500,000 characters: Sume TTS $23.75 vs ElevenLabs $20.00–$40.00

Turning a 500,000-character back catalog into speech costs $23.75 on Sume. ElevenLabs lists $20.00 for its Flash and Turbo models and $40.00 for its multilingual v2 and v3 models. Sume is above Flash by $3.75 and below the multilingual models by $16.25.

The arithmetic

The Sume public catalog lists Text to speech at $0.0475 per 1,000 characters; ElevenLabs' API pricing page lists $0.04 per 1,000 characters for Flash and Turbo and $0.08 for v2 Multilingual and v3 (both read 2026-10-09). Price is characters divided by 1,000, times the rate.

How to read it

The cheapest line is ElevenLabs Flash. Voices differ per service, so a lower price is only a saving if you accept that voice. Sume reserves the amount from the transcript character count and rounds the reservation up to a whole cent, so the reservation for a very short text is at least one cent.

If your volume is 500,000 characters a month, the monthly gap against ElevenLabs multilingual is $16.25; against Flash it is $3.75 the other way.