OpenAI TTS pricing vs EasyVoice — when flat-rate wins
OpenAI TTS costs $15 per 1 million characters on tts-1 and $30 on tts-1-hd, with no free tier. EasyVoice Pro is $9.99 a month flat with unlimited characters (fair use 10 million per 30 days), so it costs less above about 666,000 characters a month on tts-1. Prices checked September 2026.
OpenAI's text-to-speech API charges $15 per 1,000,000 input characters on tts-1 and $30 per 1,000,000 on tts-1-hd, with no free tier — every request bills from the first character. EasyVoice Pro is $9.99/mo flat, unlimited generations, unlimited characters, all 66 voices, all 9 languages — no character meter. The breakeven point where the two vendors cost the same is 666,000 characters per month against tts-1 and 333,000 characters per month against tts-1-hd. Above those thresholds, EasyVoice is cheaper — and the gap widens linearly because EasyVoice stays flat at $9.99 regardless of volume. This page covers the math at common production volumes (100K, 500K, 1M, 5M, 10M chars/mo), the assumptions behind it, why per-character pricing punishes scale, and the migration-cost-recovery timeline for teams already paying OpenAI's $150-$300/mo on tts-1-hd.
5,000 characters per day free, no credit card. Pro $9.99/mo unlimited (fair use 10M characters per 30 days).
The numbers, verified 2026-09-27
OpenAI's official pricing page lists tts-1 at $15 per 1M characters of input text and tts-1-hd at $30 per 1M characters. (Its newer gpt-4o-mini-tts model is priced per token instead — $0.60 per 1M text-input tokens plus $12 per 1M audio-output tokens — so it is not in the per-character math below.) Pricing is metered on input (the text you send), not output (the audio you receive). Whitespace counts; punctuation counts; SSML tags, when supported, do not. There is no free tier — the first character of the first request bills $0.000015 on tts-1, $0.00003 on tts-1-hd, prorated against your monthly billing cycle.
EasyVoice Pro is $9.99 per month billed monthly with no annual commitment — or $24.99 a quarter (about $8.33/mo) or $59.99 a year (about $5.00/mo). No per-character meter, no separate per-language tier. Unlimited generations across all 66 voices, all 9 languages, mp3 / wav response formats, full-file responses, and the same endpoint on free and Pro tiers. The free tier is 5,000 characters per day on a free account with a daily reset, no credit card required. Pro upgrades remove the daily cap server-side without an integration code change.
The breakeven math
Breakeven against OpenAI tts-1: 9.99 / 15 × 1,000,000 = 666,000 characters per month. Below 666K chars/mo, OpenAI tts-1 is cheaper (you pay only for what you use). Above 666K chars/mo, EasyVoice's flat $9.99 is cheaper — and the gap widens linearly. At 1M chars/mo OpenAI charges $15 vs our $9.99 (small win). At 5M chars/mo OpenAI charges $75 vs $9.99 (7.5× win). At 10M chars/mo OpenAI charges $150 vs $9.99 (15× win). At 50M chars/mo OpenAI charges $750 vs $9.99 (75× win).
Breakeven against OpenAI tts-1-hd: 9.99 / 30 × 1,000,000 = 333,000 characters per month. The breakeven is half because tts-1-hd costs double. Above 333K chars/mo, EasyVoice is cheaper — and at the typical production volumes most apps reach within their first month of shipping voice features, the savings stack fast. The table below renders the math at seven common volume points on the monthly plan; the numbers are arithmetic, not estimates.
On the annual plan ($59.99/year, about $5.00/mo) the breakevens roughly halve: about 333,000 characters per month against tts-1 and about 167,000 against tts-1-hd. The quarterly plan ($24.99, about $8.33/mo) sits in between.
