Deepgram Flux TTS: $0.045 per 1K characters after the free period

Deepgram lists Flux TTS at $0.045 per 1,000 characters, which is $45 per million. Trade press reports that Flux TTS launched on 2026-08-13 with a free tier through 2026-09-12 and standard pricing from 2026-09-13, so the free period is over. The pricing page corroborates the price; the launch dates and the English-only launch come from audioXpress and are press-reported.

The listed price

Deepgram's pricing page lists three text-to-speech models on 2026-10-05.

What press coverage adds

From audioXpress, trade press. Treat these as reported, not as Deepgram's own statements.

• Flux TTS launched 2026-08-13 as a conversation-aware model for voice agents.
• An 80 ms response latency was claimed. It is a vendor claim relayed by the press and was not measured for this post.
• On an interruption it returns text_spoken and text_remaining, so an agent knows how much of its sentence the caller heard.
• English only at launch.
• Free through 2026-09-12; standard price from 2026-09-13.

What it costs for real scripts

Arithmetic on the listed rates. Cartesia's page says a minute of audio takes 750 to 800 characters, which this post uses only to translate characters into minutes; Deepgram does not state a ratio, so the minute column is an estimate.

When Flux is worth 1.5x

The extra $0.015 per thousand characters buys the interruption bookkeeping and the low latency claim, which matter for live voice agents that must stop mid-sentence and resume correctly. For produced audio, such as an ad read or a narrated video, those features do nothing, and Aura-2 or another engine is the better value. Many teams will pay for Flux only on the live path.

Sume does not ship Deepgram. Its TTS Router offers Cartesia Sonic, billed at $0.0475 per 1,000 characters (Cartesia's $38 per million list times 1.25) before rounding up to the cent and the 5.5% platform fee, and it has no streaming in its first version, so it suits produced audio rather than live agents.