Free text-to-speech API tiers, compared honestly
Free is not one thing: monthly allowances, one-time credit, or a plan with a character count. What each provider's own page says, read 2026-10-08.
What you actually get free
| Provider | Free offer read on its page | Type | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Speakvora | 100,000 characters per account (plus 60 minutes of transcription and 200 agent turns) | One-time allowance, no card | this site |
| Amazon Polly | 5M Standard characters a month; 1M Neural, 500K Long-Form, 100K Generative a month for 12 months | Monthly; most tiers for 12 months | source |
| Deepgram | $200 credit | One-time credit | source |
| Cartesia | Free plan: 20K credits a month (1 credit per character) | Monthly plan | source |
| ElevenLabs | A Free plan exists; its allowance is not labelled on the page we read | Plan | source |
How far each one goes
A 45-character notification: Speakvora's 100,000 free characters cover about 2,200 of them once. Polly Standard's 5M monthly characters cover about 111,000 every month. Cartesia's 20K credits cover about 440 a month. Deepgram's $200 at Aura-1's $0.015 per 1,000 characters is about 13.3 million characters, or roughly 296,000 notifications once.
Pick by what you are doing
- A prototype that speaks a lot of text every month: Polly Standard is the most generous recurring free tier we found.
- A demo with a few hundred lines: any of them works; Speakvora needs no card.
- Your own voice for a demo: Speakvora's allowance is shared with custom voices, so 100,000 characters also covers your own voice once.
Paid prices: text to speech pricing compared · how Speakvora counts usage.