vsref

Text-to-speech APIs platforms

52 platforms tracked · 742 facts verified · pricing re-checked weekly. APIs and platforms that turn text into speech: real per-minute cost, latency, cloning rights, and a verdict per use case.

Last verified Jul 20, 2026
Amazon Polly logoAmazon Polly
Cloud-utility TTS at commodity prices
Alternatives →See pricing
Azure Speech logoAzure Speech
Enterprise hyperscaler TTS with custom-voice depth
Alternatives →From$960/mo
Cartesia logoCartesia
Lowest-latency TTS for real-time voice agents
Alternatives →From$5/mo
Deepgram Aura-2 logoDeepgram Aura-2
Enterprise real-time voice-agent TTS
Alternatives →See pricing
ElevenLabs logoElevenLabs
Premium AI voice platform for creators and developers
Alternatives →From$6/mo
Google Cloud TTS logoGoogle Cloud TTS
Hyperscaler TTS with the broadest voice/language catalog
Alternatives →See pricing
MiniMax Speech logoMiniMax Speech
Multilingual cloning-first TTS with aggressive pricing
Alternatives →From$5/mo
OpenAI TTS logoOpenAI TTS
Simple usage-based TTS inside a general AI platform
Alternatives →See pricing
Voxtral TTS logoVoxtral TTS
Open-weights-friendly voice cloning TTS from a frontier AI lab
Alternatives →See pricing
CAMB.AI logoCAMB.AI
Localization-first TTS: the MARS 8 family (flash/pro/instruct variants) plus dubbing and translated-TTS pipelines, credit-based plans from $5/mo, aimed at media, sports, and content going multilingual.
Alternatives →From$5/mo
Fish Audio logoFish Audio
Developer-first hosted API from the team behind the open-source fish-speech models; simple prepaid pay-as-you-go billing, 80+ language coverage, and a free fair-use model tier (s2.1-pro-free). Facts here cover the hosted API, not the OSS model.
Alternatives →See pricing
Hume Octave TTS logoHume Octave TTS
Expressiveness-first TTS (Octave understands the meaning of the text it speaks); subscription plans gate commercial use, with Octave 2 (preview) adding ~100ms latency and 11 languages for realtime use.
Alternatives →From$3/mo
Inworld TTS logoInworld TTS
Cost-leader realtime TTS for voice agents and games; hybrid pay-as-you-go plus monthly credit plans that lower the per-1M-character rate as commitment grows; SOC 2 Type II with zero-data-retention posture.
Alternatives →From$25/mo
LMNT logoLMNT
Speed-and-affordability challenger: a single fast model (Blizzard 2) with streaming-first APIs, unlimited voice clones on every tier, and flat subscription pricing with per-1K overage.
Alternatives →From$10/mo
Murf API logoMurf API
API arm of the Murf studio platform: 150+ voices in 35 languages, SSML support, word timestamps, and Falcon 2 aimed at high-concurrency voice agents at $0.01/1K characters. Note: Murf Studio subscription plans (murf.ai/pricing) are a separate product from API pay-as-you-go pricing and API characters are purchased separately.
Alternatives →See pricing
Resemble AI logoResemble AI
Security-first enterprise play: generation plus detection/verification in one platform, pay-as-you-go Flex credits, on-prem option, and the MIT-licensed open-source Chatterbox model family.
Alternatives →See pricing
Rime logoRime
Enterprise conversational TTS (IVR, contact centers, voice agents) emphasizing ultra-low latency models (Coda, Mist, Arcana) and self-hosted deployment; usage-based pricing with a single published rate.
Alternatives →See pricing
Speechify API logoSpeechify API
Developer platform spun out of the Speechify brand: transparent tiered pricing ($10-$499/mo plus per-1M overage), streaming-native Simba 3.2, and a bundled voice-agents product with flat per-minute rates.
Alternatives →From$10/mo
WellSaid logoWellSaid
Enterprise voiceover specialist: polished Studio product for L&D/marketing narration with an API on the side; API pricing is contact-sales, and compliance (SOC 2 Type II, GDPR) and ethical voice sourcing are the pitch.
Alternatives →From$10/mo
Chatterbox logoChatterbox
Production-minded open TTS from a commercial voice company - MIT license, built-in watermarking, and a fast Turbo variant, with Resemble's paid API as the scale-up path.
