Let me tell you about the moment I decided to build a TTS app.
I was looking at Speechify's pricing page. The product was good. The voices were decent. The extraction from web articles mostly worked. Then I saw the number: $139 per year. For a tool that converts text to audio.
I did some back-of-the-envelope math on what the underlying service actually costs to provide, and the margin was so absurd that I genuinely could not believe no one had undercut them. So I did.
This is not just a competitor taking shots. This is a structural argument about why TTS pricing is broken and why it does not have to be this way.
The VC-Funded Pricing Trap
Speechify has raised over $100 million in venture capital. That money comes with expectations. Investors do not write nine-figure checks because they believe in the social good of text-to-speech. They write them because they expect 10x returns, which means Speechify needs to generate enormous revenue growth to justify its valuation.
The most straightforward way to generate revenue growth is to charge more. Not to serve more customers at fair prices, but to extract maximum revenue per customer. This is the VC pricing playbook: raise prices, add features to justify those prices, and target customers who expense the cost to their employers.
The result is predictable. The product gets loaded with features that most users never touch -- AI summaries, translation, OCR scanning, celebrity voices -- each one providing justification for the next price increase. The core use case (convert text to audio) gets buried under layers of complexity.
You are not paying $139 per year for text-to-speech. You are paying for investor returns, a 400-person team, Super Bowl commercials, and a feature list designed to impress enterprise procurement departments.
What TTS Actually Costs to Provide
Here is what most people do not realize: the raw cost of neural text-to-speech has plummeted.
The major cloud TTS providers -- Google Cloud, Amazon Polly, OpenAI, InWorld -- charge between $4 and $16 per million characters of synthesized speech. A typical 2,000-word article is roughly 12,000 characters. At the higher end of that range, the TTS cost per article is about $0.19. At the lower end, it is under $0.05.
Let us be generous and assume an active user converts 30 articles per month. At $0.19 per article, the TTS cost is $5.70 per month. Add server infrastructure, URL extraction, bandwidth for audio delivery, and reasonable overhead: you are looking at a total cost of service well under $8 per user per month.
Speechify charges $11.58 per month (their annual rate). That is not outrageous in isolation. But their monthly rate is $24.99, and the features gated behind that price are overwhelmingly ones that most users do not need. The pricing is designed to push you toward the annual plan by making the monthly alternative feel punitive.
The Real Cost Breakdown
For a typical user converting 20-30 articles per month: TTS synthesis costs
$4-6, server and infrastructure costs $1-2, and bandwidth costs under $1. The
total cost of service is roughly $6-9 per user per month. Anything above that
is margin.
The Feature Bloat Tax
Open Speechify's app and count the features. AI summaries. 30+ languages. Celebrity voice cloning. OCR from images. PDF scanning. Chrome extension with inline reading. Kindle integration. Speed reading training. Note-taking.
Now ask yourself: how many of those do you actually use?
For most people, the answer is one: convert text to audio and listen. Maybe two, if you count speed control. Everything else is noise. But every feature adds engineering complexity, support burden, and cost -- and that cost gets passed to you in the subscription price.
This is the feature bloat tax. You pay for the PDF scanner you have never opened, the celebrity voices you tried once for novelty, and the AI summarizer that produces worse summaries than just listening at 1.5x speed. These features exist not because users demanded them, but because the pricing model demands justification.
The alternative is focus. Build the core use case exceptionally well. Keep the interface clean. Keep the price fair.
A Different Approach
When I built speakeasy, I made a deliberate choice: price it based on what the service costs to provide, plus a reasonable margin, rather than on what the market will bear.
The result is $9.99 per month or $89.99 per year. That is 35% less than Speechify's annual price. And you get 3 articles per week free, with no account required, so you can evaluate whether the tool actually fits your workflow before paying anything.
What does $9.99 per month get you?
- Unlimited article conversions. Paste any URL and get natural-sounding audio.
- High-quality neural voices. InWorld TTS voices that are genuinely pleasant to listen to for extended periods.
- iCloud sync. Your audio library syncs across all your Apple devices automatically.
- RSS feeds. Subscribe to your favorite sources and get new articles as audio automatically.
- 0.5x to 4x speed control. Fine-grained speed adjustment during playback.
- No account required. Install and start using it. Your device is your identity.
That is it. No bloat. No features you will never use. No features designed to justify a price point.
What $9.99 Per Month Should Get You
I think about this a lot. The subscription economy has conditioned us to accept price anchoring that does not reflect value. Netflix is $15.49. Spotify is $11.99. Your cloud storage is $2.99. We accept these prices because we use these services daily and the value is obvious.
TTS should be in the same category. If you use it daily -- and the data shows that users who adopt audio articles quickly do use it daily -- then $9.99 per month is trivially justified. That is about 33 cents per day. It is less than a single cup of gas station coffee.
But the value calculation only works if the tool respects your time and money. If it is loaded with features you do not need, if the interface is cluttered, if the pricing is designed to extract maximum revenue rather than deliver maximum value, then no price feels fair.
The TTS market does not have a technology problem. The voices are great. Extraction is reliable. The infrastructure is mature. What it has is a pricing problem, created by business models that prioritize investor returns over user value.
You deserve better. A focused tool at a fair price. That is what speakeasy is.
Try Before You Pay
speakeasy gives you 3 free articles per week with no account or credit card
required. Try it for a week. If converting your commute into reading time is
worth 33 cents a day to you, the subscription is there. If not, you still got
some free audio articles out of it.