HN Explorer

Tell HN: Suspicious pricing for text-to-speech on AWS/Google Cloud

6 points by doomrobo ↗ HN
Google's WaveNet TTS service, and Amazon Polly's Neural TTS services are both currently priced at $16/1M characters, with a free 1M characters per month [0][1].

First, it is odd to me that these are priced completely identically. Given that these are entirely different backends, I'd expect some price variation. Second, these prices have not changed since at least 2018 in the case of Google [2] and 2019 in the case of Amazon [3]. I'd imagine that costs would have significantly decreased over this time, considering how much faster and abundant TPUs have become at both of these companies.

Does anyone have insight here? Are these services artificially expensive? For context, I'm currently running a FOSS service [4] for myself and my friends that scrapes articles, converts them to speech via GCP WaveNet TTS, and plays them via any podcast app. The average article costs me about $0.10, which is a pretty noticeable sum, even with my limited user base.

[0] https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/pricing

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/polly/pricing/

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20180617113243/https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/pricing

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20190819070148/https://aws.amazon.com/polly/pricing/

[4] https://github.com/rozbb/readtomyshoe

4 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 23.3 ms ] thread
throwawayadvsec
Costs have decreased for 2018 tech, but not for 2023 tech.

"First, it is odd to me that these are priced completely identically."

Well they're competing with each other and have similar prices on basically all their offerings.

Nothing weird about any of this

doomrobo
> Costs have decreased for 2018 tech, but not for 2023 tech

WaveNet is 2018 tech though. I'm curious why that hasn't gotten cheaper.

taf2
Who is offering significant competition? If Amazon and google are the only game in town then it’s like a game of chicken where they don’t have to collude on price they just have to be fine with current margins and simply are watching the competition to see if a price reduction happens
aristofun
You assume price is built on the costs, while it never does. I bet it costs them barely 1% of the price.