Alternatives →See pricing
ChatTTS logoChatTTS
Optimized for natural dialogue-style speech for LLM assistants; the licensing combination (AGPLv3+ code, CC BY-NC 4.0 weights, research/education only) rules out most commercial SaaS use without a separate deal.
Alternatives →See pricing
CosyVoice logoCosyVoice
Full-stack open TTS from Alibaba's speech team: 9 languages plus 18+ Chinese dialects, 150 ms streaming latency claim, instruction control of emotion/dialect/speed, and training + deployment scripts under Apache-2.0.
Alternatives →See pricing
Dia / Dia2 logoDia / Dia2
Best-known open model for scripted two-speaker dialogue rather than narration - Apache-2.0, English-only, GPU-oriented.
Alternatives →See pricing
F5-TTS logoF5-TTS
The go-to research-grade voice-cloning model - actively maintained and broadly ported, with the classic code-vs-weights license split: commercial products must retrain or license around the CC-BY-NC checkpoints.
Alternatives →See pricing
Fish Speech logoFish Speech
Top-tier expressive multilingual open-weights TTS whose license moved from permissive to research/non-commercial; commercial use requires a license from Fish Audio or their hosted API.
Alternatives →See pricing
GPT-SoVITS logoGPT-SoVITS
The de facto community standard for DIY voice cloning (60k GitHub stars), with a full WebUI covering dataset prep, ASR, training, and inference across five languages; MIT-licensed.
Alternatives →See pricing
Gradium logoGradium
Real-time voice-agent infrastructure play: WebSocket-first streaming TTS in 5 European languages with instant cloning, on-device models (Phonon), and credit-based pricing. Active and well-funded (site announced funding extension to $100M, July 2026).
Alternatives →From$13/mo
Grok TTS logoGrok TTS
Usage-priced hosted TTS from xAI, part of the Grok Voice stack (TTS, STT, and a speech-to-speech Voice Agent API), aimed at developers who want low-latency voice output alongside Grok models.
Alternatives →See pricing
Higgs Audio logoHiggs Audio
Strong emotional/expressive open TTS from a well-funded lab - but 'Apache-2.0' only covers the repo code; V2 weights carry a 100k-MAU community license and the newer V3 is research/non-commercial.
Alternatives →See pricing
IndexTTS-2 logoIndexTTS-2
Emotion-controllable zero-shot voice cloning for production use, but under a custom Bilibili license (not OSI-approved) with scale caps and AI-training restrictions.
Alternatives →See pricing
KittenTTS logoKittenTTS
The lightweight/edge option: ONNX inference, sub-100 MB downloads, 8 built-in voices - trades voice cloning and multilinguality for footprint.
Alternatives →See pricing
Kokoro logoKokoro
The lightweight quality-per-parameter champion of open TTS: Apache-2.0, easy to run anywhere, no voice cloning by design.
Alternatives →See pricing
Kyutai TTS logoKyutai TTS
Research-lab open TTS optimized for real-time streaming (Delayed Streams Modeling); Pocket TTS targets on-device/CPU deployment while the larger DSM TTS targets production streaming servers (Rust backend).
Alternatives →See pricing
Maya1 logoMaya1
Apache 2.0 expressive English TTS you can run on a single 16GB+ GPU; stands out for natural-language voice design and 20+ inline emotion tags rather than audio-sample cloning, with real-time streaming via vLLM.
Alternatives →See pricing
MegaTTS3 logoMegaTTS3
Research-grade Apache-2.0 TTS whose practical cloning is gated: the WaveVAE encoder is not released, so users must submit audio to ByteDance channels to obtain pre-extracted speaker latents (.npy) for cloning.
Alternatives →See pricing
Narakeet logoNarakeet
Indie batch-content workhorse: aggregates a very broad voice/language catalog for voiceovers, audiobooks and video narration, priced per output minute (prepaid packs, no subscription) rather than per character; not aimed at real-time agent use.
Alternatives →See pricing
Neuphonic logoNeuphonic
Hybrid hosted + open-weights play: SSE/WebSocket streaming TTS API at app.neuphonic.com, and tiny CPU-only on-device models (NeuTTS-Air ~360M Apache-2.0, NeuTTS-Nano ~120M) in GGUF for phones/Raspberry Pi - privacy/edge-deployment angle. NOTE: the site's pricing page returned 404 at verification time; hosted-plan pricing treated as not published.
