A Deepgram Aura alternative for apps that voice hours of text
Deepgram is best known for speech recognition, and its Aura voices give it text to speech too, billed per character: $0.030 per 1,000 characters for Aura-2, $0.015 for Aura-1 and $0.045 for Flux TTS at pay-as-you-go prices, according to the Deepgram pricing page in October 2026.
The SuperClonica speech API bills by time instead, from $5 a month. Here is an honest comparison.
The price of an hour
At 1,000 characters a minute, an hour of speech costs about $1.80 with Aura-2 and $0.90 with Aura-1 at list prices. The SuperClonica Starter plan, $5 a month, gives 3 minutes of audio every 10 minutes, up to 216 hours a month used without a break; the same 216 hours would cost about $389 with Aura-2 and $194 with Aura-1.
- 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.
Voices
Aura offers a set of voices made for conversation. SuperClonica has a catalog of character, narrator, announcer and everyday voices made by authors; on a paid plan every one of them works through the API, and so do voices you train from your own recording on the site. Hear any of them free on its page before you decide.
Switch a request over
Post JSON to https://superclonica.com/api/v1/speech with Authorization: Bearer and your key: {"text": "...", "voice": "M1", "language": "en", "format": "mp3"}. Add "stream": true and the audio starts from 300 ms in our measurements, whatever the length of the text. A failed text counts nothing against the plan.
When Deepgram is the better choice
Deepgram gives you speech recognition, text to speech and a voice agent API from one vendor, with WebSocket streaming built for real-time conversations, volume discounts on its Growth plan and enterprise support. If your product listens as much as it speaks, that is a real advantage. If it mostly speaks, and for hours, compare the price per hour.