Runway Text to Speech: 1 credit per 50 characters, priced per script

Runway's Text to Speech costs 1 credit per 50 characters, so 1,000 characters is 20 credits. At Runway's plan prices that is $0.20 to $0.48 per 1,000 characters, and a 10,000-character script costs $2.00 to $4.80. Sume's TTS is listed at $0.0475 per 1,000 characters, so the same script is $0.475.

The Runway dollar figures are derived: the page lists credits, and I divided each plan's fee by its pool to get a price per credit.

What does a 10,000-character script cost on each plan?

A 10,000-character script is roughly 1,700 words, which is a long explainer voice-over. It uses 200 Runway credits. Plan prices on runway.com/pricing are Standard $15 monthly ($12 annual) for 625 credits, Pro $35 ($28) for 2,250 and Max $95 ($76) for 9,500.

Why is the gap so large?

Runway prices speech inside a credit system that is designed around video. Gen-4.5 on the same page costs 60 credits for 5 seconds, so a credit has to cover a lot. Speech is cheap to produce, and 1 credit per 50 characters spends little of a big pool, but on a small Standard pool the same script eats a third of the month.

Sume bills TTS as a fixed per-character rate. Its API pricing page lists $0.0475 per 1,000 characters with a maximum of 20,000 characters per request, so a 10,000-character script fits in a single request.

When does Runway's TTS still make sense?

When the voice-over is a side task inside a Runway project and you have credits left over, the marginal cost is a few cents of an already-paid pool. That is a fair reason to stay in one tool. If voice is the main job, the per-character rate above is the number to compare, and the Standard plan is the most expensive way to buy speech on that page.

The same comparison against a specific voice model is in Eleven v4 TTS on Runway credits per 1,000 characters. For how Runway turns a plan into a per-credit price in the first place, see Runway credit price by plan.

How do I check my own script?

Count characters including spaces. Divide by 50 for Runway credits, multiply by your plan's price per credit, and compare with the character count divided by 1,000 times $0.0475.