Answers
Is text to speech billed per character or per minute?
Last checked 2026-08-14
In short
Both models exist, and it changes how you work. Per-character billing makes every retry a small decision; Naadly meters minutes of audio - 30 free a month, 6,000 on $15, uncapped standard speech on $39 - because it runs its own models, so re-rendering a line eleven times costs almost nothing.
Why it changes how you work
Per-character billing prices the attempt; per-minute billing prices the result. That sounds like accounting until you are eleven takes into one line, watching an allowance drain for audio you are going to throw away - which is how per-character services quietly teach you to accept the first pass.
The reason the model differs is infrastructure: a service reselling someone else's API pays per request and must pass that on, while a service running open models on its own containers pays for machine time and can afford your retries.
Convert before comparing: an hour of finished narration is roughly 55,000-60,000 characters, so a "500,000 characters" allowance is about eight to nine hours.