Deepgram Flux TTS $0.045 per 1,000 characters vs Aura-2 and Sume

Deepgram's pricing page lists Flux TTS at $0.045 per 1,000 characters on pay as you go and Aura-2 at $0.030. Sume text to speech is $0.0475 per 1,000 characters, so a 10,000-character script costs $0.45 on Flux, $0.30 on Aura-2 and $0.48 on Sume after Sume rounds the quote up to whole cents. Sume is 5.6 percent above Flux and 58 percent above Aura-2.

Prices are from Deepgram's pricing page, read 2026-10-03. The Aura-2 limits and languages are already covered in our Aura-2 price post; this page adds Flux TTS. I did not read Flux TTS limits and make no claims about them.

Three scripts, three prices

Raw price is characters times the per-1,000 rate. Sume's quote rounds up to the cent.

Per minute of speech

Speaking rates differ by voice and vendor, so I use one assumption for all three: 750 characters a minute, from Cartesia's published range of 750 to 800. At that rate Aura-2 is $0.0225 a minute, Flux $0.03375 and Sume $0.0356. Change the assumption and the order does not change, only the level.

A 200,000-character month

For a product that speaks 200,000 characters a month, the raw price is $6.00 on Aura-2, $9.00 on Flux TTS and $9.50 on Sume, before Sume's per-request rounding. The difference between the cheapest and Sume is $3.50 a month, which is small beside the cost of engineering the integration. The case for the cheaper vendor gets stronger at millions of characters, and for a live product that needs streaming, Sume is not an option.

What Sume does and does not do

Sume text to speech is $0.0475 per 1,000 characters, each quote rounded up to whole cents, up to 20,000 characters or 1,200 seconds of audio per request. Speech to text is $0.01 per minute of audio, up to 600 seconds per job.

It has no streaming output; you receive a finished audio file. The per-request cap is 20,000 characters, so the 100,000-character row above is at least five requests, and by the duration limit more like seven (14,400 characters keeps a part under 1,200 seconds).

See the per-minute TTS price for the worked examples.