OpenAI TTS has no free tier — EasyVoice gives you 5,000 chars/day, permanently

Does OpenAI TTS have a free tier?

No. OpenAI's text-to-speech API has no free tier, no daily allowance, and no trial period. Every request to audio.speech.create() bills from the first character at $15 per 1,000,000 input characters on tts-1 and $30 per 1,000,000 on tts-1-hd (OpenAI list prices checked September 2026). There is no free TTS allowance to fall back on — you need a funded OpenAI account before the speech endpoint will generate anything.

This is the critical distinction developers miss: pay-as-you-go from the first character is not the same as a permanent free tier. Every character costs money. If you're building a prototype, personal project, or low-traffic tool and need free TTS indefinitely, OpenAI is not the right starting point.

How EasyVoice's permanent free tier works

EasyVoice's free tier provides 5,000 characters per day with no credit card required and no trial period. The quota is permanent — it does not expire after 30 days, it does not require you to enter payment information, and it does not downgrade to a lower limit after an onboarding window closes. You sign up, you get 5,000 characters per day, and that quota renews every day at UTC midnight.

5,000 characters per day is approximately: 50 product descriptions of 100 characters each; 10 blog post summaries of 500 characters each; 5 customer service responses of 1,000 characters each; or about 5 minutes of natural-cadence narration audio. For a developer building a prototype, an indie creator testing AI voiceover, or a small team evaluating TTS before a production decision, 5,000 characters per day covers real-world testing without any spend.

The free tier uses the same API endpoint and the same synthesis engines as Pro, with 12 of the 66 voices: American and British English voices plus 2 Arabic voices (ar_m1 and ar_f1). Spanish, French, Hindi, Italian, Japanese and Portuguese (Brazil) voices are Pro-only. Free API keys are limited to 20 requests a minute, 2 at a time, up to 5,000 characters per request. Upgrading to Pro removes the daily cap and unlocks every voice without any code change on your end; the endpoint, authentication, and response format are identical.

Permanent free tier vs paying from the first character

Many TTS providers offer no free tier at all, or a one-off trial allowance instead of one that renews. The comparison below shows how EasyVoice's permanent free tier differs from OpenAI's pay-from-the-first-character model.

EasyVoice free tier: 5,000 characters/day. Credit card required: No. Expiry: None (permanent). Resets: Daily at UTC midnight. API access: Yes (same endpoint as Pro; 20 requests a minute, 2 at a time, up to 5,000 characters per request). Voices: 12 of the 66, on the same engines as Pro.

OpenAI TTS: No free TTS allowance. Funded account required: Yes. Expiry: N/A. Resets: N/A — billing starts with the first character. Ongoing access: pay-as-you-go ($15/1M chars on tts-1, list price checked September 2026). API access: Yes. Voice quality: tts-1 standard.

The practical consequence: if you're three months into a personal project and your usage is 4,000 characters per day, EasyVoice's free tier costs you nothing, indefinitely. On OpenAI tts-1, the same usage costs $1.80 per month — small, but real, and billed to an account you must fund first. For prototype-phase work where budget is zero, the 'permanent' part of 'permanent free tier' matters more than the character count.

Daily reset at UTC midnight — what that means in practice

The 5,000 character quota resets at UTC midnight every day. If you're in New York (UTC-4 in summer), that's 8:00 PM Eastern. If you're in London (UTC+1 in summer), that's 1:00 AM. If you're in Dubai (UTC+4), that's 4:00 AM. The reset is server-side and automatic — you don't need to do anything.

This means a developer working late can often split work across the reset boundary and effectively access 10,000 characters in a short window. It also means that a tool scheduled to run once daily should schedule shortly after UTC midnight to ensure a full quota is available. If your daily job generates text that varies in length, staying below 4,500 characters provides a reasonable buffer against quota exhaustion on longer days.

The quota is per-account, not per-API-key. If you generate two API keys on the same free account, they share the 5,000 character daily pool — they don't each get their own 5,000 characters. Pro accounts have no daily cap (Fair use: 10,000,000 characters per rolling 30 days; beyond that the account is slowed, never blocked or billed.); Pro keys are limited to 60 requests a minute.

When to upgrade from free to Pro

The signal to upgrade is simple: when your daily usage consistently hits 5,000 characters and you need more. Pro is $9.99/mo flat, unlimited characters (fair use 10,000,000 characters per rolling 30 days), unlimited generations, all 66 voices (56 multilingual Kokoro + 10 Arabic MSA Supertonic), all languages. There is no breakeven calculation against the free tier — when the daily cap becomes a limit on what you can build, $9.99/mo removes it.

Switch to EasyVoice if you need a permanent no-credit-card free tier, are building a prototype with zero budget, or want to validate TTS quality before spending anything. Stay on OpenAI if you need more than 5,000 characters per day from day one and have already set up billing — at volumes below 666,000 characters per month, OpenAI tts-1's per-character pricing at $15/1M chars (list price checked September 2026) is less than $9.99/mo flat.