Fish Audio alternative with per-character pricing
If you pay Fish Audio by the byte and your text is not plain English, the bill is hard to predict. This page covers moving to per-character billing.
What the same job costs
Text to speech billed per character, at list price. Fish Audio charges $15.00 to $15.00 per million characters; Speakvora catalog voices are $0.70, which is 95% to 95% less for the same number of characters. Different models, so this compares cost, not voice quality.
| Voice | 1M characters | 10M a month | 100M a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fish Audio s2.1-pro text to speech | $15.00 | $150 | $1,500 |
| Speakvora catalog voices | $0.70 | $7.00 | $70.00 |
| Speakvora your own voice | $6.00 | $60.00 | $600 |
Source: Fish Audio official pricing, checked 2026-10-08. Prices change; confirm on the source. Speech to text, agents and plans are priced in other units, explained below.
Who switches
- Your text includes non-English scripts that cost more bytes
- You want a lower list price per character
- Much of your speech is repeated prompts
What you gain
- Plain per-character billing
- $0.70 per million for catalog voices and $6 for your own voice
- Ready-made packs and a checked phrase library
What you give up
- Fish Audio's s2 expressive models and multi-speaker dialogue
- Inline reference-audio cloning in one call
- Its prosody controls
The code change
Request shapes were taken from each provider's own documentation on 2026-10-08. Provider APIs change; check theirs before you migrate.
Fish Audio text to speech (docs: docs.fish.audio/api-reference)
curl -X POST https://api.fish.audio/v1/tts \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $FISH_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "model: s2.1-pro" \
-d '{"text":"Hello, how can I help you today?","reference_id":"$VOICE_ID","format":"mp3"}' --output prompt.mp3
# response body is the audio bytesSpeakvora text to speech
curl -X POST https://speakvora.com/api/v1/speak \
-H "x-api-key: $SPEAKVORA_KEY" -H "content-type: application/json" \
-d '{"text":"Hello, how can I help you today?","voice":"af_heart","lang":"en"}'
# JSON reply: {"url":"https://speakvora.com/...m4a","lang":"en","voice":"af_heart","characters":32,"format":"m4a"}
curl -s "$URL" --output prompt.m4a # second step: download (or play) the linkWhat changes in practice: Fish Audio takes a bearer token and an optional `model` header and returns audio; Speakvora takes an `x-api-key`, text, voice and language, and returns a link. The text limit is 500 characters per request, and Speakvora returns JSON with a url that you fetch or play. Library links are stable public files; custom-voice links last about five minutes.
A safe migration order
- Count your monthly characters and bytes.
- Price them at both providers' list rates.
- Move steady prompts first and keep expressive lines where they are.
Is it actually cheaper?
Fish Audio's page lists s2.1-pro at $15 per million UTF-8 bytes. For English that is about $15 per million characters; for scripts such as Chinese, Japanese or Hindi each character takes several bytes, so the cost per character rises. Speakvora's catalog voices are $0.70 per million characters and your own voice is $6.
Full numbers, scenarios and sources: Speakvora vs Fish Audio.
Test these before you commit
- Compare quality on your own lines; we do not claim to beat Fish Audio.
- Check whether you rely on multi-speaker dialogue.
- Try the free allowance first: 100,000 characters, once per account.
Speakvora is in early access with billing is live; questions to support@eyeguide.ai. Latency: see the speed page.