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. There is no monthly free credit specific to TTS — OpenAI's general API 'free trial' credits (when available to new accounts) apply across all API products and expire on a 30-day clock. They are not a permanent free tier and they are not TTS-specific.

This is the critical distinction developers miss: a 30-day trial credit is not the same as a permanent free tier. After the trial, 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 roughly 2 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 Kokoro-82M voices as the Pro tier. You are not using a lower-quality model on the free tier — you are using the same synthesizer with a daily character cap. Upgrading to Pro removes the cap without any code change on your end; the endpoint, authentication, and response format are identical.

Permanent free vs 30-day trial — the difference that matters

Most TTS providers that offer a 'free tier' are actually offering a 30-day trial credit. The comparison table below shows how EasyVoice's permanent free tier differs from the trial-credit model common across the industry.

EasyVoice free tier: 5,000 characters/day. Credit card required: No. Expiry: None (permanent). Resets: Daily at UTC midnight. Access after trial: Yes (same quota indefinitely). API access: Yes (same endpoint as Pro). Voice quality: Same Kokoro-82M model as Pro.

OpenAI TTS trial model: No TTS-specific free tier. Credit card required: No (for trial period, if applicable). Expiry: 30 days (account-level credit, not TTS-specific). Resets: N/A — once trial credit exhausted, billing begins. Access after trial: Pay-as-you-go only ($15/1M chars tts-1). 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, the same usage costs $1.80 per month — small, but real, and billed to a card you must have on file. 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 remove this limit server-side and all API keys on a Pro account are uncapped.

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, unlimited generations, all 56 voices (46 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 is less than $9.99/mo flat.