Alternatives →See pricing
NVIDIA Magpie TTS logoNVIDIA Magpie TTS
A small, GPU-efficient 9-language TTS checkpoint for teams already in the NVIDIA NeMo/Riva ecosystem; commercially usable open weights, but zero-shot voice cloning was removed from the open release and it caps generations at about 20 seconds.
Alternatives →See pricing
Orpheus TTS logoOrpheus TTS
The 'LLM-as-TTS' approach under Apache-2.0 - expressive and clonable, but repo activity has slowed since mid-2025.
Alternatives →See pricing
OuteTTS logoOuteTTS
The llama.cpp-native option: runs via GGUF on CUDA/ROCm/Vulkan/Metal and even in the browser (Transformers.js). License splits by model: the 0.6B (Qwen3-based) is Apache-2.0, the 1B Llama-based flagship is CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 (non-commercial).
Alternatives →See pricing
Piper logoPiper
The pragmatic embedded/self-hosted choice: no cloning or frills, just quick offline speech in many languages - note the license change from MIT (archived rhasspy/piper) to GPL-3.0 in the successor repo.
Alternatives →See pricing
Qwen3-TTS logoQwen3-TTS
Genuinely open weights (confirmed - not API-only since the Jan 2026 release): Apache-2.0 checkpoints on Hugging Face with an Alibaba Cloud DashScope API for hosted use.
Alternatives →See pricing
Sarvam AI Bulbul logoSarvam AI Bulbul
The go-to hosted TTS for Indian-language products (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali and more) with REST, HTTP streaming and WebSocket APIs and prepaid INR pricing; not aimed at global multilingual coverage.
Alternatives →See pricing
Smallest.ai Waves logoSmallest.ai Waves
Speed- and price-led challenger from an India-focused voice AI startup; Waves is the speech-model API layer (Lightning TTS, Pulse STT), sold pay-as-you-go with $10 free credits, with HIPAA/SOC2/on-prem reserved for the Enterprise plan.
Alternatives →See pricing
Speechmatics TTS logoSpeechmatics TTS
Budget low-latency English TTS for voice agents; priced at a fraction of premium voice APIs, but currently English-only with a small voice set and no SSML or voice cloning.
Alternatives →See pricing
Step-Audio logoStep-Audio
Differentiates on iterative audio *editing* (emotion, style, breathing, laughter, sighs, polyphone pinyin control) rather than plain synthesis; Apache-2.0 with training code (SFT/DPO/GRPO) and vLLM support.
Alternatives →See pricing
Supertone API logoSupertone API
Expressive character voices (games, content, Korean/Japanese/English markets first, now 31 languages via Supertonic 3) on cheap credit-based subscriptions from $2.99/month; uniquely pairs the hosted API with the open OpenRAIL-M Supertonic model for on-device synthesis.
Alternatives →From$2.99/mo
Typecast logoTypecast
Expressiveness play from a Korean AI-actor studio: strongest on emotion prompts/presets and character voices for content and conversational AI; separate consumer studio subscription ($8.99+) and developer API plans (Free/Lite/Plus).
Alternatives →From$15/mo
Unreal Speech logoUnreal Speech
Pure price play: markets itself as up to 11x cheaper than ElevenLabs with a simple 3-endpoint API (stream/speech/synthesisTasks); smaller voice/language catalog and no voice cloning documented.
Alternatives →From$49/mo
VibeVoice logoVibeVoice
The open long-form/multi-speaker specialist - MIT weights, but Microsoft pulled the TTS code from the repo in Sept 2025 and frames the models as research-only.
Alternatives →See pricing
Voxtral (open weights) logoVoxtral (open weights)
A frontier-lab open-weight TTS you can run on a single 16GB GPU; the CC BY-NC license makes it evaluation/research-only, with Mistral's paid API as the commercial route.
Alternatives →See pricing
XTTS v2 (Coqui) logoXTTS v2 (Coqui)
The legacy standard for open voice cloning: dormant upstream since Coqui's Jan 2024 shutdown (community fork idiap/coqui-ai-TTS carries maintenance), and CPML weights bar commercial use.
Alternatives →See pricing

