The economics

Priced so the bill never decides.

No plans, no slabs, no monthly minimums. You pay for the characters you synthesise: Feather for high-volume work, Starling for studio quality and cloning.

RATE CARD · 2026
SERVING · FEATHER + STARLING
01 · The rate

One number to remember.

0.19¢ / 1,000 characters · feather

All 107 languages and every voice included, at the same rate. Against published list prices that is up to 50× cheaper than frontier voice models: press play below and watch the bill. Billed per character, no minimums, cancel any time.

feather · per 1,000 characters$0.0019
feather · per 1M characters$1.90
starling · per 1,000 characters$0.0090
starling · per 1M characters$9.00
Free, renewed monthly10,000 chars
02 · The field

Where the rate sits among providers.

Published list prices, normalised to the same two units, for the exact models you can hear below. The difference is compute: everyone else rents GPUs, CelestLabs runs on ordinary CPUs.

ProviderModel$ / 1M chars$ / 1K chars
CelestLabsfeather$1.90$0.0019
CelestLabsstarling$9.00$0.0090
Smallestlightning-v3.1$17.50$0.0175
Deepgramaura-2$30.00$0.0300
OpenAItts-1-hd$30.00$0.0300
Sarvambulbul:v3$31.66$0.0317
Cartesiasonic-3.5$40.00$0.0400
ElevenLabseleven v3$100.00$0.1000
03 · The same line

Eight engines. One sentence. Watch the bill.

Each row is a real recording of the same line from that provider's model. The meters count up in lockstep with playback: each number is that model's price per million characters, not the cost of this clip.

FIG. 01 · eight engines, published list prices per 1M characters, each paired with the model you hear.

CelestLabsfeather · CPU
$0.00/ 1M chars1× · you
CelestLabsstarling · flagship
$0.00/ 1M chars~5× · you
Smallestlightning-v3.1
$0.00/ 1M chars
Deepgramaura-2
$0.00/ 1M chars16×
OpenAItts-1-hd
$0.00/ 1M chars16×
Sarvambulbul:v3
$0.00/ 1M chars17×
Cartesiasonic-3.5
$0.00/ 1M chars21×
ElevenLabseleven v3
$0.00/ 1M chars50×+

Published list prices per 1M characters · multiples measured against feather

04 · Why the price holds

Engineering, not arithmetic.

This is not a loss leader, an introductory rate, or a thin reseller margin. It is what synthesis costs when the whole path runs on commodity CPUs.

OBS. A · NO GPUS
No GPUs anywhere in the path.
A 117M-parameter distilled model on an ONNX runtime, streaming faster than realtime on an ordinary 8-core CPU, with the first word in under 100 ms. No CUDA, no accelerator surcharge passed along to you.
OBS. B · EVERY REGION
The rate holds in every region.
CPUs exist in every cloud region on earth, so the price does not change with geography. Serve your users where their data must live, at the same 0.19¢ per 1,000 characters.
OBS. C · ON-PREM
Small enough to bring home.
The serving stack fits in roughly 500 MB and a single process, and cold-starts in about two seconds. It runs inside your own cloud, on-premise, and air-gapped.

The full methodology, model card, and per-machine latency table live on the research page.

Hear it first

Numbers are nice. Voices are better.