Is ElevenLabs cheaper than OpenAI TTS per minute?

On list prices checked Nov 10, 2026, OpenAI tts-1 is $15 per 1 million characters (about $0.015 per minute at 1,000 characters per minute) and tts-1-hd is $30 per 1 million characters (about $0.030). ElevenLabs Flash/Turbo is $0.04 per 1,000 characters and v4 is $0.08. OpenAI’s tts-1 family is scheduled to shut down January 6, 2027.

What is the cheapest text to speech API in 2026?

Among character-billed APIs checked on Nov 10, 2026, Google Cloud WaveNet and Standard voices and Amazon Polly Standard voices are the lowest list prices at $4 per 1 million characters, or about $0.004 per minute at 1,000 characters per minute, after their free monthly allowances.

Updated Nov 10, 2026 (America/New_York) · US English comparison · Independent, unpaid

How much does ElevenLabs cost per minute?

Q: How much does ElevenLabs cost per minute?

As of Nov 10, 2026, ElevenLabs lists $0.08 per 1,000 characters for v4, v3 and Multilingual v2, and $0.04 per 1,000 characters for v4 Turbo, v3 Conversational and Flash/Turbo. ElevenLabs’ own pricing table treats about 1,000 characters as one minute, so that is about $0.08 or $0.04 per minute of audio at their conversion. Source: https://elevenlabs.io/pricing/api

Short answer: $0.04 or $0.08 per minute, depending on the model, if you use ElevenLabs’ own conversion of about 1,000 characters per minute. That comes straight from the official API price list checked on Nov 10, 2026: $0.04 per 1,000 characters for v4 Turbo, v3 Conversational and Flash/Turbo, and $0.08 per 1,000 characters for v4, v3 and Multilingual v2. Source: elevenlabs.io/pricing/api.

$0.04 / minElevenLabs Flash, Turbo, v4 Turbo, v3 Conversational

$0.08 / minElevenLabs v4, v3, Multilingual v2

$0.004 / minLowest character-billed list prices in this table: Google WaveNet / Polly Standard

Jan 6, 2027OpenAI tts-1, tts-1-hd and gpt-4o-mini-tts scheduled shutdown

The “per minute” column is a planning estimate. Providers bill by characters (or credits, or tokens), not by the wall-clock minute of audio, and speaking rate changes the result. This page uses 1,000 characters = 1 minute because that is the conversion ElevenLabs prints on its own pricing table (for example, 10,000 characters ≈ 10 minutes). Cartesia’s pricing FAQ says Sonic uses “about 750 to 800 credits per minute,” and Amazon Polly’s examples imply a slower rate (1 million characters ≈ 23 hours 8 minutes, or about 720 characters per minute). If your voice is closer to 800 characters per minute, multiply every estimate on this page by 0.8.

ElevenLabs vs other TTS APIs, cost per minute

This table answers the follow-up that usually comes with the ElevenLabs question: is $0.04–$0.08 a good rate? Figures are list prices for pay-as-you-go or included-credit rates, in US dollars, as of Nov 10, 2026. Free monthly allowances are noted, not subtracted from the unit price.

Filter Click a column header to sort. Estimated $/min uses 1,000 characters = 1 minute.

