Free tool · prices checked 2026-11-05
Text to speech cost calculator.What will your voiceovers cost each year?
Enter how much text you turn into speech each month. See what ElevenLabs, OpenAI, Google Cloud, Azure and Amazon Polly would charge at list prices, next to a one-time local license.
Start from a typical workload
Providers bill by characters, including spaces. We count about 6 characters per English word, so 86,400 characters is roughly 96 minutes of audio at a narration pace.
Murmur, one time
$49
Launch price until Nov 30, commercial use included. From Dec 1 it is $69 personal or $99 commercial.
- Cheapest cloud, month
- $0
- Priciest cloud, year
- $104
12 of 15 cloud options cost less than the license over the first year, mostly free tiers and basic voices.
Cost by provider at 86,400 characters a month
Sorted from cheapest. Pay as you go list prices in US dollars, before tax and volume discounts. The last column shows the month a $49 license would have cost less in total.
| Provider and voice | Per month | 12 months | 24 months | License cheaper from |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Cloud Text-to-Speech StandardInside the free tier | $0 | $0 | $0 | Free at this volume |
| Google Cloud Text-to-Speech WaveNetInside the free tier | $0 | $0 | $0 | Free at this volume |
| Google Cloud Text-to-Speech Neural2Inside the free tier | $0 | $0 | $0 | Free at this volume |
| Google Cloud Text-to-Speech Chirp 3: HDInside the free tier | $0 | $0 | $0 | Free at this volume |
| Google Cloud Text-to-Speech StudioInside the free tier | $0 | $0 | $0 | Free at this volume |
| Azure AI Speech NeuralInside the free tier | $0 | $0 | $0 | Free at this volume |
| Amazon Polly StandardPay as you go | $0.35 | $4.15 | $8.29 | Over 3 years |
| OpenAI tts-1Pay as you go | $1.30 | $16 | $31 | Over 3 years |
| Amazon Polly NeuralPay as you go | $1.38 | $17 | $33 | Month 36 |
| Azure AI Speech Neural HDPay as you go | $1.90 | $23 | $46 | Month 26 |
| OpenAI tts-1-hdPay as you go | $2.59 | $31 | $62 | Month 19 |
| Amazon Polly GenerativePay as you go | $2.59 | $31 | $62 | Month 19 |
| ElevenLabs API Flash / TurboStarter plan | $6.00 | $72 | $144 | Month 9 |
| ElevenLabs API Multilingual v2 / v4Starter plan + extra characters | $6.91 | $83 | $166 | Month 8 |
| Amazon Polly Long-FormPay as you go | $8.64 | $104 | $207 | Month 6 |
| Murmur local, one-time license | $0 | $49 | $49 | Paid once |
The honest version
When the cloud is the better deal
If you only need a few thousand characters a month, free tiers cover you. Google gives 4 million Standard or WaveNet characters free every month, Azure gives 0.5 million neural characters, and ElevenLabs has a small free plan. Basic voices at $4 per million characters also take years to add up to a license.
Cloud APIs also suit servers, apps with many users, and teams that need a hosted endpoint. A local license covers one computer, and it needs a reasonably modern Mac or Windows PC to generate quickly.
Local wins when
- you narrate books, courses or a weekly channel
- you regenerate lines until they sound right
- scripts are private or under NDA
- you want a fixed cost instead of a meter
Prices and sources
Every rate was read from the provider's own pricing page on 2026-11-05.
- ElevenLabs API: Multilingual v2 / v4 plans from $6 a month, then $0.08 per 1,000 characters; Flash / Turbo plans from $6 a month, then $0.04 per 1,000 characters. Free plan includes 10,000 multilingual characters a month, without a commercial license. Source: elevenlabs.io/pricing/api
- OpenAI: tts-1 $15 per 1M characters; tts-1-hd $30 per 1M characters. gpt-4o-mini-tts bills by tokens ($0.60 per 1M text tokens in, $12 per 1M audio tokens out), so it is not per character and is left out of the totals. Source: developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
- Google Cloud Text-to-Speech: Standard $4 per 1M characters (4,000,000 free a month); WaveNet $4 per 1M characters (4,000,000 free a month); Neural2 $16 per 1M characters (1,000,000 free a month); Chirp 3: HD $30 per 1M characters (1,000,000 free a month); Studio $160 per 1M characters (1,000,000 free a month). Free characters reset every month and are deducted before billing. Source: cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/pricing
- Azure AI Speech: Neural $15 per 1M characters (500,000 free a month); Neural HD $22 per 1M characters. Source: Azure Speech pricing page and Azure Retail Prices API (East US)
- Amazon Polly: Standard $4 per 1M characters; Neural $16 per 1M characters; Generative $30 per 1M characters; Long-Form $100 per 1M characters. New AWS accounts get a free tier for the first 12 months (for example 1M Neural characters a month), so totals here assume an account past that period. Source: aws.amazon.com/polly/pricing
More calculators
Comparing a specific ElevenLabs plan? The ElevenLabs calculator matches a plan to your workflow. To turn a script into minutes first, use the speech time calculator.
ElevenLabs alternative calculatorSpeech time calculatorFree text to speech online
Questions
How many characters is one minute of speech?
At a narration pace of about 150 words per minute, one minute of English speech is roughly 900 characters, since an average word plus its space and punctuation is about 6 characters. A one hour audiobook chapter is around 54,000 characters.
Which text to speech API is cheapest?
For small volumes the free tiers win. Google Cloud gives 4 million Standard or WaveNet characters free each month, and Azure gives 0.5 million neural characters free. Past those, Google Standard and Amazon Polly Standard are the cheapest at $4 per million characters, but they sound noticeably more robotic than neural and HD voices.
When does a one-time local TTS license pay off?
It depends on the voice quality you compare against. Against premium neural voices at $15 to $30 per million characters, a one-time license usually pays for itself within a few months at audiobook or YouTube volumes. Against free tiers or $4 per million voices at low volume, the cloud can stay cheaper for years.
What does local text to speech need?
Local models run on your own computer, so you need a reasonably modern machine. Murmur runs on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs with macOS 15 or later, and on Windows 10 or 11 as a beta. Generation is slower on older hardware, and you do not get a hosted API for servers.
Are these prices current?
They were copied from each provider's official pricing page on 2026-11-05. Prices are pay as you go list prices in US dollars, before taxes, volume discounts or committed use deals. Check the linked source before you budget.