Google Text-to-Speech API pricing: what an hour of speech costs
Google Cloud Text-to-Speech bills by the character, and the price depends on the voice type: from $4 to $160 per million characters. This guide lists the prices from Google’s pricing page as of November 2026, turns them into the cost of an hour of audio and compares them with a plan billed by time.
Prices per million characters
Standard and WaveNet voices cost $4 per million characters, Neural2 and Polyglot voices $16, Chirp 3: HD voices $30, Instant custom voices $60 and Studio voices $160. Google counts every character of the input, spaces and line breaks included, and SSML tags except the mark tag. The Gemini-TTS models on Google Cloud are billed by tokens instead and have no free usage.
The free tier
Every month the first 4 million characters of Standard and WaveNet voices are free, and the first million of Neural2, Polyglot, Chirp 3: HD and Studio voices. Instant custom voices have no free tier. At about 1,000 characters a minute, the rule ElevenLabs uses on its pricing page, 4 million characters are roughly 66 hours of speech and a million about 16 hours.
What an hour costs
An hour of speech is about 60,000 characters. At list prices it costs about $0.24 with Standard or WaveNet voices, $0.96 with Neural2, $1.80 with Chirp 3: HD, $3.60 with an Instant custom voice and $9.60 with Studio voices. The 216 hours that the $5 SuperClonica Starter plan voices at most in a month would cost about $52 with Standard voices, or about $36 after the free tier, and about $390 with Chirp 3: HD.
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 Google is the better choice
If you voice less than the free tier, Google Standard and WaveNet voices may cost you nothing at all. Google also offers many more languages and regional variants, including Chinese, SSML, word timings, regional hosting and the guarantees of a large cloud. SuperClonica pays off when you voice many hours a month, want character or custom voices from the catalog, 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.