8,000 characters: Sume TTS $0.38 vs ElevenLabs $0.32–$0.64
Voicing an 8,000-character audiobook sample: Sume $0.0475 per 1,000 characters is $0.38; ElevenLabs lists $0.04 Flash, $0.08 multilingual. Read 2026-10-09.
Turning an 8,000-character audiobook sample into speech costs $0.38 on Sume. ElevenLabs lists $0.32 for its Flash and Turbo models and $0.64 for its multilingual v2 and v3 models. Sume is above Flash by $0.06 and below the multilingual models by $0.26.
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.
| Service and model | Rate per 1,000 characters | Total |
|---|---|---|
| Sume TTS 1.0 | $0.0475 | $0.380 |
| ElevenLabs Flash / Turbo | $0.04 | $0.320 |
| ElevenLabs v2 Multilingual | $0.08 | $0.640 |
| ElevenLabs v3 | $0.08 | $0.640 |
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 8,000 characters a month, the monthly gap against ElevenLabs multilingual is $0.26; against Flash it is $0.06 the other way.
Sources
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