How prices are read and worked out

Quick answer

Every price on this site is read from the vendor's own pricing page or API docs, linked, and dated with the day it was checked. Per-minute, per-hour and per-song costs are worked out from those published figures with the formulas below. Nothing is estimated and shown as published.

Where prices come from

• Official vendors: the company that makes the model or runs the plan, priced from its own pricing page or API docs.
• Resellers: platforms that offer other companies' models at their own prices. They're priced from their own pages, listed in a separate section and never mixed into the official tables. A reseller's price is not the model maker's price.
• Each table names the page and the date: "Checked {date} against {vendor}'s pricing page."

Units

• Voice: price per 1 million characters, the unit most vendors publish. Where a vendor prices per 1,000 characters, the figure is multiplied by 1,000.
• Plans with credits: plan price / credits a month x 1,000,000, assuming every credit goes to text to speech at the vendor's stated credits per character.
• Plans with minutes: plan price / the vendor's own minute count. Where the vendor says "up to", the result is the lowest cost per minute at full use.
• Per hour of speech: only where the vendor's page gives a ratio:
  • ElevenLabs API: the page pairs $0.08 per 1,000 characters with about $0.08 a minute.
  • Amazon Polly: the page's example puts 1 million characters at about 23 hours, 8 minutes.
  • Google Gemini TTS: 25 audio tokens per second of audio.
  • Where no ratio is published (for example OpenAI gpt-4o-mini-tts), the cell is left blank.
• Music: per song, per generation, per minute of music or per download, as each vendor prices it. Plans with a download cap: plan price / downloads a month, at full use.
• Currency: USD, except AIVA, which is shown in euros plus VAT as AIVA lists it.

Keep rate

Vendors bill every generation, including takes you redo. Cost per finished minute or track = cost per generation / keep rate. The calculator starts at 100%, clearly labeled as the list price.

What's left off, and why

Tools are left off the price tables when their prices can't be read on their own public page on the day of the check. They're listed on the home page as dated observations, not prices: for example a pricing page that didn't load, one that now sells a different product, or a vendor that closed a product to new users. A short list of tools appears as "price not shown here yet" until a clean read is saved.

When figures differ

If a vendor's page shows two figures for the same plan, or a reseller's figure differs from the model maker's, each is shown as found, with the date. These are observations, not judgments.

How often prices are re-read

Prices are re-read at least monthly, and whenever a correction comes in. When a price is re-read, its checked date changes.

What this site doesn't do

No ratings, no rankings by quality and no paid placement in the price tables. Voice quality, music quality and latency aren't compared here.

Corrections

Seen a price change? Report it with a link to the official page. Prices are updated only when they can be checked on that page.