> AWS Polly
Amazon Polly is AWS's text-to-speech service, billed monthly per character of text converted to speech or Speech Marks. Published rates per 1 million characters are $4.00 Standard, $16.00 Neural, $100.00 Long-Form and $30.00 Generative (GovCloud US: $4.80 Standard, $19.20 Neural). The free tier includes 5 million Standard characters per month plus 1 million Neural, 500,000 Long-Form and 100,000 Generative characters per month for the first 12 months.
Use AWS Secret Access Key as API key; set providerSpecificData.accessKeyId and optional region.
// pros
- Standard voices carry a 5 million characters-per-month free allowance that is not limited to the first 12 months, while the Neural (1M), Long-Form (500K) and Generative (100K) monthly allowances end after 12 months.
- Generated speech can be cached and replayed at no additional cost, so repeating the same audio does not incur a second charge.
- Speech Marks are billed on the same per-character basis as speech, so lip-sync and highlighted-text features consume roughly double the billable characters for the same script.
- Published per-item examples: a typical news article of about 6.5k characters costs $0.03 Standard, $0.10 Neural, $0.65 Long-Form and $0.20 Generative.
- There is no per-request or minimum fee: 1,000 requests of 1,000 characters and 10,000 requests of 100 characters both price at exactly $4.00 Standard per 1 million characters.
// cons
- Long-Form voices at $100.00 per 1 million characters cost 25x Standard and 6.25x Neural, and Generative at $30.00 is 7.5x Standard, so voice selection is the dominant cost variable.
- New-customer credit is time-boxed: from July 15, 2025 new AWS customers receive up to $200 in Free Tier credits, the free plan runs 6 months from account creation, and all credits must be used within 12 months.
- Characters are metered when requested, so re-synthesizing text that was not cached is billed again.
- GovCloud (US) pricing is above commercial regions ($4.80 Standard, $19.20 Neural per 1 million characters) and the page only encourages Standard voices there.
Use Polly when the workload already lives in an AWS account and billing per character converted is acceptable; cache synthesized audio rather than re-synthesizing, and reserve Long-Form or Generative voices for content that justifies the multiple. It is the pragmatic default for TTS among the providers listed in this directory when IAM, regions and a single AWS bill matter more than utterance-level control.
written by Mike Fleming, Uprouter editorial · verified against official sources September 16, 2026
Value taken from the provider’s own published free-tier terms, expressed in USD.
note: Up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits for new customers (from July 15, 2025), applicable to eligible services including Polly; AWS states $100 in credits immediately plus up to $100 more earned, on a free plan lasting 6 months with credits expiring 12 months after account creation.
| Plan | Type | Monthly | Input /1M | Output /1M | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard voices | payg | — | $4.00 | — | $4.00 per 1M characters of text converted to speech |
| Neural voices | payg | — | $16.00 | — | $16.00 per 1M characters |
| Long-Form voices | payg | — | $100.00 | — | $100.00 per 1M characters |
| Generative voices | payg | — | $30.00 | — | $30.00 per 1M characters |
| AWS Free Tier | free | — | — | — | 5M Standard chars/mo (recurring); 1M Neural, 500k Long-Form, 100k Generative chars/mo for first 12 months; new AWS accounts (since 2025-07-15) may instead receive up to $200 free-plan credits |
Pricing normalized from public sources — always verify with the provider.
// model prices
| Model | Input /1M | Output /1M | Context |
|---|---|---|---|
| Polly Standard Voices | — | — | — |
| Polly Neural Voices | — | — | — |
| Polly Long-Form Voices | — | — | — |
| Polly Generative Voices | — | — | — |
| Polly Neural | — | — | — |
| Polly Standard | — | — | — |
| Polly Long-form v2 | — | — | — |
$ Does AWS Polly have a free tier?
Yes — AWS Polly offers a free tier that we value at roughly $200.00 in free credits. Always confirm current limits on AWS Polly's official pricing page — free tiers change without notice.
$ How much does AWS Polly cost per 1M tokens?
AWS Polly does not publish simple per-1M-token pricing (it may bill per request, per output, or via a subscription plan). Check their official pricing page for exact figures.
$ Is AWS Polly safe to use?
Uprouter rates AWS Polly as low risk. Low risk: first-party from AWS, with the free tier stated on the service page — 5M Standard characters/month plus Neural/Long-Form/Generative allowances "for the first 12 months," and new customers eligible for up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits. The caveats are metering-shaped, not trust-shaped: billing is per character (and Speech Marks), the four voice tiers price separately, and the 12-month window means the "free" line expires on an AWS-wide clock, not Polly's. Risk ratings are editorial, evidence-based, and never influenced by affiliate relationships.
Raw community sentiment, shown unblended. Votes never feed into objective data fields like price, risk, or status — and never into sort order.
No published reviews yet — be the first.
// more_informationprice history · live status · risk & confidence · code snippets
price_history
No recorded changes yet.
live_status
current: unknownNo probes recorded yet.
Uprouter runs its own probes; best-effort, not a guarantee. Probe results depend on our network location and cadence — for production, always use the provider’s own status page.
risk_&_confidence
Low risk: first-party from AWS, with the free tier stated on the service page — 5M Standard characters/month plus Neural/Long-Form/Generative allowances "for the first 12 months," and new customers eligible for up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits. The caveats are metering-shaped, not trust-shaped: billing is per character (and Speech Marks), the four voice tiers price separately, and the 12-month window means the "free" line expires on an AWS-wide clock, not Polly's.
Confidence reflects how much verifiable evidence (official docs, probe history, community reports) backs this entry. Risk is our editorial assessment of operator reliability and terms — not financial advice.
code_snippets
# AWS Polly's own API — get a key from their dashboard
curl https://aws.amazon.com/polly/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer THEIR_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "aws-polly/standard-voices",
"messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "Hello" }]
}'Direct to the provider — Uprouter receives nothing; verify their current pricing before purchasing.
Ranked by neutral similarity signals only — live status, free-tier shape and free-credit proximity. Commercial relationships never influence this list.