ElevenLabs alternatives.
Six text-to-speech APIs and one studio suite beside ElevenLabs, on what each publishes, normalised to one unit, with a verdict for each. Every figure is dated and linked to the vendor's own site.
| Tool | Published rate | Roughly per minute |
|---|---|---|
 ElevenLabs | $0.10 per 1,000 characters (v3 API); plans $6–$990 per month | ~$0.10 |
 Svara TTS TURBO | ₹1 / $0.01 per 1,000 characters, every plan | ~$0.01 |
 OpenAI TTS | $15 per 1M characters | ~$0.015 |
 Deepgram Aura-2 | $0.030 per 1K characters (pay as you go) | ~$0.03 |
 Cartesia | Credit plans; Pro is $5 per month for ~133 minutes | ~$0.04 |
 Fish Audio | $15 per 1M — billed per UTF-8 byte | ~$0.015 Latin, ~3× for Indic and CJK scripts |
 Murf | Studio subscriptions | — |
Per-minute estimates use the rule of thumb that 1,000 characters is about a minute of audio.
Which one, for what.
ElevenLabs
The reference point. Choose it if you want the suite around the model — dubbing, sound effects, a marketplace — and the rate that comes with it.
Svara TTS TURBO
Choose it for voice agents and multilingual products: 80+ languages in one model, mid-sentence code-switching, ~80 ms to first audio, and both OpenAI- and ElevenLabs-compatible endpoints — at a tenth of ElevenLabs' rate.
OpenAI TTS
Choose it if you are already on OpenAI's platform and need straightforward English-centric narration from a small voice set.
Deepgram Aura-2
Choose it if your agent stack already runs on Deepgram's speech-to-text and you want one vendor for both directions.
Cartesia
Choose it for low-latency realtime work and voice design controls, priced in minutes rather than characters.
Fish Audio
Choose it for budget English work — but per-byte billing roughly triples the effective rate for Devanagari, Tamil, Chinese or Japanese text.
Murf
Choose it if you want a voiceover studio with editing workflows rather than an API to build on.
Head-to-head with the reference point: Svara TTS Turbo vs ElevenLabs. Building for India: Svara TTS Turbo vs Sarvam.
Questions
Competitor rates as of September 2026, read from each vendor's own site — check the sources before deciding, since prices change. Sources, with our own pages beside them: elevenlabs.io/pricing · murf.ai/pricing · openai.com/api/pricing · deepgram.com/pricing · cartesia.ai/pricing · fish.audio/pricing · kenpathlabs.com/pricing.