Category
Text-to-Speech APIs pricing
Text-to-Speech APIs convert text into spoken audio, and the 2026 market splits cleanly into three camps: ultra-realistic AI-voice specialists (ElevenLabs, Cartesia, Resemble), the hyperscaler incumbents that bundle TTS into their cloud (Google, AWS, Azure), and the LLM platforms that added voice as a feature (OpenAI). Compare them on documentation/DX quality, reliability (SLA + proven scale), SDK and ecosystem breadth, and how fast a developer or AI agent can self-serve a working key. The specialists win on voice quality, latency, and developer ergonomics; the hyperscalers win on enterprise SLA, regional redundancy, and SDK breadth; OpenAI wins on ubiquity but offers the thinnest dedicated voice tooling.
| API | Billed by | Free tier | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|
E ElevenLabs Text-to-Speech APIs | Per character (credits) | Free tier or trial | Jun 27, 2026 |
Google Cloud Text-to-Speech Text-to-Speech APIs | Per 1M characters | Free tier or trial | Jun 27, 2026 |
Amazon Polly Text-to-Speech APIs | Per 1M characters | Free tier or trial | Jun 27, 2026 |
OpenAI TTS Text-to-Speech APIs | Per 1M characters / tokens | No free tier | Jun 27, 2026 |
Azure AI Speech Text-to-Speech APIs | Per 1M characters | Free tier or trial | Jun 27, 2026 |
Cartesia Text-to-Speech APIs | Per character (credits) | Free tier or trial | Jun 27, 2026 |
Resemble AI Text-to-Speech APIs | Per second of audio | Free tier or trial | Jun 27, 2026 |