Amazon Polly pricing
What Amazon Polly charges per million characters, what that costs at real volumes, and when a cheaper or pay-once option makes sense.
Prices are list prices from the official pricing page of Amazon Polly, read October 8, 2026. They change; confirm before you decide. Source: https://aws.amazon.com/polly/pricing/
What Amazon Polly charges
| Item | Price | Unit | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | $4.00 | per 1M characters | Free tier 5M characters a month (no time limit stated) |
| Neural | $16.00 | per 1M characters | Free tier 1M characters a month for 12 months |
| Generative | $30.00 | per 1M characters | Free tier 100K characters a month for 12 months |
| Long-Form | $100.00 | per 1M characters | Free tier 500K characters a month for 12 months |
| Caching and replay | No additional cost | - | Stated on the pricing page: you can cache and replay generated speech |
Cost at real volumes
| Model | 1M characters | 10M characters | 100M characters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | $4 | $40 | $400 |
| Neural | $16 | $160 | $1,600 |
| Generative | $30 | $300 | $3,000 |
| Long-Form | $100 | $1,000 | $10,000 |
| Speakvora catalog voices | $3 | $30 | $300 |
One million characters is very roughly 15 to 20 hours of speech. Cost only: these models sound different, and we do not claim ours match theirs. Listen to the free samples and decide.
What Amazon Polly offers
- General-purpose text to speech in several quality tiers
- Pay-per-character billing like Speakvora
- Explicit permission to cache and replay generated speech
- Deep integration with the rest of AWS
What we did not find in Amazon Polly's official material
- Curated industry phrase packs
- Voice cloning from your own recording in the pricing material reviewed
- A speech-to-text price on this page (Amazon Transcribe is a separate service, not reviewed here)
How it compares with Speakvora
Polly is the closest match on billing style: plain characters, no subscription plans (pay as you go). Its Standard tier ($4 per million) is not far from Speakvora's $3, though a different and older quality tier, and its Neural tier is $16. Polly gives you a voice engine; it does not give you finished industry phrases.
Pay once instead
If most of your audio repeats (greetings, confirmations, prompts), a one-time bundle plays offline with no per-play fee. See pay-once text to speech and the speech API alternative page.
More on Amazon Polly: · · cheapest text to speech API · .
Questions
How much does Amazon Polly cost?
For text to speech, Amazon Polly lists between $4 and $100 per million characters depending on the model, on its pricing page read October 8, 2026. Prices change, so confirm at the source: https://aws.amazon.com/polly/pricing/.
Is there a cheaper alternative to Amazon Polly?
On list price per character, yes. Speakvora's catalog voices are $3 per million characters and your own voice is $6. That is a cost comparison only; the models, languages and voices differ, and we do not claim equal quality. Polly is the closest match on billing style: plain characters, no subscription plans (pay as you go). Its Standard tier ($4 per million) is not far from Speakvora's $3, though a different and older quality tier, and its Neural tier is $16.
What does Amazon Polly do that Speakvora does not?
Amazon Polly offers: General-purpose text to speech in several quality tiers; Pay-per-character billing like Speakvora; Explicit permission to cache and replay generated speech. Speakvora is smaller, with fewer models and languages.
Can I pay once instead of per character?
For lines that repeat, yes. Speakvora sells ready-made voice bundles you buy once (audio from $14, or $214 to $399 with a local agent) and play offline with no per-play fee. If you generate a line once and keep the file, per-character pricing is already very cheap, and we say so on the comparison pages.