Unreal Speech TTS plans in dollars per million characters vs Sume

Unreal Speech sells text-to-speech by monthly plan, with a character allowance in each (read 2026-10-06). Dividing the plan price by its allowance gives an effective rate per million characters, but only if you use the whole allowance. Sume has no plan: Sume TTS 1.0 is $0.0475 per 1,000 characters, $47.50 per million, rounded up to the cent per job.

Effective rate per plan

Where a plan stops paying off

A monthly plan beats pay-as-you-go only when you use enough of it. At Sume's rate, $49 buys 1,031,579 characters, about 1.03 million. So Unreal's Basic plan is cheaper once you use more than about a million characters a month; below that, a plan's flat fee is mostly unused allowance. A ten-video month at 750 characters each is 7,500 characters, which costs $0.40 on Sume across ten jobs.

The page also says one minute of audio is roughly 750 characters, a rule of thumb used for the planning figures elsewhere on this blog.

What to compare besides price

• Billing shape: plan or usage. Sume charges per finished job and returns the cost in the job record.
• Request limits: Sume takes up to 20,000 characters per job.
• Provenance: Sume can bind a job to an accepted script and return a receipt.
• Do not infer quality from price; the table is arithmetic from list prices.