ElevenLabs is too expensive for my use case

If ElevenLabs is too expensive, there are a few good alternatives depending on what you need:

Cheaper / free-ish TTS alternatives

• OpenAI TTS — often simpler pricing, good quality, easy API.
• Google Cloud Text-to-Speech — solid quality, lots of voices, usually cost-effective at scale.
• Amazon Polly — one of the cheaper mainstream options, reliable.
• Microsoft Azure TTS — good quality, competitive pricing.
• Coqui / Piper / XTTS — if you can run something locally, this can be much cheaper for higher volume.

If you want to cut costs further

• Use non-neural or standard voices for less important content.
• Cache generated audio so you don’t regenerate the same text.
• Batch requests instead of generating line by line.
• Only use premium voices for a small subset of content.

Best option depends on your use case

If you tell me:

1. how many minutes of audio you need per month,
2. whether you need studio-quality or “good enough,”
3. whether you need voice cloning,
4. whether you can run something locally,

I can recommend the cheapest practical setup.