Free TTS API — 5,000 Characters Per Day, No Credit Card
Most 'free' TTS APIs aren't really free — they're a 7-day trial, a 10K-chars-once allowance, or a credit-card-required free tier that auto-bills the moment you forget to cancel. EasyVoice's free TTS API is genuinely free: 5,000 characters per day with a daily reset, no credit card, no trial expiry. That's roughly 750 words of synthesized audio every day, indefinitely, on the same Kokoro-82M model and 46-voice catalog Pro users get. This page covers what 5K chars/day actually buys you, how the free tier compares to OpenAI's no-free-tier, ElevenLabs's monthly cap, and Google's GCP-billing trial, and how to authenticate and hit your first endpoint in under a minute.
5,000 characters per day on the free tier, no credit card. Pro $9.99/mo unlimited. 46 voices, 8 languages.
What 5,000 characters per day really gets you
5,000 characters is about 750 words of English text — roughly a 5-minute spoken-word audio segment at typical narration cadence (140-160 wpm). Concretely: that's one mid-length blog post read aloud per day, or a daily newsletter audio version, or 25-30 IVR / chatbot prompts of 30 words each, or the daily audio output for a niche read-aloud accessibility tool with under 100 active users. The daily-reset model means heavy users hit the cap and resume tomorrow, rather than burning a monthly allowance in the first week and being locked out for 24 days.
The cap is enforced per API key, measured by input characters (not output audio length, and not by number of requests). Whitespace counts. SSML tags don't count toward the cap in the future when SSML ships, but punctuation does. There's no separate cap on number of requests — you can hit the endpoint 5,000 times with 1 character each, or once with 5,000 characters, and both count the same. Generated audio is yours to keep, download, redistribute, and use commercially on every plan including free.
How EasyVoice's free tier compares to other free TTS APIs
OpenAI tts-1: no free tier at all. The endpoint requires a paid OpenAI account and charges $15 per 1M characters from request one. There's no monthly allowance, no daily allowance, no trial credit. If you want to evaluate, you pay. ElevenLabs: 10,000 characters per month free, monthly reset (not daily), no credit card. Generous on paper but the wrong reset cadence for app development — burning 10K chars in one afternoon of integration testing locks you out for 30 days. Google Cloud TTS: 1M chars/month free on Standard voices, 4M on WaveNet, for the first 12 months of the GCP account. Genuinely generous but requires a billing-enabled GCP project (credit card on file), GCP service-account JSON auth, and time-limits at the 12-month mark.
Azure Speech: 500K chars/month free on the Neural TTS tier, requires Azure subscription with credit card on file. Amazon Polly: 4M chars/month free on Standard voices, 1M on Neural, requires AWS account with billing. PlayHT and Speechify: no public free API tier — their developer access starts at paid plans. The TL;DR: EasyVoice is the only API in this list with no credit card requirement and a daily-reset cadence — both of which matter for indie developers, hobby projects, and apps that want a free tier of their own product to exist.
Sign up, get a key, ship in 60 seconds
The integration is intentionally minimal. Visit easyvoice.ae/signup, create an account with email + password (no credit card prompt anywhere in the flow), navigate to the API keys section in your account dashboard, click 'Create API key', copy the value (it's shown once — store it in your env file or secrets manager immediately). Then make your first request: POST https://easyvoice.ae/api/tts/generate with Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY and a JSON body {voice: 'af_heart', input: 'hello world', response_format: 'mp3'}. The response is raw audio bytes — write them to a file or stream them to your audio player.
The API key is the only credential you need. No region selection, no service-account JSON, no tenant ID, no environment-specific endpoints. Both free-tier and Pro keys hit the same endpoint URL; the tier is enforced server-side per key. Upgrading to Pro is a one-click flow that doesn't change your API key — the existing key keeps working with the higher cap applied immediately. This is also the rollback story: cancel Pro and the key reverts to the free tier; no code change needed.
Voice selection on the free tier
All 46 voices across all 8 languages are available on the free tier. We do not gate flagship voices behind a paywall — af_heart (the warmest American female voice in the catalog), am_adam (the default American male narrator), bf_emma (modern British RP), and ef_dora (native Spanish), among others, are all callable with a free-tier API key. This is intentional. Free-tier developers shipping accessibility features, indie SaaS read-aloud, and side-project demos are the seed that grows into Pro signups; gating the best voices behind the paywall would defeat that flywheel.
Browse /voices to preview every voice in the catalog. Each voice page has a sample audio embed and a 'try this voice' button that calls the API with a default sentence. Once you've identified the right voice for your use case, copy the voice ID (e.g. af_heart, am_michael, ef_dora) and use it in your request body. The voice parameter is the only field that selects which voice speaks — there's no separate model parameter to coordinate.
What to do when you outgrow the free tier
5,000 characters per day caps roughly at the threshold where a hobby project becomes a real product. If your app crosses that line — daily active users above ~100, audio-output durations averaging more than 5 minutes per session, or just usage patterns that don't fit a daily reset — the right move is Pro at $9.99/mo flat unlimited. The same API key keeps working, the cap goes away, and there's no per-character billing surprise at the end of the month.
If you don't want to commit monthly yet, the free tier persists indefinitely — there is no time-limited trial, no 'pay or your key expires.' For very specific use cases that need to scale past 5K chars/day but only a few times a month (one-shot audiobook generation, a quarterly podcast episode), running a single billing cycle on Pro and then downgrading is the cleanest approach. There's no annual lock-in. There's no early-cancellation penalty.
