AI Voice Generators
Low-cost text-to-speech API for streaming, long-form synthesis, and timestamped audio.
Free plan: 250K characters.
Paid: API billed separately.
Prices checked November 9, 2026 on unrealspeech.comUSD as listed
Before you pay: Promotional entry price
ToolColumn's pick
Basic
Cost-sensitive pilots with meaningful monthly text volume
Cheapest plan that holds up
Who each plan suits ↓Source: unrealspeech.com · USD as listed
| Plan | Monthly | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Free plans | ||
| Free | Free | 250K characters |
| API plans | ||
| BasicToolColumn's pick | From $49 | 3M characters |
| Plus | From $499 | 42M characters |
| Pro | From $1,499 | 150M characters |
| Enterprise plans | ||
| Enterprise | $4,999 | 625M characters |
| Custom High Volume | Contact for pricing | 1B+ characters |
Free plans
250K characters
API plans
Enterprise plans
625M characters
1B+ characters
Public API pricing is presented as monthly plan pricing; verify any annual, renewal, or promotional checkout terms before treating the visible monthly amount as the long-run baseline.
Self-serve TTS API · Direct API · Primary · From $49/mo
Primary route for developers and content systems using monthly character allowances across streaming, synchronous speech, and asynchronous long-form synthesis endpoints.
Self-serve TTS API · Recommended · Direct API · Separate API meter
Primary buying path for developers and content systems that generate speech through Unreal Speech API keys and monthly character allowances.
Best for: Products, publishers, accessibility workflows, and automated narration pipelines.
Boundary: Budget around the character allowance, daily overage at the plan's rate and the $49 Basic renewal price rather than seat count.
Custom high-volume API · Enterprise sales · Custom
Sales-assisted route for 1B+ monthly characters, volume discounts, procurement review, and production support expectations that exceed the public plan ladder.
Custom high-volume inquiry · Enterprise sales · Enterprise only
Sales-assisted path for buyers whose monthly character volume, procurement needs, or support expectations exceed the public plan ladder.
Best for: Large-volume API buyers, production media operations, and procurement-led teams.
Boundary: Confirm volume discounts, support expectations, terms, and usage controls directly before committing.
API boundary: Treat Unreal Speech as a separate API budget: each plan includes a monthly character allowance, overage is charged daily at the plan's rate, and paid plans roll unused characters over.
Buyer guide
Unreal Speech sells 6 plans: 1 free, 3 API, 2 enterprise.
Skip if: The $49 Basic price after the six-month introduction has not been budgeted
Includes: 3M characters/mo; about 67 hours of audio; $4.99/mo for the first 6 months; overage $16 per 1M
Proofs of concept and low-risk evaluation
Skip if: The workload already has recurring production volume or client-facing output deadlines
Includes: 250K characters/mo; about 6 hours of audio; commercial use with a link to unrealspeech.com
Teams with measured character burn and repeat generation jobs
Skip if: Scripts, retry behavior, and QA are still too unstable to forecast
Includes: 42M characters/mo; about 933 hours of audio; overage $12 per 1M; unused characters roll over
Includes: 150M characters/mo; about 3K hours of audio; overage $10 per 1M; unused characters roll over
Includes: 625M characters/mo; about 14K hours of audio; overage $8 per 1M; unused characters roll over
Very large API buyers and procurement-led rollouts
Skip if: A self-serve plan can still validate the workload safely
Includes: 1B+ characters/mo; volume discounts by inquiry
Notes
Unreal Speech's $4.99 Basic price is a six-month introduction to a $49 plan, and the next plan up costs ten times Basic's list price, $499, followed by $1,499 and $4,999 a month, with nothing in between. What fills the gap is overage, charged daily at the rate of your current plan: $16 per million characters on Basic, $12 on Plus, $10 on Pro and $8 on Enterprise. Paid plans also roll unused characters over to the next billing cycle; Free's allowance resets on the first of each month instead. So the real upgrade question is not which plan your volume fits, but when overage on the smaller plan starts costing more than the next plan up.
