Amazon Polly pricing calculator
Standard, Neural, Long-Form & Generative TTS. Estimate your costs using AWS list prices.
Estimates from AWS list prices, not an AWS quote. Discounts, taxes and credit terms may affect your bill.
01 · How Amazon Polly pricing works
What you pay for
- Per million characters by voice type: standard $4, neural $16, generative $30, long-form $100 (us-east-1).
- SSML tags are not counted as characters; speech marks are billed as characters.
- Storage of generated audio in S3 and delivery via CloudFront are billed separately.
Common cost traps
- Long-form voices cost 25x standard voices.
- Re-synthesising the same text on every request multiplies cost.
Ways to reduce cost
- Cache generated audio in S3 and reuse it.
- Use neural voices for most use cases and reserve long-form/generative for content that needs them.
Free Tier & account eligibility
Free Tier depends on account age. Accounts created on or after 15 July 2025 get a $100 sign-up credit plus up to $100 more for completing onboarding activities; on the Free plan these last 6 months (or until used up), on the Paid plan unused Free Tier credits stay usable for 12 months from sign-up. Accounts created before 15 July 2025 keep the legacy Free Tier (12-month offers plus always-free offers). Always-free offers apply on both plans. Legacy accounts: 5 M standard characters per month for 12 months (and 1 M neural characters, per the legacy offer). New-plan accounts pay from Free Tier credits.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover Amazon Polly?
Polly speech synthesis for standard, neural, long-form and generative voices, and speech marks, are eligible usage and are offset by credits. General rules: credits only offset charges from the billing cycle in which they were applied onward (never past bills), they apply only to the services listed on the credit in Billing and Cost Management > Credits, they expire on the date shown there, and accounts on the AWS Free plan cannot receive Activate credits until they upgrade to the Paid plan.
Check my creditsExcluded charges & conditions
- Upfront payments for Savings Plans and Reserved Instances (All Upfront, and the upfront part of Partial Upfront). The recurring hourly fee of a No Upfront commitment is billed as normal usage and can be offset.
- AWS Marketplace charges (Activate credits make an exception for third-party foundation models used through Amazon Bedrock).
- AWS Enterprise Support, Enterprise On-Ramp, Unified Operations, resold support and partner-led support.
- Amazon Route 53 domain name registration and transfer fees.
- Taxes (sales, use, VAT and similar), AWS Professional Services, Training and Certification, Mechanical Turk, AWS Managed Services, and any use for cryptocurrency mining.
Illustrative credit runway
Single-service examples from the supplied data, not your calculator result. Months = credit amount ÷ monthly cost, before credit expiry. Credits can expire before these theoretical months are used; coverage and other AWS services can shorten runway.
| Usage profile | Monthly estimate | $10,000 | $25,000 | $100,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small | $80.00 | 125.0 mo. | 312.5 mo. | 1,250.0 mo. |
| Medium | $470.00 | 21.3 mo. | 53.2 mo. | 212.8 mo. |
| Large | $3,600.00 | 2.8 mo. | 6.9 mo. | 27.8 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
5 M characters of neural voices per month | Neural characters: 5 million chars x $16 = $80.00 | Total ~$80.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
20 M neural + 5 M generative characters | Neural characters: 20 million chars x $16 = $320.00; Generative characters: 5 million chars x $30 = $150.00 | Total ~$470.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
100 M neural, 20 M long-form characters (audiobooks) | Neural characters: 100 million chars x $16 = $1,600.00; Long-form characters: 20 million chars x $100 = $2,000.00 | Total ~$3,600.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
Amazon Polly pricing FAQ
How is Polly billed?
Per character synthesised, priced per million characters by voice type.
Do SSML tags count?
No, SSML markup is not billed as characters.
Which voice is cheapest?
Standard voices at $4 per million characters; neural voices are $16.
Do credits cover Polly?
Yes, it is eligible usage.
05 · Sources & estimate notes
Content pack dated 2026-10-19. Calculator rates remain their existing snapshots; this content update is not a price refresh.
Verification notes
- Legacy neural-voice free allowance (1 M characters) should be confirmed.
- Runway prices come from the calculator repository snapshot rate card polly (no AWS Price List mapping in the build). Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/polly/pricing/ before publishing.