Real production volumes — where most apps actually land
A content app with 1,000 daily active users, 1 read-aloud activation per user per session, 5 minutes of synthesized audio per activation (≈10,000 characters at typical narration cadence), runs the numbers at 1,000 × 10,000 × 30 = 300M characters per month. On OpenAI tts-1 that's $4,500/mo; on tts-1-hd it's $9,000/mo. On EasyVoice Pro it's $9.99/mo. The 7-day moving average for read-aloud activation on shipped products tends to land between 30-60% of DAU, not 100% — so divide those numbers by 2-3 for realistic estimates; still, the order of magnitude is right.
A customer support chatbot handling 1,000 conversations a day, 90 seconds of bot-spoken-audio per conversation (≈2,700 characters), runs at 1,000 × 2,700 × 30 = 81M chars/mo. OpenAI tts-1: $1,215/mo. OpenAI tts-1-hd: $2,430/mo. EasyVoice Pro: $9.99/mo. A B2B SaaS app with 100 active users using a voice-summary feature averaging 2,000 characters per use, 3 times per user per week, runs at 100 × 2,000 × 3 × 4 = 2.4M chars/mo. OpenAI tts-1: $36/mo. tts-1-hd: $72/mo. EasyVoice: $9.99/mo. The pattern holds across product categories — once any voice feature has real users, OpenAI's per-character billing becomes a visible line item finance asks about, and EasyVoice's flat rate doesn't.
Migration-cost-recovery timeline
Teams already paying OpenAI's tts-1 or tts-1-hd bills usually look at migration when the monthly bill crosses $100. The migration itself is to change the base URL and key — see /openai-tts-alternative/migration-guide. The recovery math below is an illustration, not a quote: it assumes $300-$600 of total engineering time (the change, plus validating the swap on your own test cases) at $150/hr fully-loaded.
At a starting OpenAI bill of $150/mo on tts-1-hd at 5M chars/mo, switching to EasyVoice saves $140.01/mo. Migration cost is recovered in 2.1-4.3 months. At $300/mo OpenAI on tts-1-hd at 10M chars/mo, switching saves $290.01/mo. Migration cost is recovered in 1.0-2.1 months. Beyond the recovery point, every month is pure flat-rate savings — and crucially, the flat-rate model means you stop worrying about feature growth as a budget event. Adding 'audio version of every blog post' to a content product costs zero incremental cents on EasyVoice; on OpenAI it's a finance conversation.
Why per-character pricing punishes scale
Per-character pricing is rational at infrastructure level — TTS generation has real GPU compute cost per character generated, and OpenAI's pricing reflects that cost plus a margin. The problem is the mismatch between the cost structure and the product structure most app developers ship. Apps don't grow their TTS usage one character at a time; they ship a voice feature and DAU adoption goes from 0 to 30% over a launch quarter. Per-character pricing means the bill goes from $0 to $1,000 in a single product cycle, which finance teams generally do not like.
Flat-rate pricing trades off variable revenue for predictable spend. EasyVoice's economics work because Kokoro-82M is roughly 1/10th the size of OpenAI's tts-1 (estimated ~600M parameters based on inference characteristics) and runs on commodity GPU infrastructure with high utilization — the marginal cost of a generated character is low enough that flat $9.99/mo unlimited is sustainable. The same architecture wouldn't work on a 600M-parameter model; the trade-off is real. For most TTS use cases (accessibility, chatbot, narration, content audio versions), run a blind A/B on your own content — the voices spoke above shows how — to check the trade-off costs you nothing your users perceive.