Vendor	Model	Official unit price	Est. $ / minute	Notes	Source	Link
Google Cloud	WaveNet / Standard voices	$4 per 1M characters	$0.0040	First 4 million characters each month are free, then this rate. Price is per input character, including spaces, newlines, and most SSML tags.	Google Cloud pricing, as of Nov 10, 2026	Open Google
Amazon Polly	Standard voices	$4.00 per 1M characters	$0.0040	Pay-as-you-go, outside the free tier. Free tier: 5 million characters per month for Standard voices.	Amazon Polly pricing, as of Nov 10, 2026	Open Polly
Murf	Falcon (API pay-as-you-go)	$0.01 per 1,000 characters	$0.0100	Official help article. Minimum purchase on that page is $10. You add credits or turn on autopay.	Murf pay-as-you-go, as of Nov 10, 2026	Open Murf
Deepgram	Aura-1 (pay as you go)	$0.0150 per 1K characters	$0.0150	Billed per 1,000 characters of input text. Growth plan lists $0.0135 per 1K.	Deepgram pricing, as of Nov 10, 2026	Open Deepgram
OpenAI	tts-1	$15.00 per 1M characters	$0.0150	Still listed on the API pricing page. Deprecated; scheduled to shut down Jan 6, 2027. Replacement named there: gpt-realtime-2.1-mini.Ends Jan 6, 2027	OpenAI pricing and deprecations, as of Nov 10, 2026	Open OpenAI
AssemblyAI	AssemblyAI-TTS-1	$15 per 1M characters	$0.0150	Pay as you go. Billed on input characters. The pricing page says cloned voices and EU processing are the same price.	AssemblyAI pricing, as of Nov 10, 2026	Open AssemblyAI
Google Cloud	Neural2 / Polyglot voices	$16 per 1M characters	$0.0160	First 1 million characters each month are free, then this rate.	Google Cloud pricing, as of Nov 10, 2026	Open Google
Amazon Polly	Neural voices	$16.00 per 1M characters	$0.0160	Pay-as-you-go, outside the free tier. Free tier: 1 million characters per month for the first 12 months.	Amazon Polly pricing, as of Nov 10, 2026	Open Polly
Deepgram	Aura-2 (pay as you go)	$0.030 per 1K characters	$0.0300	Growth plan lists $0.027 per 1K.	Deepgram pricing, as of Nov 10, 2026	Open Deepgram
OpenAI	tts-1-hd	$30.00 per 1M characters	$0.0300	Deprecated; scheduled to shut down Jan 6, 2027.Ends Jan 6, 2027	OpenAI pricing and deprecations, as of Nov 10, 2026	Open OpenAI
Google Cloud	Chirp 3: HD voices	$30 per 1M characters	$0.0300	First 1 million characters each month are free, then this rate. Official page also lists US$0.00003 per character.	Google Cloud pricing, as of Nov 10, 2026	Open Google
Amazon Polly	Generative voices	$30 per 1M characters	$0.0300	Pay-as-you-go, outside the free tier. Free tier: 100 thousand characters per month for the first 12 months.	Amazon Polly pricing, as of Nov 10, 2026	Open Polly
Murf	Gen 2 (API pay-as-you-go)	$0.03 per 1,000 characters	$0.0300	Official help article. Same $10 minimum purchase note as Falcon.	Murf pay-as-you-go, as of Nov 10, 2026	Open Murf
Cartesia	Sonic, Scale plan (included credits)	$299 / 8M credits	$0.0374	Worked out: the pricing page sells Scale at $299 per month with 8 million credits, and says Sonic TTS is 1 credit per character. $299 ÷ 8,000,000 × 1,000 = $0.037375 per 1K characters, which is $0.0374 per minute at the 1,000-character assumption. Official overage on Scale is $38 per 1M credits ($0.038 per 1K).	Cartesia pricing, as of Nov 10, 2026	Open Cartesia
ElevenLabs	v4 Turbo / v3 Conversational / Flash / Turbo	$0.04 per 1K characters	$0.0400	Official API list price. ElevenLabs’ own table equates 1,000 characters with about 1 minute for these models.	ElevenLabs API pricing, as of Nov 10, 2026	Open ElevenLabs
Deepgram	Flux TTS (pay as you go)	$0.0450 per 1K characters	$0.0450	Same rate on Growth. Page notes $1 in credits for every $1 spent, up to $500, through Dec. 31, 2026.	Deepgram pricing, as of Nov 10, 2026	Open Deepgram
Google Cloud	Instant custom voice	$60 per 1M characters	$0.0600	No free-usage row listed for this SKU on the pricing page.	Google Cloud pricing, as of Nov 10, 2026	Open Google
ElevenLabs	v4 / v3 / Multilingual v2	$0.08 per 1K characters	$0.0800	Official API list price for the higher-quality / multilingual models. This is the figure most “ElevenLabs cost per minute” answers should start from if you are using v4, v3, or Multilingual v2, not Flash or Turbo.	ElevenLabs API pricing, as of Nov 10, 2026	Open ElevenLabs
Amazon Polly	Long-Form voices	$100.00 per 1M characters	$0.1000	Pay-as-you-go, outside the free tier. Free tier: 500 thousand characters per month for the first 12 months.	Amazon Polly pricing, as of Nov 10, 2026	Open Polly
Google Cloud	Studio voices	$160 per 1M characters	$0.1600	First 1 million characters each month are free, then this rate.	Google Cloud pricing, as of Nov 10, 2026	Open Google

Cost calculator

This only multiplies a listed per-character rate by the number of characters you choose. It does not include taxes, free-tier allowances, overages, or token-billed models.

Minutes Characters per minute Rate

Estimated cost: —

How much does ElevenLabs cost per month?

That is a related autocomplete query, and the same official page lists subscription plans next to the API rates. As of Nov 10, 2026, the API pricing table shows:

Starter: $6 per month, first month $1, with 75,000 characters of v4 included (about 75 minutes at ElevenLabs’ conversion).
Creator: $22 per month, first month $11, with 275,000 characters of v4 included (about 275 minutes).
Pro: $99 per month, 1,238,000 characters of v4.
Scale: $299 per month, 3,738,000 characters of v4.
Business: $990 per month, 12,375,000 characters of v4.

Worked out from those included amounts, the Creator plan’s included v4 characters cost $22 ÷ 275,000 × 1,000 = $0.08 per 1,000 characters — the same as the API list rate. Extra usage is billed at the per-character rates above. Source: ElevenLabs API pricing, as of Nov 10, 2026.

Token-billed models (not in the per-minute table)

Some newer models bill by tokens, not characters. Mixing those into the same $/minute column would require extra assumptions, so they are kept separate.

OpenAI gpt-4o-mini-tts: $0.60 per 1 million text input tokens and $12.00 per 1 million audio output tokens, from the official API pricing page, as of Nov 10, 2026. This model is also scheduled to shut down January 6, 2027.
Google Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS (Preview), through December 31, 2026: $0.50 per 1 million text input tokens and $9.00 per 1 million audio output tokens. The same page says audio tokens correspond to 25 tokens per second of audio, so output audio alone is 1,500 tokens per minute, or $9 × 1,500 / 1,000,000 = $0.0135 per minute of output audio, plus whatever the text input costs. From January 1, 2027 the listed rates double. Source: Google Cloud Text-to-Speech pricing, as of Nov 10, 2026.
Google Gemini 3.8 Flash-Lite TTS (Preview), through December 31, 2026: $0.50 per 1 million text input tokens and $6.00 per 1 million audio output tokens. Using the same official 25 tokens/second conversion, output audio alone is $0.009 per minute, plus text input. Rates also double on January 1, 2027.

Looking for a consumer reader or a yearly voiceover plan instead of an API? Speechify Premium is $29 a month or $139 a year on speechify.com; Speechify Studio starts at $100 a year. Official prices, Nov 10, 2026. See How much does Speechify cost? and Speechify vs ElevenLabs.