Voice Agent Unit Economics
Amazon Polly Pricing Calculator
Compare Standard, Neural, and Generative voice tiers — size TTS cost per user session before you ship voice features.
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- Instant results
- ~2 min
Rates reviewed
Voice tier & volume
us-east-1list rates, pricing as of 2026-10-17. Speech marks billed separately. SSML and plain text use the same per-character rates. Source: AWS public pricing.
Average voice response ≈ 500–2,000 characters.
Estimated Polly Cost
Monthly TTS estimate
Total Monthly Cost
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FactualMinds builds voice agents on AWS — Polly TTS, Transcribe STT, and Bedrock orchestration with cost guardrails.
Explore GenAI on AWS →Who This Tool Is For
AI product teams and voice/GenAI builders sizing text-to-speech before shipping conversational features.
Why We Built This Tool
Neural voices cost 4× Standard — a voice agent doing 5M characters monthly jumps from $20 to $80 before speech marks and Bedrock inference.
What Problem It Solves
- Tier mismatch. Generative or Long-Form on short chat responses wastes 5–25× per character vs Neural.
- Response length. Verbose LLM outputs inflate TTS character counts — cap responses before synthesis.
- Speech marks. Viseme and word-timing metadata doubles character-metered charges when enabled.
See Transcribe pricing or GenAI on AWS.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which Polly tier should I use for a voice agent?
Neural is the production default for conversational agents. Standard works for internal tools and alerts. Generative fits expressive, character-driven delivery. Long-Form is for audiobook-length narration only.
Is there a Polly free tier?
Amazon Polly offers 5M characters per month free for the first 12 months on Standard and Neural voices in supported regions. This calculator models post-free-tier production rates.
How do speech marks affect cost?
Speech marks (visemes, word boundaries) bill at $4.00 per 1M characters in addition to synthesis charges when requested.
Polly vs Bedrock for voice output?
Polly is purpose-built TTS with predictable per-character pricing. Bedrock multimodal models can generate audio but bill per token — compare total voice-agent cost with both calculators.
How many characters is a typical voice response?
Short agent replies run 200–800 characters. A 2-minute narration at ~150 words/minute is roughly 1,500 characters.
Where do these prices come from?
AWS published us-east-1 list prices (Amazon Polly pricing), pricing as of 2026-10-17.
