Google text to speech vs ElevenLabs
On official list prices checked Nov 10, 2026, Google Cloud Text-to-Speech is much cheaper per character than ElevenLabs’ API. Google WaveNet and Standard voices are $4 per 1 million characters (about $0.004 per minute at 1,000 characters). ElevenLabs is $0.04 or $0.08 per 1,000 characters (about $0.04 or $0.08 per minute at the same conversion). Google also prints a free monthly allowance on several voice families.
| Model (official page) | List price | Free allowance printed on the page |
|---|---|---|
| Google WaveNet / Standard | $4 per 1M characters | First 4 million characters per month |
| Google Neural2 / Polyglot | $16 per 1M characters | First 1 million characters per month |
| Google Chirp 3: HD | $30 per 1M characters | First 1 million characters per month |
| Google Studio voices | $160 per 1M characters | First 1 million characters per month |
| Google Instant custom voice | $60 per 1M characters | No free-usage row listed for this SKU |
| ElevenLabs Flash / Turbo / v4 Turbo | $0.04 per 1K characters | See plan credits on elevenlabs.io/pricing |
| ElevenLabs v4 / v3 / Multilingual v2 | $0.08 per 1K characters | See plan credits on elevenlabs.io/pricing |
Sources: cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/pricing and elevenlabs.io/pricing/api, as of Nov 10, 2026. Google Gemini TTS is token-billed (not in the character table); output-audio math is on the ElevenLabs cost-per-minute page.
ElevenLabs Starter is $6 / month after a $1 first month and lists a commercial license and instant voice cloning. Google Cloud bills usage on a Google Cloud account after the free characters. Those are different buying motions, not just different rates.
If you wanted a consumer app instead of either API, Speechify Premium is $29 / month or $139 / year on speechify.com, official article checked Nov 10, 2026.
Sources (as of Nov 10, 2026)
- ElevenLabs pricing and API pricing
- ElevenLabs voice cloning docs
- Speechify: How much does Speechify cost? (updated Oct 1, 2026)
- Speechify pricing and Speechify Studio pricing
- Murf pricing and Murf API pay-as-you-go
- Google Cloud Text-to-Speech pricing
- Amazon Polly pricing
- Deepgram pricing
- Cartesia pricing
- AssemblyAI pricing
- OpenAI API pricing and deprecations
- Descript pricing
- Synthesia pricing
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