250,000 characters: ElevenLabs v4 Turbo before/after Oct 12 vs Sume
250,000 characters on ElevenLabs v4 Turbo cost $2.75 until Oct 12 and $10.00 after. Sume TTS is $11.88 for the same text. The break-even is the date.
For 250,000 characters, ElevenLabs v4 Turbo costs $2.75 at the promotional rate shown on its API pricing page until October 12, and $10.00 at the regular rate after. Sume TTS costs $11.88 for the same text. If you can run the job by October 12, ElevenLabs is the cheapest option here by a wide margin.
Per 1,000 characters
ElevenLabs lists v4 Turbo at $0.011 per 1,000 characters, 72% off its regular $0.04, until October 12. Its Flash/Turbo line is $0.04 and v2 Multilingual is $0.08. Sume lists one TTS price: $0.0475 per 1,000 characters.
| Route | Per 1,000 characters | 250 thousand-character blocks |
|---|---|---|
| ElevenLabs v4 Turbo, promo | $0.011 | $2.75 |
| ElevenLabs v4 Turbo, regular | $0.04 | $10.00 |
| ElevenLabs v2 Multilingual | $0.08 | $20.00 |
| Sume TTS 1.0 | $0.0475 | $11.875 |
The gap after the promotion
Once the promotion ends, ElevenLabs v4 Turbo at $0.04 is $1.875 cheaper than Sume on this job, which is 16% of Sume's price. Sume's rate is 4.32 times the promotional rate, so the promotion window is where the largest gap sits.
What changes the answer
A single request on Sume is capped at 20,000 characters ($0.95), so 250,000 characters is 13 jobs: 12 at the cap and one with the remaining 10,000. The count matters if you queue by job, not by character. ElevenLabs' limits are on its own pages and are not compared here.
Sume's advantage is not the per-character rate. It is that TTS, the Timeline render and the video models share one balance and one job API, so a script that turns into a narrated video stays inside one integration. Read the ElevenLabs pricing page on the day you buy, since promotions end without notice, and check the Sume catalog for the current TTS rate.
- Before Oct 12 and speech only: ElevenLabs promo is lowest.
- After Oct 12: the gap narrows to $0.0075 per 1,000 characters.
- Narration that becomes a Sume-rendered video: one balance may beat the gap.
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 ElevenLabs 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.
Sources
Related posts
More in Comparisons
- 2K image price check: FLUX.3 $0.100, GPT 2.5 $0.0556, Banana $0.15
A 2K image costs $0.100 on BFL's FLUX.3, $0.055625 on Sume's GPT Image 2.5 medium, and $0.15 on Sume's Nano Banana 2.1. 100 images: $10.00, $5.56, $15.00.
- 3-second clip: Wan 3.0 $0.375 vs Seedance 2.5 at its 4 s floor
Wan 3.0 accepts 2 to 30 seconds on Sume, so a 3-second 720p clip is $0.375. Seedance 2.5 starts at 4 seconds, so its shortest 720p clip is $2.3112.
- 30-second talking video on Sume: Avatar tiers vs Fabric vs H3 Lip Sync
Thirty seconds of talking video costs $5.52 on Avatar Video standard, $7.35 plus, $16.50 max, $5.63 on VEED Fabric 720p and $3.00 on H3 Max Lip Sync at 768p.
- 3,000 Nano Banana 2.1 images: Google batch, standard and Sume
At 1K, 3,000 Nano Banana 2.1 images cost $50.40 on Google batch, $100.80 standard and $300 on Sume. At 4K: $170.10, $339 and $600. Sources and arithmetic.
Written by Sume