Compare Whisper, Deepgram, ElevenLabs, OpenAI TTS, and Google pricing. Enter minutes or characters → see exact monthly cost. Free, no signup.
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| Provider | Type | Price | Quality | 10K min / 1M chars |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deepgram Nova-2CHEAPEST STT | STT | $0.0043/min | Excellent | $43 |
| OpenAI Whisper | STT | $0.006/min | Excellent | $60 |
| Google STT | STT | $0.024/min | Good | $240 |
| OpenAI TTSCHEAPEST TTS | TTS | $0.015/1K chars | Good | $15 |
| Google TTS | TTS | $0.016/1K chars | Good | $16 |
| ElevenLabs | TTS | $0.330/1K chars | Best | $330 |
OpenAI Whisper is open source. Self-hosting on a $6/mo Hetzner CX22 handles ~5K minutes/month at near-zero cost. For over 50K min/month, self-hosting saves $300+/mo.
Try the best TTS API:
$0.006 per minute of audio transcribed. For 10,000 minutes/month: $60. Self-hosting Whisper (open source) on your own server costs near $0 at the same volume.
ElevenLabs at $0.330/1K chars is 20× more expensive than OpenAI TTS ($0.015). The quality and naturalness is significantly better — worth it for customer-facing voice, audiobooks, or brand voice. For internal tools, OpenAI TTS is sufficient.
OpenAI TTS at $0.015 per 1,000 characters. Google TTS is similar at $0.016. For large volumes, Azure Neural TTS or Amazon Polly can be cheaper. Self-hosting Coqui TTS or Bark eliminates API costs entirely.
Approximately 800–1,000 characters per minute of spoken text (at normal speaking pace). A 10-minute podcast script ≈ 9,000 characters ≈ $0.135 with OpenAI TTS.