When OpenAI's pricing is actually the right call
OpenAI tts-1 is cheaper than EasyVoice Pro at any volume below 666,000 characters per month. If your app is genuinely low-volume — a personal project with under 50 weekly active users, an internal tool used by a 10-person team, a side project read-aloud — paying OpenAI's per-character rate may net out under $9.99/mo. The trade-off is the lack of a free tier (every request bills) and the lack of predictable cost as you scale; if you're confident your usage will stay under the breakeven indefinitely, OpenAI's per-character math is favorable.
tts-1-hd's higher fidelity is occasionally worth the price premium for specific use cases — close-mic'd character voice acting for video games, premium audiobook production where listener attention dwells on individual phonemes for hours, brand films where the voice itself is the deliverable. For the dominant TTS use cases (accessibility, chatbot, IVR, content audio versions, narration), the fidelity delta isn't perceptible to most listeners — and the 4× breakeven gap (tts-1-hd breaks even with EasyVoice at 333K chars/mo) means the pricing argument lands much earlier on tts-1-hd than on tts-1. If you're on tts-1-hd today, the migration math is even more compelling.
Pricing at common monthly volumes
Real arithmetic, not estimates. Verified against OpenAI's official pricing ($15/1M chars on tts-1, $30/1M on tts-1-hd) as of 2026-09-27. Negative savings values mean OpenAI is cheaper at that volume (below breakeven).
| Volume | OpenAI tts-1 | OpenAI tts-1-hd | EasyVoice Pro | Savings vs tts-1 /mo | Annual savings vs tts-1-hd |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100K chars/mo | $1.50 | $3.00 | $9.99 | -$8.49 | -$83.88 |
| 333K chars/mo (tts-1-hd breakeven) | $5.00 | $9.99 | $9.99 | -$4.99 | $0.00 |
| 500K chars/mo | $7.50 | $15.00 | $9.99 | -$2.49 | $60.12 |
| 666K chars/mo (tts-1 breakeven) | $9.99 | $19.98 | $9.99 | $0.00 | $119.88 |
| 1M chars/mo | $15.00 | $30.00 | $9.99 | $5.01 | $240.12 |
| 5M chars/mo | $75.00 | $150.00 | $9.99 | $65.01 | $1680.12 |
| 10M chars/mo | $150.00 | $300.00 | $9.99 | $140.01 | $3480.12 |
Breakeven points: 666K chars/mo (vs tts-1), 333K chars/mo (vs tts-1-hd). Above those volumes, EasyVoice's flat $9.99/mo Pro is cheaper — and the gap widens linearly because the EasyVoice price doesn't change with volume.
Code samples
Real working code, not pseudo-code. Every request below assumes you've set EASYVOICE_API_KEY and OPENAI_API_KEY as env vars where shown.
Calculate your monthly OpenAI bill
Plug your monthly character volume into the formula// OpenAI tts-1 monthly cost in USD
function openaiTts1Cost(charsPerMonth) {
return (charsPerMonth / 1_000_000) * 15;
}
// OpenAI tts-1-hd monthly cost in USD
function openaiTts1HdCost(charsPerMonth) {
return (charsPerMonth / 1_000_000) * 30;
}
// Months to recover a $400 engineering migration cost
function monthsToRecoverMigration(currentOpenAiMonthly) {
const monthlySavings = currentOpenAiMonthly - 9.99;
if (monthlySavings <= 0) return Infinity;
return Math.ceil(400 / monthlySavings);
}
// Example: you're on tts-1-hd at 5M chars/mo
console.log(openaiTts1HdCost(5_000_000)); // 150
console.log(monthsToRecoverMigration(150)); // 3
console.log(monthsToRecoverMigration(1500)); // 1 (heavy users recover faster)Voices to try
Every voice below is callable via the same voice parameter — preview audio samples and read the full character profile.
Frequently asked questions
How much does the OpenAI TTS API cost?▾
$15 per 1,000,000 input characters on tts-1, $30 per 1,000,000 on tts-1-hd (OpenAI list prices checked 2026-09-27). No free tier — every request bills from the first character. Pricing is metered on input text (what you send), not output audio (what you receive). Whitespace and punctuation count. SSML tags don't count when supported, but punctuation inside the SSML does. Verified against OpenAI's official pricing page 2026-09-27.