Text-to-speech APIs pricing compared (2026)

Effective monthly bill at 2M chars/mo (product feature), computed from each vendor's published rates, cheapest first. Every tool page carries the full three-tier table. How we compute costs →

Text-to-speech APIs pricing at 2M chars/mo, cheapest first
ToolPublished rateBill at 2M chars/moVerified
Supertone APICheapest paid plan $2.99/mo$2.99Jul 20
CAMB.AICheapest paid plan $5/mo$5Jul 20
WellSaidCheapest paid plan $10/mo$10Jul 20
Speechify APIUsage-priced at $10 per 1M characters (≈ $0.0095 per audio-minute)$20Jul 20
Speechmatics TTSUsage-priced at $11 per 1M characters (≈ $0.0105 per audio-minute)$22Jul 20
Fish AudioUsage-priced at $15 per 1M characters (≈ $0.0143 per audio-minute)$30Jul 20
Grok TTSUsage-priced at $15 per 1M characters (≈ $0.0143 per audio-minute)$30Jul 20
Voxtral TTSUsage-priced at $16 per 1M characters (≈ $0.0152 per audio-minute)$32Jul 20
Azure SpeechUsage-priced at $22 per 1M characters (≈ $0.0209 per audio-minute)$44Jul 20
Unreal SpeechCheapest paid plan $49/mo with 3,000,000 characters included$49Jul 20
Inworld TTSUsage-priced at $25 per 1M characters (≈ $0.0238 per audio-minute)$50Jul 20
Amazon PollyUsage-priced at $30 per 1M characters (≈ $0.0285 per audio-minute)$60Jul 20
Deepgram Aura-2Usage-priced at $30 per 1M characters (≈ $0.0285 per audio-minute)$60Jul 20
Google Cloud TTSUsage-priced at $30 per 1M characters (≈ $0.0285 per audio-minute)$60Jul 20
Murf APIUsage-priced at $30 per 1M characters (≈ $0.0285 per audio-minute)$60Jul 20
OpenAI TTSUsage-priced at $30 per 1M characters (≈ $0.0285 per audio-minute)$60Jul 20
LMNTCheapest paid plan $10/mo with 200,000 characters included$100Jul 20
RimeUsage-priced at $50 per 1M characters (≈ $0.0475 per audio-minute)$100Jul 20
TypecastUsage-priced at $70 per 1M characters (≈ $0.0665 per audio-minute)$140Jul 20
ElevenLabsUsage-priced at $100 per 1M characters (≈ $0.095 per audio-minute)$200Jul 20
MiniMax SpeechUsage-priced at $100 per 1M characters (≈ $0.095 per audio-minute)$200Jul 20
CartesiaCheapest paid plan $5/mo with 100,000 characters includedHigher planJul 20
GradiumCheapest paid plan $13/mo with 225,000 characters includedHigher planJul 20
Hume Octave TTSCheapest paid plan $3/mo with 30,000 characters includedHigher planJul 20

Popular comparisons

ElevenLabs logoElevenLabsvsOpenAI TTS logoOpenAI TTS→Cartesia logoCartesiavsElevenLabs logoElevenLabs→ElevenLabs logoElevenLabsvsVoxtral TTS logoVoxtral TTS→ElevenLabs logoElevenLabsvsMurf API logoMurf API→Amazon Polly logoAmazon PollyvsElevenLabs logoElevenLabs→ElevenLabs logoElevenLabsvsGoogle Cloud TTS logoGoogle Cloud TTS→Azure Speech logoAzure SpeechvsElevenLabs logoElevenLabs→ElevenLabs logoElevenLabsvsFish Audio logoFish Audio→Deepgram Aura-2 logoDeepgram Aura-2vsElevenLabs logoElevenLabs→Cartesia logoCartesiavsOpenAI TTS logoOpenAI TTS→Cartesia logoCartesiavsRime logoRime→Cartesia logoCartesiavsDeepgram Aura-2 logoDeepgram Aura-2→Cartesia logoCartesiavsVoxtral TTS logoVoxtral TTS→Google Cloud TTS logoGoogle Cloud TTSvsOpenAI TTS logoOpenAI TTS→Azure Speech logoAzure SpeechvsOpenAI TTS logoOpenAI TTS→OpenAI TTS logoOpenAI TTSvsVoxtral TTS logoVoxtral TTS→Azure Speech logoAzure SpeechvsGoogle Cloud TTS logoGoogle Cloud TTS→Amazon Polly logoAmazon PollyvsGoogle Cloud TTS logoGoogle Cloud TTS→Amazon Polly logoAmazon PollyvsAzure Speech logoAzure Speech→Murf API logoMurf APIvsSpeechify API logoSpeechify API→Fish Audio logoFish AudiovsMiniMax Speech logoMiniMax Speech→Inworld TTS logoInworld TTSvsRime logoRime→Cartesia logoCartesiavsInworld TTS logoInworld TTS→Cartesia logoCartesiavsLMNT logoLMNT→CAMB.AI logoCAMB.AIvsElevenLabs logoElevenLabs→Dia / Dia2 logoDia / Dia2vsElevenLabs logoElevenLabs→CosyVoice logoCosyVoicevsFish Speech logoFish Speech→Azure Speech logoAzure SpeechvsMurf API logoMurf API→

Best for…

AudiobooksAzure SpeechContent CreatorsElevenLabsDevelopersCartesiaDubbingInworld TTSSelf-HostedVoxtral TTSVoice AgentsCartesia
Voice stack cost calculator →See the real combined cost per minute of a platform, an STT API, and a TTS voice from Text-to-speech APIs and its sibling categories.

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