Edge cases and free-tier limits to know
Rate limits on the free tier are designed for normal developer usage patterns, not stress tests. Sustained request rates above roughly 1 QPS get throttled; bursts of 10-20 requests in a few seconds are fine. If you're load-testing your integration, do it on Pro — the unlimited tier doesn't throttle at indie-developer rates. If you're running batch jobs that consume the daily cap in one burst, the daily reset happens at 00:00 UTC; build your batch schedule around that boundary if predictability matters.
Generated audio is owned by you, including on the free tier. Use it commercially, redistribute it, fine-tune downstream pipelines against it — there's no per-project license fee, no attribution requirement, no royalty. The one thing we don't allow on any tier is using the generated audio to train competing TTS models — see /terms for the full language. If you're building anything else, you're fine.
Code samples
Drop-in examples for the EasyVoice TTS API. Every request below assumes you've set EASYVOICE_API_KEY as an environment variable.
1. Get a free API key
No credit card required# 1. Visit https://easyvoice.ae/signup
# 2. Create account with email + password
# 3. Dashboard → API Keys → Create API key
# 4. Copy the value (shown once)
export EASYVOICE_API_KEY="ev_live_..."2. First request — curl
Smoke test the free tiercurl -X POST https://easyvoice.ae/api/tts/generate \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $EASYVOICE_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"voice": "af_heart",
"input": "Hello from the EasyVoice free tier.",
"response_format": "mp3"
}' \
--output hello.mp3
# 5,000 chars/day cap, daily reset at 00:00 UTC3. JavaScript (Node 18+)
const res = await fetch("https://easyvoice.ae/api/tts/generate", {
method: "POST",
headers: {
"Authorization": `Bearer ${process.env.EASYVOICE_API_KEY}`,
"Content-Type": "application/json",
},
body: JSON.stringify({
voice: "af_heart",
input: "Hello from EasyVoice's free TTS API.",
response_format: "mp3",
}),
});
if (res.status === 429) {
// Daily quota reached — resets at 00:00 UTC
console.warn("Free tier cap reached for today");
}
const audio = Buffer.from(await res.arrayBuffer());
require("fs").writeFileSync("hello.mp3", audio);4. Python (stdlib requests)
import os, requests
res = requests.post(
"https://easyvoice.ae/api/tts/generate",
headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['EASYVOICE_API_KEY']}"},
json={"voice": "af_heart", "input": "Hello world", "response_format": "mp3"},
)
if res.status_code == 429:
print("Daily 5K char cap reached — try again after 00:00 UTC")
else:
open("hello.mp3", "wb").write(res.content)Voices to try with the API
Every voice below is callable via the same voice parameter — preview samples and read the full character profile.
Frequently asked questions
Is the EasyVoice TTS API really free?▾
Yes. 5,000 characters per day with a daily reset, no credit card required at signup, no trial expiry, indefinitely. That's roughly 750 words of synthesized audio every day. All 46 voices across all 8 languages are available on the free tier — we don't gate flagship voices behind the paywall. The only difference between free and Pro ($9.99/mo unlimited) is the daily cap.
What's the catch?▾
Honest answer: the 5K chars/day cap is the catch. If you ship a real product with more than ~100 daily active users averaging 5 minutes of audio per session, you'll cross 5K chars in an afternoon and the cap will become real. For hobby projects, internal tools, and indie SaaS with low daily volume, the free tier covers you indefinitely. We're not running a 'free for the first 30 days, then we bill the card you forgot to remove' trap.
Does the free tier include all the voices?▾
Yes — all 46 voices across all 8 languages (American and British English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Hindi, Chinese) are callable with a free-tier API key. Flagship voices (af_heart, am_adam, bf_emma) are not paywalled. Browse the full catalog at /voices to preview samples before picking which voice your app should default to.
What happens when I hit the 5,000 chars/day cap?▾
The next request returns HTTP 429 (Too Many Requests). The cap resets at 00:00 UTC. Plan your batch jobs around that boundary if you need predictability. If you're consistently hitting the cap, the right upgrade is Pro at $9.99/mo flat unlimited — same API key, no integration changes, just a higher cap applied server-side. You can also downgrade back to free at any time without losing the key.
How does the free tier compare to OpenAI / ElevenLabs / Google free tiers?▾
OpenAI has no free tier — it bills $15/1M chars from request one. ElevenLabs is 10K chars/month with monthly reset, which is harder to develop against (you burn it in one afternoon of integration testing). Google Cloud TTS is 1-4M chars/month free but requires a billing-enabled GCP project with a credit card on file. Azure Speech is 500K chars/month free with Azure subscription and credit card. EasyVoice is the only API in this list with no credit card requirement and a daily-reset cadence.
Can I use the audio commercially on the free tier?▾
Yes. Full commercial usage rights on every plan, free tier included. Use the audio in monetized YouTube videos, paid podcasts, paid courses, accessibility products you sell, IVR systems you ship to clients. No per-project license, no royalties, no attribution required. The only restriction (on any tier) is using the audio to train competing TTS models — see /terms for the full language.
Related TTS API guides
OpenAI TTS API Alternative — Drop-in Migration to Flat-Rate
Swap OpenAI tts-1 for EasyVoice in 5 lines. Same request shape, flat $9.99/mo unlimited vs $15/1M chars. Voice mapping for alloy/echo/onyx + free tier.
TTS API for Developers — Bearer Auth, OpenAI Shape, Flat Pricing
TTS API for developers — Bearer auth, OpenAI-compatible request shape, curl/JS/Python/Go samples. 5K chars/day free. $9.99/mo unlimited Pro. 46 voices.
Comparing vendors? See EasyVoice vs elevenlabs →
Start building with the EasyVoice TTS API
5,000 characters per day free, no credit card. Pro $9.99/mo unlimited. OpenAI-compatible request shape.