Rime Mist v3 vs Coda vs Sume TTS: cost for 1M characters

For one million characters of speech, Rime Mist v3 costs $30, Sume TTS 1.0 costs $47.50, and Rime Coda costs $50, going by each page read on 2026-10-05. Mist v3 is the cheapest of the three by $17.50 per million. Coda is $2.50 per million above Sume.

The three prices are all per-character, so the comparison is a straight multiplication. Nothing here measures voice quality, latency or language coverage, so treat it as a cost sheet and not a ranking of the voices.

The rates side by side

Rime's pricing page lists Mist v3 at $0.03 per 1K characters and Coda at $0.05 per 1K. Sume's API pricing page lists TTS 1.0 at $0.0475 per 1,000 characters, which is the provider list rate of $0.038 multiplied by 1.25.

What the Sume number includes

Sume bills the provider list price times 1.25, in integer USD micros. For TTS 1.0 that is 38,000 micros times 1.25, or 47,500 micros per 1,000 characters. The maximum request is 20,000 characters, so a full request reserves $0.95.

Spaces and punctuation count toward the character total, so a script's length in your editor is the number to bill against, not the count of spoken words.

Where the gap matters

The gap between Mist v3 and Sume is $0.0175 per 1K characters. At 100,000 characters a month that is $1.75. At 10 million characters a month it is $175. Below a few hundred thousand characters, a price difference this size is smaller than the time you would spend wiring up a second vendor.

The case for Coda is the opposite: it costs $2.50 per million more than Sume, so if Coda is the voice you want, the price is not the reason to choose either way. A fair test is to render the same 2,000-character script on each service, listen, and then let the cost per million decide only between the voices you would actually ship. Cheap speech that you replace after a week costs more than the voice you keep.

• Under 1M characters a month: the gap to Mist v3 is under $17.50.
• At 10M characters a month: the gap to Mist v3 is $175.
• Coda against Sume: $2.50 per million, Sume is lower.

Three monthly volumes

Here is the same arithmetic at three volumes a buyer might plan for: a narrated blog (200,000 characters a month), a podcast-style daily show (2 million) and a product that reads support replies aloud (20 million). Each figure is characters times the per-1K rate, divided by 1,000.

The Sume column is exact because it is 47,500 micros per 1,000 characters. The Rime columns are straight multiplication of the listed rates; neither includes taxes, plan fees or any volume discount that might exist off the page.

Free allowances

Rime's page also lists a free Starter allowance of roughly 800 minutes of audio. Sume's TTS has no free tier described in the docs, and the Free plan is image generation only, so a prototype on Rime's free allowance costs nothing at Rime and a prototype on Sume is billed from the first character.

How to check your own number

Multiply the character count by the per-1K rate and divide by 1,000. For Sume that is characters times 0.0475 divided by 1,000. Read the Sume rate from the pricing page before you commit, and read Rime's from its own page, because both can change. Usage billed on Sume shows up in the usage dashboard.