Choosing a voice API is harder than it looks: every provider mixes a different set of services and quotes prices in different units, and the comparisons tend to be written by the providers themselves. This one too —we are one of them, Uttera— so we wrote it with one rule: where someone is better or cheaper than us, we say so. It is the only way it is useful to you.
Prices as of 24 September 2026, shown in euros (≈ €0.92/$) so they compare like-for-like. They change often: always check each provider's own page before deciding.
Before price comes which services each API offers, because almost nobody offers all of them:
| Service | Uttera | ElevenLabs | OpenAI | Deepgram | AssemblyAI | Gladia | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard voice (TTS) | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | — | ✅ | — |
| Voice cloning | ✅ | ✅ | — | — | — | ✅¹ | — |
| Transcription (STT) | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Diarization (who speaks) | ✅ | ✅ | — | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Translation | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | — | — | ✅¹ | ✅ |
| Voice analysis (emotion/profile) | ✅ | — | — | — | ✅² | — | — |
| Summarization | ✅ | — | ✅¹ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅¹ | ✅ |
| Native MCP server | ✅ | ✅ | — | — | — | — | — |
| OpenAI dialect (drop-in) | ✅ | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| EU data residency | ✅ | — | — | — | — | ✅¹ | ✅ |
| Self-hostable | ✅ | — | — | ✅¹ | — | — | — |
| Does not train on your data | ✅ | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Signature / watermark in the audio | ✅ | — | — | — | — | ✅³ | — |
1 as a separate product or tier · 2 text-based, not acoustic · 3 SynthID. Table as of date; verify with each provider.
The short read: AssemblyAI and Gladia are pure STT (no speech synthesis), ElevenLabs is voice and cloning (its STT is secondary), OpenAI and Google do everything but in separate products, and Uttera brings voice + listening + intelligence under one account, with the MCP connector and sovereignty as the difference.
| Provider | €/hour |
|---|---|
| AssemblyAI | 0.14 |
| Uttera (Pro) | 0.18 |
| ElevenLabs (Scribe) | 0.20 |
| Deepgram (Nova-3, batch) | 0.24 |
| OpenAI | 0.33 |
| Gladia (Starter) | 0.56 |
| Google (Chirp) | 0.88 |
We are among the cheapest, only behind AssemblyAI. And our transcription ships with acoustic intelligence (emotion, profile, diarization) in the same balance, not as add-ons that stack up.
| Provider | €/1M chars |
|---|---|
| Uttera standard (Pro) | 3.2 |
| Google Standard | 3.7 |
| OpenAI tts-1 | 13.8 |
| Deepgram Aura-2 | 27.6 |
| Google Chirp3-HD | 27.6 |
| ElevenLabs | 46 – 92 |
Our standard voice is the cheapest on the market from the Professional plan up, below even the hyperscalers' basic voices. If you need volumes of preset speech, nothing is cheaper.
Cloning is a different league —it competes with ElevenLabs, not with preset voices— so it gets its own table:
| Provider | €/1M chars |
|---|---|
| Uttera cloning (Pro) | 45 |
| ElevenLabs | 46 – 92 |
| OpenAI · Deepgram · AssemblyAI · Gladia | no API voice cloning |
| Google (Custom Voice) | custom, enterprise tier |
Here we are not the cheap option: we are the quality just below ElevenLabs, with high-fidelity voice cloning and, on top, EU residency and no training on your data —things the leader does not give you.
Our pitch is not "cheapest at everything" —we are not, on cloning— but one API that listens, speaks, translates and analyses, with OpenAI's dialect so you migrate without touching code, EU residency, no training on your data, and an MCP server so your agent uses it on its own. If you want to see it, here is what it does and the plans.
Third-party prices are public and as-of-date; ours are what the API actually charges, published
at /v1/plans. Any figure ages: check at the source.
Anything to add or correct? Write to support@uttera.ai. If you correct us, we edit the post and credit you.
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