GUIDE

An Amazon Polly alternative for apps that talk a lot

Amazon Polly is a solid text to speech service inside AWS, billed per character: $4 per million on Standard voices, $16 on Neural, $30 on Generative and $100 on Long-Form, according to the Polly pricing page in October 2026. Its free tier is generous for a start, but once an app talks for hours every day the bill follows the characters.

The SuperClonica speech API is billed by time instead, from $5 a month. This guide compares the two honestly and shows when each one is the better choice.

Hear the voices free Or run the engine in your own cloud

The cost of a busy month

At 1,000 characters a minute, 216 hours of speech are about 13 million characters. At Polly list prices that is about $52 on Standard voices, $207 on Neural, $389 on Generative and $1,296 on Long-Form. The SuperClonica Starter plan gives 3 minutes of audio every 10 minutes for $5 a month, up to 216 hours used without a break.

  • Free: 1 minute of audio a day.
  • Starter, $5: up to 216 hours a month.
  • Author, $10: up to 576 hours.
  • Pro, $20: up to 1,440 hours.
  • Studio, $50: up to 4,680 hours.

What else is different

Polly has fixed voices per language. SuperClonica has a catalog of voices made by authors, characters, narrators and announcers, and every one works through the API on a paid plan; you can also train a voice from your own recording on the site. Long texts are voiced in pieces on several workers at once and can stream from 300 ms, and there is no AWS account, IAM policy or SDK to set up: one HTTPS request with a key.

Switch a request over

Where your code calls SynthesizeSpeech, post the text to https://superclonica.com/api/v1/speech with Authorization: Bearer and your key, and the body {"text": "...", "voice": "F1", "language": "en", "format": "mp3"}. The answer is the audio itself. SSML tags are not read as markup, so send plain text; line breaks are kept as paragraph breaks.

When Polly is the better choice

Stay with Polly if you rely on SSML, Speech Marks for word timings or lip sync, Chinese or other languages Supertonic 3 does not speak, AWS billing and compliance, or if your volume fits its free tier: 5 million Standard characters a month, and 1 million Neural characters a month for the first 12 months. Listen before you decide: put the same line into a SuperClonica voice page and into the Polly console.