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The cheapest text-to-speech API, compared
List prices per million characters from the major text-to-speech APIs, side by side. Giggy Fast costs $5 and Giggy Streaming $10, with prepaid credits and no subscription.
Text to speech: what you pay
| Provider | Mode or model | USD per 1M characters |
|---|---|---|
| Giggy | Fast | $5.00 |
| Giggy | Streaming | $10.00 |
| Fish Audio | S2.1 Pro | $15.00 |
| Inworld | Realtime TTS-2 Flash | $15.00 |
| OpenAI | tts-1 | $15.00 |
| Azure | Neural TTS | $15.00 |
| Inworld | Realtime TTS-2 | $25.00 |
| Amazon | Polly Generative | $30.00 |
| Deepgram | Aura-2 | $30.00 |
| Chirp 3: HD | $30.00 | |
| OpenAI | tts-1-hd | $30.00 |
| Cartesia | Sonic-3.6 · Scale overage | $38.00 |
| ElevenLabs | Flash v2.5 | $40.00 |
| ElevenLabs | Multilingual v2 / v3 / v4 | $80.00 |
| MiniMax | Speech-02-HD | $100.00 |
ElevenLabs, OpenAI, Deepgram, Google, Amazon and Azure checked November 11, 2026; Fish and Inworld October 20; Cartesia and MiniMax October 13.
How this comparison works
Each price is the provider's published pay-as-you-go rate for its standard voices, converted to US dollars per million characters and linked to its source. Subscriptions, volume discounts and promotions are excluded. Giggy rates use Pro, Studio or Scale credits; Starter and Creator packs cost more per credit.
Providers count characters differently. Giggy counts Unicode code points, including spaces and punctuation, at the same rate in every language.
Why Giggy costs less
Giggy built its speech model around efficiency: smaller, faster models that are cheaper to serve without giving up naturalness. That saving is passed on as a lower price per character, so long scripts, audiobooks and high-volume voice agents stay affordable.
What the difference means at scale
At ten million characters a month, roughly 160 hours of narration, Giggy Fast costs $50. The same volume costs $400 on ElevenLabs Flash v2.5, $800 on ElevenLabs Multilingual v2, and $300 on Google Chirp 3: HD, Amazon Polly Generative or Deepgram Aura-2.
Frequently asked questions
What is the cheapest text-to-speech API?
Among the providers compared here, Giggy Fast has the lowest published paid rate at $5 per 1,000,000 characters. Giggy Batch is also free within request and queue limits.
Are these prices per character or per word?
All prices are converted to US dollars per million characters. A typical English word averages about six characters including the space after it.
Do cheaper voices sound worse?
Not necessarily. In the Coval tts-v1 snapshot, Giggy Streaming recorded a lower word error rate than ElevenLabs Flash v2.5, Deepgram Aura-2 and Google Chirp 3: HD. Listen to samples in the Voice Library before you decide.