Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Tortoise TTS as an at-cost open-source pay-per-second API
Tortoise TTS is the best TTS available today. We built an open-source, at cost, pay per second API for it. The quality of intonation it generates is unparalleled, and we hope our at-cost API will make it easier for people to build on top! This allows folks to run via a single API call - it costs $0.03/query. The WAV file is downloadable, we apply no restrictions. We're open-sourcing all our work — we made Tortoise run 30% faster, and have more improvements coming. If you're keen to contribute we can help with ideas, pointers, compute and data; just DM us. Our fork with the improvements…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier. Tortoise TTS as an at-cost open-source pay-per-second API launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
At-cost per-second API for the best text-to-speech model.
2023 · tts.themetavoice.xyz · its alternatives →
- 2
Kitten TTS is an open-source series of tiny and expressive text-to-speech models for on-device applications. We are excited to launch a preview of our smallest model, which is less than 25 MB. This model has 15M parameters. This release supports English text-to-speech applications in eight voices: four male and four female. The model is quantized to int8 + fp16, and it uses onnx for runtime. The model is designed to run literally anywhere eg. raspberry pi, low-end smartphones, wearables, browsers etc. No GPU required! We're releasing this to give early users a sense of the latency and voices…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3
Inworld TTSfree tier, from $25/mo▲318Hey HN, this is Igor, one of the engineers behind Inworld Runtime, which we're releasing today in public preview. We built it to solve the common problem we and our customers had: engineers spend more time on AI ops and plumbing than on actual feature development. This was often due to the challenge of using Python for I/O-bound, high-concurrency workloads and complexity maintaining pipelines with streams that use always-changing ML models. Our solution is a high-performance runtime written in C++ with the core idea of defining AI logic as graphs. For instance, a basic voice-to-voice…
2025 · inworld.ai · its alternatives →
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FreeTTS▲123Top TTS converter & audio editor to speed up your workflow
2024 · freetts.com · its alternatives →
- 5
MARS5 TTS▲489Open-source, insanely prosodic text-to-speech model
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Orpheus TTS▲152Open-source TTS with emotion & voice cloning
2025 · canopylabs.ai · its alternatives →
- 7
Chatterbox Turbo▲206Fast, expressive, open source TTS with native watermarking
Dec 2025 · resemble.ai · its alternatives →
- 8
Zyphra Zonos▲134Highly expressive TTS model with high fidelity voice cloning
2025 · zyphra.com · its alternatives →
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I wanted to share our new speech to text model, and the library to use them effectively. We're a small startup (six people, sub-$100k monthly GPU budget) so I'm proud of the work the team has done to create streaming STT models with lower word-error rates than OpenAI's largest Whisper model. Admittedly Large v3 is a couple of years old, but we're near the top the HF OpenASR leaderboard, even up against Nvidia's Parakeet family. Anyway, I'd love to get feedback on the models and software, and hear about what people might build with it.
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11
Super-fast transcription for 10 cents a minute
2019 · cheaptranscription.io · its alternatives →
- 12
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A real-time transcription project using React and socketio - GitHub - saharmor/realtime-transcription-playground: A real-time transcription project using React and socketio
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14
GoWhisper▲150Cross-platform, privacy-first audio transcription app
2023 · gowhisper.io · its alternatives →
- 15
I built Whispering because I believe transcription is too fundamental a tool to be locked behind paywalls. It's a cross-platform desktop and web transcription app that turns speech into text with a keyboard shortcut, among other things. The app lets you bring your own API key (OpenAI, Groq, etc.) and make direct calls. If you want complete privacy, it also supports local transcription. Either way, your audio never goes through any middleman servers. It's super lightweight (~22MB), built with Svelte 5 and Tauri, and works on Mac, Windows, and Linux. I've been using it daily for the past few…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16
WhisperAPI▲77$0.15/hr audio transcription API powered by OpenAI Whisper
2022 · whisperapi.com · its alternatives →
- 17
I built a pipeline that turns tweets about ML papers into a podcast. Code's up here. Happy hacking. https://github.com/yacineMTB/scribepod
2023 · scribepod.substack.com · its alternatives →
- 18
VoxCPM2▲110Open-source 48kHz TTS with voice design and cloning
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
Mimic 3▲77Privacy-focused neural text-to-speech (TTS) engine
2022 · community.openconversational.ai · its alternatives →
- 20
I wanted a voice-to-text app but didn't trust any of the proprietary ones with my privacy. So I decided to see if I could vibe code it with 0 macOS app & Swift experience. It uses a local binary of whisper.cpp (a fast implementation of OpenAI's Whisper voice-to-text model in C++). Github: https://github.com/richardwu/openwhisper I also decided to take this as an opportunity to compare 3 agentic coding harnesses: Cursor w/ Opus 4.6: - Best one-shot UI by far - Didn't get permissioning correct - Had issues making the "Cancel recording" hotkey being turned on all the…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21
Free TTS API with 1,200+ voices in 75+ languages
Feb 2026 · eidosspeech.xyz · its alternatives →
- 22
Natural voice generator - tts-free.online
2025 · tts-free.online · its alternatives →
- 23
The audio/TTS space just moved fast. In the last week alone: NVIDIA – PersonaPlex-7B Open-source, full-duplex conversational speech model. Inworld AI – TTS-1.5 Realtime TTS (<250ms), $0.005/min, currently #1 on Artificial Analysis. Flash Labs – Chroma 1.0 First open-source, end-to-end, real-time speech-to-speech model. Alibaba Qwen – Qwen3-TTS Fully open-sourced TTS family: Base, CustomVoice, VoiceDesign. Kyutai Labs – Pocket TTS Runs locally on a laptop. No GPU required. Feels like TTS is hitting the same acceleration moment LLMs had last year. Realtime, open-source, and local is…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
TTS Buddy▲19Built for people with accessibility needs. Free.
Feb 2026 · ttsbuddy.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →