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TTS pricing: per character vs flat rate

$30, $100

published meters, per million characters

Metered pricing bills every character you synthesise. Flat pricing bills the stream instead, and everything said on it is unmetered. The break-even is arithmetic, not philosophy.

The two models, defined

Published character meters run $30 to $100 per million characters (July 2026). A spoken minute is about 1,000 characters, so that is 3 to 10 cents a minute, forever. A stream is $150 a month.

What the meter does to a product

  • It prices growth: close a big customer and the voice bill doubles with the win.
  • It prices quality: when characters cost money, someone shortens the agent’s answers.
  • It prices interruptions: every barge-in bills characters nobody heard.

What flat pricing costs you

Idle capacity. A stream you bought and did not talk on is money spent, which is why low-volume traffic belongs on prepaid tokens instead. Here that is $10 a million on the same engine. Flat wins when the streams are busy or shared, past about 15,000 spoken minutes a month.

Every term on this page is measurable. Take a key and read the numbers off your own requests.

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