# Gemini TTS API pricing: what an hour of Gemini speech costs

Updated 2026-11-05

Google’s Gemini TTS models are billed by tokens, not characters, so the price of a minute is not obvious at first sight. This guide lists the prices from the Gemini API pricing page as of November 2026, converts them into the cost of an hour of audio and compares them with a plan billed by time.

## Prices per million tokens

Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS costs $0.50 per million text tokens in and $9 per million audio tokens out until December 31, 2026, then $1 and $18 from January 1, 2027. Gemini 3.8 Flash-Lite TTS costs $0.50 and $6, then $1 and $12. The older models cost $1 and $20 for 3.1 Flash TTS Preview and 2.5 Pro Preview TTS, and $0.50 and $10 for 2.5 Flash Preview TTS. Batch requests cost half these prices.

## What an hour costs

Google counts 25 audio tokens per second, so an hour of speech is 90,000 audio tokens. That makes an hour about $0.81 with 3.8 Flash TTS and $0.54 with Flash-Lite in 2026, and $1.62 and $1.08 from 2027, plus the text input, which adds little. The 216 hours that the $5 SuperClonica Starter plan voices at most in a month would cost about $175 with Flash TTS and $117 with Flash-Lite at 2026 prices.

## The free tier

The Gemini API has a free tier for 3.8 Flash TTS, 3.8 Flash-Lite TTS, 3.1 Flash TTS and 2.5 Flash TTS, with rate limits, and trying speech in Google AI Studio is free. According to the pricing page, Google may use free-tier content to improve its products, but not paid-tier content. On Google Cloud, Gemini-TTS has no free usage.

## The same hours on SuperClonica

The SuperClonica speech API bills by time, not characters: a plan gives minutes of audio in every 10-minute window. Used without a break, the $5 Starter plan voices up to 216 hours a month, the $10 plan up to 576, $20 up to 1,440 and $50 up to 4,680. A free key gives 3 minutes a day. Every catalog voice and your own trained voices work on any plan, and audio streams back from 300 ms in our measurements. Supertonic 3 speaks 31 languages; Chinese is not among them yet.

## When Gemini is the better choice

Gemini TTS speaks many more languages, including Chinese, takes style directions in plain words and can voice two speakers in one request. For a few hours a month it is cheap, and the free tier may be enough. SuperClonica pays off when you voice many hours a month, want character voices from the catalog or voices trained from your own recordings, or need a fixed bill.

## Try it in one request

Get a free key on the site and post text to https://superclonica.com/api/v1/speech with the header Authorization: Bearer and your key, and the body

```
{"text": "...", "voice": "F1", "language": "en"}
```

Add "format": "mp3" for MP3, or "stream": true to play the audio as it arrives.

## More guides

- [Google Text-to-Speech API pricing: what an hour of speech costs](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/google-tts-api-pricing)
- [OpenAI TTS API pricing: tts-1, tts-1-hd and gpt-4o-mini-tts](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/openai-tts-api-pricing)
- [Cheapest text to speech API: what an hour of audio really costs](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/text-to-speech-api-pricing)
- [An Inworld and MiniMax TTS API alternative priced by the hour](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/inworld-minimax-tts-alternative)
- [Gemini TTS alternative: an offline voice engine you run yourself](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/gemini-tts-alternative)
- [An Amazon Polly alternative for apps that talk a lot](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/amazon-polly-alternative)
- [An Azure text to speech alternative billed by time, not characters](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/azure-text-to-speech-alternative)
- [A Deepgram Aura alternative for apps that voice hours of text](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/deepgram-aura-alternative)
- [An offline alternative to OpenAI text to speech](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/openai-tts-alternative)
- [An offline alternative to Google Cloud Text-to-Speech](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/google-text-to-speech-alternative)
- [A streaming text to speech API: the first sound from 300 ms](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/streaming-text-to-speech-api)
- [A cheaper ElevenLabs API alternative for long and frequent speech](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/elevenlabs-api-alternative)

## Text to speech and comparisons

- [Text-to-speech that runs on your own computer](https://superclonica.com/en/text-to-speech)
- [Supertonic vs SuperClonica: same model, faster and cleaner](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/supertonic)
- [Fish Audio and Fish Speech vs SuperClonica](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/fish-audio)
- [OmniVoice vs SuperClonica: more languages or more speed](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/omnivoice)
- [Qwen3-TTS vs SuperClonica for local text-to-speech](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/qwen3-tts)
- [VoxCPM 2 vs SuperClonica: studio sound or CPU speed](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/voxcpm)
- [F5-TTS vs SuperClonica: zero-shot cloning or fast CPU speech](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/f5-tts)
- [An offline alternative to ElevenLabs](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/elevenlabs)
- [Kokoro TTS vs SuperClonica: two small models for local speech](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/kokoro)
- [Piper TTS vs SuperClonica: tiny devices or custom voices](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/piper)
- [Coqui XTTS-v2 vs SuperClonica: a Coqui TTS alternative](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/xtts)
- [Chatterbox TTS vs SuperClonica: instant cloning or a trained voice file](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/chatterbox)

## Frequently asked questions

### How much does the Gemini TTS API cost?

Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS costs $0.50 per million text tokens and $9 per million audio tokens until the end of 2026, then $1 and $18; Flash-Lite TTS costs $0.50 and $6, then $1 and $12.

### Is Gemini TTS free?

The Gemini API free tier covers 3.8 Flash and Flash-Lite TTS with rate limits, and AI Studio is free to try. Free-tier content may be used to improve Google products.

### How many tokens is a minute of Gemini audio?

25 tokens a second: 1,500 tokens a minute and 90,000 an hour.

### Is there a free TTS API key?

Yes. A free SuperClonica key gives 3 minutes of audio a day with every catalog voice, without a card.

- [Get a free API key](https://superclonica.com/en/speech-api)
- [Hear the catalog voices free](https://superclonica.com/en/explore)
- [Or run the engine yourself](https://superclonica.com/en/superclonica)

## Sources

- [Gemini API pricing](https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing)
- [Google Cloud: Text-to-Speech pricing (Gemini-TTS)](https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/pricing)
- [ElevenLabs: API pricing (1,000 characters ≈ 1 minute)](https://elevenlabs.io/pricing/api)
- [SuperClonica](https://superclonica.com/en/)
- [AI voice catalog for text to speech](https://superclonica.com/en/explore)
- [Text to Speech API: free key, plans from $5](https://superclonica.com/en/speech-api)
- [Custom voice commissions for Supertonic 3](https://superclonica.com/en/requests)
- [How it works: voices, local speech, training](https://superclonica.com/en/guide)
- [Install the faster Supertonic 3 engine](https://superclonica.com/en/superclonica)
- [About us: speech synthesis enthusiasts](https://superclonica.com/en/about)
- [Contacts, support and voice complaints](https://superclonica.com/en/contacts)
- [Privacy policy: what data we keep](https://superclonica.com/en/privacy)
- [Terms of use: rules for buyers and authors](https://superclonica.com/en/terms)
- [Text to speech](https://superclonica.com/en/text-to-speech)