Open API PricingOpen API Pricing

Google Cloud Text-to-Speech vs OpenAI TTS pricing

Both are in text-to-speech apis. Google Cloud Text-to-Speech is billed per 1m characters; OpenAI TTS is billed per 1m characters / tokens. Numbers below are copied from each vendor's pricing page.

Google Cloud Text-to-Speech vs OpenAI TTS pricing side by side
Google Cloud Text-to-SpeechFree tier or trial
Free tier
1M (WaveNet) / 4M (Standard) chars/mo
Billed
Per 1M characters
Best for
Enterprise TTS on Google Cloud
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

Google Cloud Text-to-Speech plans

PlanPriceWhat it covers
Standard voices$4 / 1M charactersFirst 4M characters per month free; basic concatenative voices.
WaveNet voices$16 / 1M charactersFirst 1M characters/month free; DeepMind WaveNet neural voices.
Neural2 voices$16 / 1M charactersFirst 1M characters/month free; higher-quality neural voices.
Studio voices$160 / 1M charactersPremium narration-grade voices (priced per byte/character).
Chirp 3: HD voices$30 / 1M charactersGenerative high-fidelity voices; free monthly allotment, 8 voices across 31 languages.
Free tier$0Recurring monthly free character allotment per voice class (e.g. 4M Standard, 1M WaveNet/Neural2).

Source: https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/pricing

OpenAI TTS plans

PlanPriceWhat it covers
tts-1 (standard)$15 / 1M charactersLatency-optimized model; ~$0.015 per 1K characters. Per-character billing.
tts-1-hd$30 / 1M charactersHigher-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 tokensToken-based pricing; OpenAI estimates ~$0.015 per minute of generated audio. Newest, steerable model.

Source: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/text-to-speech

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