Monthly characters | Basic ($49) plus overage at $16 per million | Plus ($499, 42M included) |
|---|---|---|
3 million | $49 | $499 |
10 million | $161 | $499 |
20 million | $321 | $499 |
31 million | $497 | $499 |
42 million | $673 | $499 |
The table is our arithmetic on Unreal's published prices, after Basic's introductory six months; during them the crossover sits near 34 million characters, and because paid plans roll unused characters over, uneven months cross later than the table suggests. The two lines cross at about 31.1 million characters, roughly 690 hours of audio at Unreal's own rate of about 750 characters per audio minute. The same calculation puts the Plus-to-Pro crossover at about 125 million characters, where Plus's $12 overage on 83 million extra characters reaches Pro's $1,000 premium. Below those points, staying on the smaller plan and paying overage is the cheaper route.
On our arithmetic, converted to price per million characters, the allowances cost about $16.33 on Basic at list price, $11.88 on Plus, $9.99 on Pro and $8 on Enterprise, so each plan's overage rate is close to its own included rate.
Unreal offers 48 voices across 8 languages, including Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, French and Italian alongside US and UK English. It has no voice cloning ("Not right now, but we're working on it"). Request size depends on the endpoint: /stream takes up to 1,000 characters and returns raw audio quickly, /speech takes 3,000 and returns MP3 with timestamps, and /synthesisTasks accepts up to 500,000 characters as an asynchronous job, which Unreal says turns 10 hours of audio around in 15 minutes. A WebSocket endpoint returns per-word timestamps with the audio. Unreal publishes no concurrency or rate-limit table.
Unreal says its service is powered by Kokoro TTS, an Apache 2.0 model. On our reading, that gives teams with their own GPUs a self-hosted route to the open Kokoro model, though Unreal does not say its hosted voices are identical to the open release.
At list price ElevenLabs' API costs $40 per million characters on its Flash and Turbo models and $80 on Eleven v3 and v4, so Unreal's Plus rate of $12 per million is, on our arithmetic, about 30% of ElevenLabs' cheapest, though ElevenLabs adds voice cloning and many more languages. OpenAI's $15-per-million tts-1 is deprecated and leaves the API on January 6, 2027, so it is not a basis for a new budget.
Watchouts
The Basic price is shown with a first-six-month discount beside a higher list price, so renewal cost needs review.
Usage beyond the allowance is charged daily at the current plan's rate, $16 per 1M characters on Basic down to $8 on Enterprise, so a spike can cost more than moving up a plan.
Short streaming, synchronous speech, and asynchronous synthesis routes have different text-size boundaries.
Free-plan audio may be used commercially only with a link to unrealspeech.com in the description; paid plans need no attribution.
How Unreal Speech pricing has moved over time: plan lineup shifts, free access changes and starting price updates.
3 archived snapshots
Starting price moved up $44.01.
From $49 · Free plan available · Freemium · Flat monthly
Free
Monthly: $0/mo · Annual: Not listed
Usage: 250K characters/mo; about 6 hours of audio; commercial use with a link to unrealspeech.com
Basic
Monthly: $49/mo · Annual: Not listed
Usage: 3M characters/mo; about 67 hours of audio; $4.99/mo for the first 6 months; overage $16 per 1M
Plus
Monthly: $499/mo · Annual: Not listed
Usage: 42M characters/mo; about 933 hours of audio; overage $12 per 1M; unused characters roll over
Pro
Monthly: $1,499/mo · Annual: Not listed
Usage: 150M characters/mo; about 3K hours of audio; overage $10 per 1M; unused characters roll over
Enterprise
Monthly: $4,999/mo · Annual: Not listed
Usage: 625M characters/mo; about 14K hours of audio; overage $8 per 1M; unused characters roll over
Custom High Volume
Monthly: Not listed · Annual: Not listed
Usage: 1B+ characters/mo; volume discounts by inquiry
Pricing was reviewed with no headline change.
