light estimateLast updated 2026-08-20

Cheapest text-to-speech API

Default pickDeepgram Aura-2

Among providers with a directly comparable per-character price, Deepgram Aura-2 is the cheapest at $30 per million characters, ahead of MiniMax Speech 2.5 Turbo ($78) and ElevenLabs ($100). Google Gemini and OpenAI can look cheaper but bill per token, so their per-character figures are estimates and are excluded from this ranking. A light estimate from vendor pricing pages, August 2026; the MiniMax figure dates from June 2026.

DefaultDeepgram Aura-2goedkoopsteDeepgram Aura-2

Provider offerings

Provider offerings compared on Price, ELO, TTFA, Langs and capabilities
Offering	Price ($/1M chars)	ELO	TTFA	Langs	Capabilities
ElevenLabs Multilingual v2 / Eleven v3ElevenLabs	100	1179	653 ms	29	streamingcloning
Cartesia Sonic 3 / Sonic 3.5Cartesia	39*	1203	271 ms	42	streamingcloning
Google Gemini 3.1 Flash TTSGoogle	12*	1212	—	—	streaming
OpenAI gpt-4o-mini-ttsOpenAI	15*	—	775 ms	50	streaming
MiniMax Speech 2.5 TurboMiniMax	78	—	—	—	streamingcloning
Deepgram Aura-2Deepgram	30	—	293 ms	7	streaming
SpeechifyAI Simba 3.2Speechify	10*	1240	398 ms	30	streamingcloning

* token-/credit-priced — the headline understates real per-unit cost, so it is excluded from the cheapest ranking.

Sources