Amazon Polly pricing: per character, per hour and free tier
Quick answer
Amazon Polly charges per character of text: $4.00 per 1 million characters for Standard voices, $16.00 for Neural, $30 for Generative and $100.00 for Long-Form (outside the free tier). Amazon's own example puts 1 million characters at about 23 hours, 8 minutes of speech, so Neural works out to about $0.69 an hour of audio. Checked November 9, 2026 against the Amazon Polly pricing page.
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Key takeaways
- Pay as you go, billed monthly for the characters you process. There is no subscription.
- Speech Marks (timing metadata) are billed at the same per-character rates as speech on Standard, Neural and Long-Form.
- Free tier: 5 million Standard characters a month; 1 million Neural, 500 thousand Long-Form and 100 thousand Generative characters a month for the first 12 months.
- AWS GovCloud (US) prices differ: $4.80 (Standard) and $19.20 (Neural) per 1 million characters.
- Amazon says you "can cache and replay Amazon Polly's generated speech at no additional cost."
Prices
| Voice type | Per 1M characters | Free tier | Per hour of speech (worked out) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | $4.00 | 5 million characters a month | about $0.17 |
| Neural | $16.00 | 1 million a month, first 12 months | about $0.69 |
| Generative | $30 | 100 thousand a month, first 12 months | about $1.30 |
| Long-Form | $100.00 | 500 thousand a month, first 12 months | about $4.32 |
Per-hour figures: price per 1 million characters / 23.13 hours, from Amazon's own example ("1 million characters ~23 hours, 8 min"). Real speech length depends on the voice, language and text.
Source: aws.amazon.com/polly/pricing. Checked November 9, 2026.
Also on the page: "Starting July 15, 2025, new AWS customers will receive up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits", which can apply to Amazon Polly.
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FAQ
How much does Amazon Polly cost?
$4.00 per 1 million characters for Standard voices, $16.00 for Neural, $30 for Generative and $100.00 for Long-Form, outside the free tier.
Is Amazon Polly free?
Partly. Standard voices include 5 million characters a month in the free tier; Neural, Long-Form and Generative free tiers last for the first 12 months.
How long is 1 million characters of speech?
Amazon's own example says about 23 hours, 8 minutes.
Is Polly cheaper than Google Cloud Text-to-Speech?
At list price, Standard voices are $4 per 1 million characters on both. Google Cloud TTS prices
Next steps
References
- https://aws.amazon.com/polly/pricing/
- https://aws.amazon.com/agreement/ (where the AWS contracting party is Amazon Web Services, Inc., the agreement names the laws of the State of Washington)