Text-to-Speech (TTS) Cost Calculator
Estimate AI text-to-speech cost by characters.
With the default inputs, $225.00/month — 500,000 characters/day. Enter your own numbers below to recompute instantly; the full step-by-step math is shown under the worked example.
Results update automatically as you type.
- Rate
- $15/1M chars
- Per day
- $7.50
- Per month
- $225.00
Estimate the cost of AI text-to-speech. TTS is billed per character (roughly $15 per 1M characters, or about $0.015 per minute of audio). Set your daily volume to see the monthly cost.
How this is calculated
Cost = characters per day ÷ 1,000,000 × price per million characters × 30. TTS is billed per character of input text — roughly $15 per 1M characters, or about $0.015 per minute of natural speech (~1,000 characters per minute).
Is this a good result? What to do next
TTS cost tracks how much text you voice, so it's predictable. Premium, more natural voices can cost more per character — weigh voice quality against volume for your use case.
Typical planning ranges
- Standard rate
- ~$15 per 1M characters
- Speech density
- ~1,000 characters / minute
- Per spoken minute
- ≈ $0.015
Ranges are typical planning figures to sanity-check your result, not authoritative benchmarks. Your numbers will vary with use case, volume, and vendor.
How to improve this number
- Keep spoken output concise.
- Cache and reuse audio for repeated phrases.
- Use a cheaper voice tier where quality allows.
Common mistakes
- Estimating per word instead of per character.
- Ignoring that premium voices cost more.
When to use a different approach
For transcription, use the speech-to-text cost calculator. For a full voice bot, use the voice agent cost calculator.
Worked example (defaults)
With the default inputs above, here is the result:
- Rate
- $15/1M chars
- Per day
- $7.50
- Per month
- $225.00
Sources & references
Frequently asked questions
How many characters is a minute of speech?+
Roughly 1,000 characters per minute of natural speech, so $15/1M characters works out to about $0.015 per minute.
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