1,000 minutes of speech: Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS now, batch, 2027 vs Sume

One thousand minutes of Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS audio costs $13.50 on the standard tier and $6.75 on batch through December 31, 2026, per Google's pricing page, and double that from January 1, 2027. Sume TTS costs about $42.75 for 1,000 minutes if a minute of speech is 900 characters, an assumption you should replace with your own figure.

The arithmetic

Google quotes $0.00225 per 10 seconds of audio standard and $0.001125 batch, so a minute is six blocks. Sume bills $0.0475 per 1,000 characters.

The assumptions

The 900 characters per minute is 15 characters per second, which is a round number, not a measured speech rate. Real scripts run faster or slower by language and voice, and Sume's cost scales with the character count, not the audio length. Google's cost scales with audio length. If your speech runs at 1,200 characters a minute the Sume figure becomes $57.00 for 1,000 minutes.

Sume caps a request at 20,000 characters ($0.95), so 900,000 characters is 45 jobs. That is a queueing fact more than a cost fact, but plan for it.

Reading the result

Sume is 3.17 times Google's standard price and 6.33 times batch at these assumptions. After the January doubling the multiples fall to 1.58 and 3.17. If the job is bulk narration with no deadline, Google's batch tier is the lowest number on the page.

Sume's case is the pipeline around the voice: the same balance pays for Timeline rendering and the video models. Check the Gemini pricing page and the Sume catalog before you plan a year of audio.

• Bulk narration, no deadline: Google batch.
• Speech inside a Sume video pipeline: Sume TTS, one balance.
• Rerun the numbers with your real characters-per-minute.

Reproduce the numbers

Every Sume price on this page comes from the public catalog at https://api.sume.com/v1/catalog, which needs no API key. Fetch it, find the row for the job or model named in the table, and multiply by your own seconds, characters or image count. Sume bills the list price shown in that row, so the catalog figure is the one that applies to your balance.

Vendor figures were read from Google Gemini API pricing on 2026-10-09 and are the vendor's to change. Where a vendor page did not show a number, this page leaves it out instead of guessing, and any assumption that is ours is labeled as one.