TTS price per minute of speech: five vendors at 750 characters

Converted to one yardstick of 750 characters per minute of speech, listed text-to-speech prices run from $0.00825 a minute (ElevenLabs v4 Turbo during its promotion) to $0.1125 (Hume Free overage), and Sume's $0.0475 per 1,000 characters is $0.0356. The yardstick is Cartesia's published low end of 750 credits a minute; other vendors' voices speak faster or slower, so use this table to rank, not to quote a bill.

Prices are from the pricing pages of Deepgram, ElevenLabs, Hume and LiveKit, read 2026-10-03; the conversion is mine.

The conversion

Per minute equals the per-1,000-character price times 0.75.

Two things the table hides

ElevenLabs v4 and v4 Turbo are listed at 72 percent off until October 12, so their rows change in nine days. LiveKit lists TTS models directly per minute, from free up to $0.03 a minute on its Build and Ship plans; I did not convert those since they are already per minute and depend on the model chosen.

Quality, voices, languages and limits per request all differ. Sume allows up to 20,000 characters or 1,200 seconds of audio per request. For language counts see Sonic 3.6 languages.

One hour of narration

An hour of speech at 750 characters a minute is 45,000 characters. The raw price is $0.99 on ElevenLabs v4 during its promotion, $1.35 on Aura-2, $1.80 on ElevenLabs Flash or Turbo, $2.03 on Flux TTS, $2.25 on Hume Business overage, $3.60 on ElevenLabs v3 and $6.75 on Hume Free overage. Sume's raw price is $2.14; split into four requests (three of 14,400 characters at $0.69, one of 1,800 at $0.09) it quotes at $2.16.

What Sume does and does not do

Sume text to speech is $0.0475 per 1,000 characters, each quote rounded up to whole cents, up to 20,000 characters or 1,200 seconds of audio per request. Speech to text is $0.01 per minute of audio, up to 600 seconds per job.

Sume's price is flat per character with no plan tiers.