Amazon Polly vs OpenAI TTS pricing
Both are in text-to-speech apis. Amazon Polly is billed per 1m characters; OpenAI TTS is billed per 1m characters / tokens. Numbers below are copied from each vendor's pricing page.
Amazon PollyFree tier or trial
- Free tier
- 5M chars/mo, 12 months (Neural 1M)
- Billed
- Per 1M characters
- Best for
- TTS embedded in the AWS stack
- Verified
- Jun 27, 2026
OpenAI TTSNo free tier
- Free tier
- None (pay-as-you-go credits)
- Billed
- Per 1M characters / tokens
- Best for
- TTS bundled into the OpenAI API
- Verified
- Jun 27, 2026
Amazon Polly plans
| Plan | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Standard voices | $4.00 / 1M characters | Concatenative TTS engine; free tier 5M characters/month. |
| Neural voices (NTTS) | $16.00 / 1M characters | Higher-quality neural engine with Newscaster style; free tier 1M chars/month for first 12 months. |
| Generative voices | $30.00 / 1M characters | Most human-like conversational engine; free tier 100K chars/month for first 12 months. |
| Long-Form voices | $100.00 / 1M characters | Optimized for long content like articles/training; free tier 500K chars/month for first 12 months. |
- Premium engines are expensive (Long-Form $100/M, Generative $30/M), making costs unpredictable at scale
OpenAI TTS plans
| Plan | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| tts-1 (standard) | $15 / 1M characters | Latency-optimized model; ~$0.015 per 1K characters. Per-character billing. |
| tts-1-hd | $30 / 1M characters | Higher-fidelity, quality-optimized model; ~$0.030 per 1K characters. Per-character billing. |
| gpt-4o-mini-tts | $0.60 / 1M text input tokens + $12 / 1M audio output tokens | Token-based pricing; OpenAI estimates ~$0.015 per minute of generated audio. Newest, steerable model. |
- No guaranteed uptime/latency SLA on the default Standard tier, 99.9% SLA only on Scale/Priority tiers
Source: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/text-to-speech