At what volume does EasyVoice become cheaper than OpenAI tts-1?▾
666,000 characters per month. The math: 9.99 / 15 × 1,000,000 = 666,000. Below 666K chars/mo, OpenAI tts-1 is cheaper. Above, EasyVoice's flat $9.99 is cheaper — and the gap widens linearly. At 1M chars/mo OpenAI charges $15 vs EV's $9.99. At 5M chars/mo OpenAI charges $75 vs $9.99. At 10M chars/mo OpenAI charges $150 vs $9.99 — a 15× difference. Most apps that ship voice features cross 666K chars/mo within a launch quarter.
What about tts-1-hd? When does flat-rate beat it?▾
333,000 characters per month — half the tts-1 breakeven because tts-1-hd costs double. At 500K chars/mo OpenAI tts-1-hd charges $15 vs EV's $9.99. At 1M chars/mo OpenAI charges $30 vs $9.99. At 5M chars/mo OpenAI charges $150 vs $9.99 — annual savings of $1,680. If your team is on tts-1-hd today, the migration math lands earlier and harder than for tts-1 users; the recovery timeline on a $400 engineering migration is often under 2 months.
Is there really no free tier on OpenAI?▾
Correct — OpenAI's TTS API has no free tier. Every request to audio.speech.create() bills from the first character. There's no monthly allowance, no daily allowance, no trial credit unless you have other OpenAI credit on the account from GPT or Whisper usage. EasyVoice's free tier is 5,000 characters per day with a daily reset, no credit card required — verified to work for indefinite hobby-scale projects.
How long does the migration take to recover its engineering cost?▾
The recovery math assumes $300-$600 of engineering time at $150/hr fully-loaded (the change plus validating it on your own test cases). At a starting OpenAI bill of $150/mo (tts-1-hd at 5M chars/mo), switching saves $140.01/mo — recovery in 2-4 months. At $300/mo OpenAI bill (tts-1-hd at 10M chars/mo), recovery is 1-2 months. Beyond recovery, every month is pure flat-rate savings, and feature growth (adding more voice surfaces to your product) stops being a budget event.
When is OpenAI's pricing actually the right call?▾
Genuinely low-volume apps — under 666K chars/mo on tts-1 or 333K chars/mo on tts-1-hd — pay less on per-character pricing than on $9.99 flat. Personal projects with under 50 weekly active users, internal tools for small teams, side-project read-alouds. The trade-off is the no-free-tier (every request bills) and the lack of predictable cost as you scale. If your usage will stay sub-breakeven indefinitely, OpenAI's math is favorable.
Does EasyVoice's pricing change by voice or language?▾
No. Flat $9.99/mo Pro unlimited covers every voice in every language. Free tier is 5,000 chars/day on a free account, one pool across the 12 free voices (per-account, not per-language); the other voices need Pro. Intentionally simpler than Google Cloud TTS (its price depends on the voice tier) or ElevenLabs (per-character billing varies by model). Multilingual apps don't model per-language pricing into their TTS budget on EasyVoice.
Related OpenAI migration guides
OpenAI TTS voices, mapped to Kokoro alternatives
Map OpenAI's six original TTS voices (alloy, echo, fable, onyx, nova, shimmer) to the closest EasyVoice Kokoro voices: tones, when to use each, sample scripts.
Migrate from OpenAI TTS to EasyVoice: change the base URL and key
Keep the official OpenAI SDK: change the base URL and API key. The six OpenAI voice names work as they are (nova is free; the other five need Pro).
Vendor comparison: EasyVoice vs OpenAI TTS
Side-by-side feature comparison covering voices, languages, pricing tiers, free limits, API surface, and the why-people-look / where-each-wins breakdown.
API reference: /audio/speech, Jobs API and limits
Every request parameter, rate limit and error code, the Jobs API for long text, and copy-paste examples using the official openai SDK with the EasyVoice base URL.
Start migrating off OpenAI TTS today
5,000 characters per day free, no credit card. Pro $9.99/mo unlimited replaces per-character bills once they grow past the breakeven shown on the pricing page.