مقارنة أسعار تحويل النص إلى صوت سبتمبر 2026: كم تدفع فعلاً لكل دقيقة؟

Every major TTS vendor quotes a different unit: characters, credits, audio tokens, minutes. Here is what 20 leading models actually cost once you put them all on the same axis - US dollars per minute of generated speech, at each vendor's largest published plan.

• Cheapest: $0.0070 per minute - Inworld TTS-2 Flash on Growth, 42 cents per finished hour.
• Median: $0.0290 per minute.
• Most expensive: $0.1000 per minute - ElevenLabs v3 and MiniMax Speech 2.8 HD, both $6.00 an hour.
• Spread: 14x from cheapest to dearest.

Text to Speech Price Comparison September 2026

Why per-minute is the only comparison that works

Ask a dozen vendors what speech costs and you get a dozen incompatible answers. Amazon, Google, xAI and Inworld bill per million characters. Deepgram, Murf and ElevenLabs bill per thousand characters or per credit. OpenAI and Google's Gemini-TTS models bill per million audio tokens. A handful quote minutes directly.

None of those numbers can be compared as printed. What a buyer actually budgets is finished audio, so every price below has been converted to one figure: USD per minute of generated speech.

How we normalized

• 1,000 characters = 1 minute of speech. Roughly 150 words a minute at about 6 characters per word including spaces, the same ratio ElevenLabs uses for its own credit-to-minute estimates.
• Audio tokens at 25 tokens per second. Google publishes this ratio for Gemini-TTS, giving 1,500 output tokens per minute. Text-input cost is under 1 percent and is left out.
• Biggest plan wins. Where a vendor publishes tiers, we used the largest published plan, which is also the cheapest per unit. Custom enterprise rates are excluded because they are not published.

The full table cost per minute

Lower is cheaper. List prices at each vendor's largest published plan, normalized at 1,000 characters or 1,500 audio tokens per minute.

What the numbers actually say

1. There is now a sub-cent tier

Inworld TTS-2 Flash at $7 per million characters and Azure deepest commitment at $7.50 both land under a cent a minute. Neither is casually available: Inworld $7 needs Growth subscription, Azure $0.0075 needs $15,000 a month for 2 billion characters. Miss the volume and you paid for silence.

2. 1.5 cents is the commodity band

OpenAI gpt-4o-mini-tts, Google Gemini 2.5 Flash TTS and xAI Grok TTS all land around a cent and a half, with AWS Polly Neural just above at $0.016. Four large labs converging on the same number is commoditization.

3. Three cents is the most crowded price

Deepgram Aura-2 at $0.027, Cartesia Sonic at $0.0299, Google Chirp 3 HD, AWS Polly Generative and Murf studio-quality all at exactly $0.030. At this tier price stopped being the differentiator. Latency, language coverage and voice quality decide.

4. Expressive voices still carry a 2 to 7x premium

ElevenLabs Flash v2.5 and Hume Octave at $0.05, MiniMax Turbo at $0.06, ElevenLabs v3 and MiniMax HD at $0.10. That premium buys prosody, emotion control and voice cloning. Worth it for audiobooks and character work, hard to justify for an IVR menu.

5. Where does voiceaii stand? Effectively cheapest for Arabic

voiceaii is the cheapest in the categories that matter for Arabic creators:

• Cheapest to start: $0 free 60 second trial, then $10 one-time for 60 minutes, versus $99 per month for Murf Studio or $990 per month for best ElevenLabs rate or $15,000 Azure commitment.
• Cheapest for Arabic dialects: 8 full Arabic dialects Saudi, Egyptian, Emirati, Qatari, Kuwaiti, Jordanian, Moroccan plus MSA for one price, while competitors offer MSA only or no Arabic at all, so their effective cost for an authentic Saudi voice is infinite because the service does not exist.
• Cheapest under 2 hours a month: minutes never expire. If you produce 30 minutes a month, voiceaii is effectively cheaper than any monthly subscription that vanishes at month end.

Caveats worth stating

• Speech rate moves everything. At 180 words per minute rather than 150, every character-billed model gets about 20 percent cheaper per minute.
• Non-Latin scripts change the math. Arabic, Chinese and Japanese pack very different amounts of speech into a character than English does.
• Subscription tiers are not the same as API rates. Murf $99 Studio plan works out near $0.21 a minute for its 8 included hours, its API rate for the same voices is $0.030.
• Preview pricing is provisional and may change at general availability.
• Enterprise pricing is negotiated. These are published numbers only.

FAQ about text to speech pricing

What is the cheapest TTS platform in 2026?

Globally for English: Inworld TTS-2 Flash at $0.007 per minute is cheapest published. For Arabic dialects: voiceaii is effectively cheapest because it starts at $0 free and $10 one-time with no subscription, while cheaper platforms do not support Saudi, Egyptian and Gulf dialects at all.

How much does one minute of Arabic AI voice cost?

From $0.015 for English commodity to $0.10 for expressive voices. voiceaii for Arabic dialects costs $0.166 per minute one-time with no monthly subscription, including a free trial minute.

Is one-time payment better than monthly subscription?

If you produce under 2 hours a month, one-time like voiceaii is effectively cheaper because minutes never expire. If you produce huge continuous English volume, a large API plan like ElevenLabs Business or Azure Commitment is cheaper per unit.

Why are published prices misleading?

Because each vendor uses a different unit: characters, credits, audio tokens, minutes. Do not compare headlines, convert everything to dollars per finished minute as we did in this table.

Conclusion

If your project is huge English volume and price sensitive, pick the 1.5 cent band: OpenAI, Gemini 2.5 Flash or Grok. If your project is Arabic in Saudi, Egyptian or Gulf dialects, cheap platforms do not support your request at all, and voiceaii is effectively the cheapest: starts at $0 free, $10 one-time with no monthly subscription and no thousands in commitments.

Prices collected 8 September 2026 from public pricing pages. TTS pricing changes often. Verify against the vendor before committing budget.

Sources

• ElevenLabs API pricing on https://elevenlabs.io/pricing/api
• Google Cloud Text-to-Speech on https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/pricing
• Amazon Polly on https://aws.amazon.com/polly/pricing/
• Azure AI Speech on https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cognitive-services/speech-services/
• Deepgram on https://deepgram.com/pricing
• Cartesia on https://cartesia.ai/pricing
• Hume AI on https://www.hume.ai/pricing
• Inworld AI on https://inworld.ai/pricing
• xAI Grok TTS on https://docs.x.ai/docs/models
• Murf API on https://murf.ai/api/pricing
• MiniMax on https://www.minimax.io/price
• OpenAI API on https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
• voiceaii pricing on https://www.voiceaii.com/pricing