={"text": "Hello from Python!", "model": "standard", "voice": "af_heart", "language": "en"}
)
print(r.json()["audio_url"])

Is it as good as ElevenLabs?

Honest answer: close, but not identical. ElevenLabs has been doing this longer and their voice catalog is deeper. For premium audiobook production, ElevenLabs is still worth considering.

For most apps? The gap is smaller than the price difference. Try both. We give you $0.50 free — generate a few hundred words, compare, decide.

→ Sign up at leanvox.com — $0.50 in free credits, no credit card required.

Originally published at leanvox.com/blog

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