Text to speech API price per 1,000 characters in October 2026

On the price pages read on 2026-10-05, character-priced text to speech runs from $0.011 per 1,000 characters (Eleven v4 Turbo, in a promo through Oct 12) up to $0.08 (Eleven v3). The middle of the field sits at $0.015 to $0.045. Sume's Sonic route is $0.0475 per 1K: Cartesia's list of $38 per 1M credits, with one credit per character, times 1.25 (47.5 micro-dollars per character), before the 5.5% platform fee.

Price is not quality. A cheap model that needs two takes is not cheap, and models differ in languages, voices and controls. Use the table to set a budget, then audition.

Price per 1,000 characters, sorted

OpenAI and Deepgram list per million or per 1K characters; the figures here are converted to per 1K. For example $15 per 1M characters is $0.015 per 1K.

What the Sume number includes

Sume bills provider list x1.25 across SKUs that have a provider list, and a 5.5% platform fee on customer spend (policy live since 2026-09-22). For TTS the character rate is $0.038 x 1.25 = $0.0475 per 1K, with each job rounded up to the cent. A 20,000-character job, the maximum, is exactly $0.95 before fee. A 1,000-character job is $0.0475, billed as $0.05.

Sume only serves Cartesia Sonic here. It does not resell Eleven, OpenAI or Deepgram voices, so rows other than the last Sonic ones are references, not Sume prices.

Reading the table honestly

• Promos end. Eleven's v4 prices are marked until Oct 12 and the page text does not give the post-promo price.
• Gemini TTS is priced per token, not per character, so it is not in this table; see the separate Gemini pricing post.
• Characters are not seconds. Cartesia states 750-800 characters per audio minute; other vendors do not publish an equivalent in the pages read.
• Per-job rounding matters for short reads: at $0.0475 per 1K, a 200-character line is $0.0095 but bills at one cent.