Offline voice pack or pay per character?
Short answer: For lines you repeat all year, a pack is a one-time price and a per-character provider is an annual bill that grows with use. At Speakvora's own API price the two can be close, so the example below shows the arithmetic rather than a slogan.
The worked example
One 45-character line played 1,000 times a day for a year is about 16.4 million characters.
| Where the audio comes from | Cost of that usage | Meter |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Polly Neural, list price | $263 a year | metered by character, every play |
| ElevenLabs Flash, list price | $657 a year | metered by character, every play |
| Speakvora API, $3 per million | $49 a year | metered; the $10 monthly minimum applies with a card |
| Speakvora offline pack | $24 to $199 once | files you keep; no meter, works offline |
What the example does and does not show
- Against per-character providers at list price, a pack is a one-time cost where the others are an annual cost that grows with every play.
- Against our own API at $3 per million, this particular usage costs about $49 a year, which is inside the price range of the larger packs. The pack is not cheaper here; it is predictable, works with no network and no latency, and has no meter to watch.
- Break-even depends on how many characters you play, not only how many different lines you have. Your yearly characters divided by a million, times the per-million price, is the number to compare with the pack price.
Honest limits
- The voices are synthetic. Where the law or good practice requires it, tell listeners they are hearing an automated voice.
- Non-English audio is marked native review pending until a native speaker approves it.
- Packs are generic, ready-made lines in the library's voices. They are not your brand voice or a script written for you; for a new sentence call the API.
- The licence lets you play the audio inside your own apps, devices and services, commercially and offline. You may not resell or redistribute the files or use them to train speech models.
Questions
When is a pack better than the API?
When you play the same lines very often, need no network, or want a fixed cost. When you play few lines or need new sentences, the API is simpler.
Do I have to choose?
No. Use the pack for common lines and the API for anything not in it.