Amazon Polly price per 1M characters, and a 5,000-character script

Amazon Polly lists four voice engines per 1 million characters: Standard $4, Neural $16, Generative $30 and Long-form $100. A 5,000-character script costs $0.0200, $0.0800, $0.1500 and $0.5000 on those engines. Sume TTS 1.0 is $0.0475 per 1,000 characters, which is $0.2375 for the same script.

Polly's prices are from its pricing page, read 2026-10-01; Sume's from the rate card. The conversion is characters divided by 1,000,000 times the per-million price.

What does a 5,000-character script cost on each engine?

Same script length, same arithmetic. The page quotes the standard US region; it separately lists higher GovCloud prices for Standard and Neural.

Does Polly have a free tier I should count?

Yes. The page lists 5 million Standard characters per month, and for the first 12 months 1 million Neural, 500 thousand Long-form and 100 thousand Generative characters per month. A small project can sit entirely inside those numbers, so compare at your real monthly volume, not at one script.

What is the Sume number based on?

Sume TTS 1.0 counts the transcript's characters, spaces and punctuation included, up to 20,000 per request. The quote assumes an estimated 1,000 characters when you do not pass a size. See TTS API pricing for how reservation works.

Is the cheapest engine the right comparison?

Not by price alone. Polly's Standard engine is the cheapest line, but the page does not describe voice quality, so a price table cannot tell you which engine sounds right for narration. Listen to a sample of your own text on each, then compare cost. Sume TTS 1.0 has no engine picker; the API reference says model and model_id are rejected with a 400.