The Economics
Priced for every night sky.
No plans, no slabs, no monthly minimums. Billed per second of audio: feather for high-volume work, starling for studio quality and cloning.
RATE CARD · 2026
SERVING · FEATHER + STARLING
No plans, no slabs, no monthly minimums. Billed per second of audio: feather for high-volume work, starling for studio quality and cloning.
All 23 languages and every voice included, at the same rate. At published list prices that is 9× to 53× cheaper than the leading commercial voice APIs: press play below and watch the bill. Three dollars buys roughly 1,750 minutes of speech. Billed by the second, no minimums, cancel any time.
Published list prices, normalised to the same two units. The difference is compute: everyone else rents GPUs, the Observatory runs on ordinary CPUs.
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 · seven engines, published list prices per 1M characters, each paired with the model you hear.
Published list prices per 1M characters · verified June 2026
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.
The full methodology, model card, and per-machine latency table live on the research page.