Voice generation bill got out of hand: the four options and what each one costs you

Narration went from a hobby line to my largest bill. The choice is less about price per character than which compromise you take.

• Hosted premium. Still audibly ahead for anything longer than a couple of minutes. Priced per character, which is fine for interface prompts and brutal for narration, because the bill scales exactly with ambition.
• Big cloud voices. Much cheaper and much better than their reputation. The compromise is prosody across a paragraph: sentences are good, something drifts over long passages. Nobody notices in an interface; some people notice immediately in narration. Test on your audience, not on yourself.
• Open model locally. Free per character once you have the hardware and patience. Right answer if you produce a lot regularly, wrong one if you need twenty seconds occasionally.
• Hire a person. For a short, fixed, high-value script heard thousands of times, often cheaper than all of the above and better than any of them.

Check before you switch anything: the commercial terms, before the price. Some of the cheapest have restrictions on how output may be used. That mistake is far more expensive than picking the wrong tier and it is one page of reading.