Free
Monthly: $0/mo · Annual: Not listed
Usage: 250K characters/mo; roughly 6 hours audio
Starter
Monthly: $10/mo · Annual: Not listed
Usage: 500K characters/mo; roughly 11 hours audio
Basic
Monthly: $4.99/mo · Annual: Not listed
Usage: 3M characters/mo; roughly 67 hours audio; first-six-month discount from listed $49/mo
Plus
Monthly: $499/mo · Annual: Not listed
Usage: 42M characters/mo; roughly 933 hours audio
Pro
Monthly: $1,499/mo · Annual: Not listed
Usage: 150M characters/mo; roughly 3K hours audio
Enterprise
Monthly: $4,999/mo · Annual: Not listed
Usage: 625M characters/mo; roughly 14K hours audio
Custom High Volume
Monthly: Not listed · Annual: Not listed
Usage: 1B+ characters/mo; volume discounts by inquiry
Earliest archived snapshot.
From $4.99 · Free plan available · Freemium · Flat monthly
Free
Monthly: $0/mo · Annual: Not listed
Usage: 250K characters/mo; roughly 6 hours audio
Starter
Monthly: $10/mo · Annual: Not listed
Usage: 500K characters/mo; roughly 11 hours audio
Basic
Monthly: $4.99/mo · Annual: Not listed
Usage: 3M characters/mo; roughly 67 hours audio; first-six-month discount from listed $49/mo
Plus
Monthly: $499/mo · Annual: Not listed
Usage: 42M characters/mo; roughly 933 hours audio
Pro
Monthly: $1,499/mo · Annual: Not listed
Usage: 150M characters/mo; roughly 3K hours audio
Enterprise
Monthly: $4,999/mo · Annual: Not listed
Usage: 625M characters/mo; roughly 14K hours audio
Custom High Volume
Monthly: Not listed · Annual: Not listed
Usage: 1B+ characters/mo; volume discounts by inquiry
AI Voice Generators
| Product | Free tier | Cheapest paid plan | Top plan | Last checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cartesia | Free | $5See plans on the tool page | Same as cheapest | Prices checked |
| ElevenLabs | Free | $6 | $99 | Prices checked |
| Fish Audio | Free | $15 | Same as cheapest | Prices checked |
| MiniMax Audio | No free plan | $5 | $999 | Prices checked |
| Speechify | Free | $19 | $49 | Prices checked |
| WellSaid | Free | $19 | $49 | Prices checked |
Unreal Speech is a low-cost text-to-speech API built on Kokoro TTS for teams that already know what text they need to turn into audio. Its API routes short, time-sensitive requests through a streaming endpoint, medium requests through a speech endpoint and long-form jobs through asynchronous synthesis tasks, with timestamps for word or sentence highlighting in read-along products. Pricing is a monthly character bundle at roughly 750 characters per minute of audio: Free covers 250,000 characters, about six hours; Basic costs $49 a month, discounted to $4.99 for the first six months, for 3 million characters, about 67 hours; Plus costs $499 for 42 million; Pro $1,499 for 150 million; and Enterprise $4,999 for 625 million, with high-volume quotes beyond that. At Plus and Pro volumes, that is about $0.012 and $0.01 per 1,000 characters. It is best for publishers, product teams and content operations narrating articles, lessons or app content at scale. The caveat is scope: it is a focused TTS layer, not a studio, cloning, dubbing or voice-agent platform.
FAQ
Yes. The public pricing page lists a free tier with a monthly character allowance, making it useful for real API evaluation before paid use.
No public per-seat pricing is shown. The main pricing model is API character allowance by plan, with custom inquiry for very high-volume use.
Unreal Speech is best for teams that need low-cost, API-driven text-to-speech generation for products, articles, narration, accessibility, or batch audio workflows.
Yes. The official API docs describe a /stream endpoint for short, time-sensitive requests, and the product page also references real-time timestamp streaming.
Official docs route short requests through /stream, medium requests through /speech, and long-form jobs through /synthesisTasks, with the long-form endpoint documented for much larger text payloads.
No. Unreal Speech should be evaluated primarily as a focused TTS API. Buyers needing cloning, dubbing, or managed creative production should verify whether the narrower workflow is enough.
Unreal Speech From $49/mo · Free plan
Prices checked November 9, 2026
Editorial guidance grounded in official product sources.
Prices come from unrealspeech.com's official pricing page; the date at the top of this page is the latest check. Plan details and limits are reviewed against official pages every month. Picks are ToolColumn's judgment.
Edited byRick Finch
Reference links
