60db vs Amazon Polly · AWS list prices
60db vs Amazon Polly: an honest comparison
Amazon Polly is a mature text to speech service inside AWS. If you already run on AWS and want the lowest price per character, Polly is hard to beat. 60db is built for teams who want a voice platform with its own speech to text, chat and memory, a commercial licence on every plan, and voice cloning without an AWS account. This page sets out both sides with the numbers, so you can choose.
The Free plan includes 3,000 credits every month.
- 01Polly is cheaper per character on raw synthesis. Neural costs $16 per million characters. 60db pay-as-you-go is $20 per million.
- 0260db includes a commercial licence, Instant Voice Cloning and 48 kHz audio on every plan, including Free.
- 0360db adds speech to text, chat and memory on the same API key. Polly is text to speech only.
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Which one should you pick?
Pick Amazon Polly if your whole stack already runs on AWS, your engineers are happy with the AWS SDK and IAM, and your main cost is audio volume. Polly's Standard and Neural voices are among the cheapest per character on the market, and the price does not change with the plan you choose. You pay for what you synthesise. Polly also lets you keep data inside the AWS regions you already use.
Pick 60db if you want a voice platform rather than a cloud service. You get a plain API key, a dashboard, a commercial licence from the first character, voice cloning on the free plan, and speech to text, chat and memory billed from one set of credits. You do not need an AWS account, IAM roles or a separate Speech service to get started. Our voices are 48 kHz by default, and our Pro plan has no cap on parallel requests.
Many teams try both. They run the same paragraph through Polly Neural and a 60db voice, listen side by side, and then check the monthly bill at their real volume. The rest of this page gives you the figures to make that test count.
60db vs Amazon Polly at a glance
Each row says what the service includes, taken from the vendors' own pages where we could check them. Where Polly is ahead, the table says so.
| What you get | 60db | Amazon Polly | Who is ahead |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price per million characters | $20 pay-as-you-go. Plans work out to $49.50 to $55 per million characters | Standard $4, Neural $16, Generative $30, Long-Form $100 | Polly, by a wide margin on raw synthesis |
| Free tier | 3,000 credits a month, commercial licence included | Monthly allowances for new AWS accounts: 5 million Standard, 1 million Neural, 500,000 Long-Form, 100,000 Generative | Polly gives far more free characters |
| Commercial use on the free tier | Yes | Yes, under the AWS service terms | Tie |
| Account needed | Email sign-up and an API key | AWS account, IAM user or role, and an SDK or CLI | 60db for speed of setup |
| Voices | 500+ | Dozens of voices across Standard, Neural, Generative and Long-Form engines | Depends on what you need. Check Polly's voice list for your language. |
| Text to speech languages | 30 | Dozens, across many regional accents | Polly, on breadth |
| Voice cloning | Instant Voice Cloning on every plan, including Free | Not offered as a self-serve clone service | 60db |
| Audio quality | 48 kHz by default; 8 to 48 kHz through the API | Sample rates set per request, depending on engine and format | 60db for the default setting |
| Speech to text | Yes, 40+ languages, from the same credits | Separate service: Amazon Transcribe | 60db, one bill and one key |
| Chat and memory for agents | Yes, on the same API key | Separate services, such as Amazon Bedrock and Lex | 60db for one vendor |
| Team members | Unlimited on every plan | Managed through AWS IAM users and roles | 60db for simple team sharing |
| Concurrent requests | Free 1, Starter 5, Creator 10, Pro unlimited | Set by AWS service quotas, which can be raised on request | Depends on your quota and your team's AWS skills |
| Regions and data residency | Our hosted API | Many AWS regions, so you can keep processing close to your data | Polly |
| Batch and long audio | Use the API for files; queue long jobs yourself | Asynchronous Long-Form synthesis for long documents | Polly |
| Hosted MCP server | Yes, mcp.60db.ai with OAuth 2.1 | Not a Polly feature | 60db |
- Price per million characters
- 60db$20 pay-as-you-go. Plans work out to $49.50 to $55 per million characters
- Amazon PollyStandard $4, Neural $16, Generative $30, Long-Form $100
- Who is aheadPolly, by a wide margin on raw synthesis
- Free tier
- 60db3,000 credits a month, commercial licence included
- Amazon PollyMonthly allowances for new AWS accounts: 5 million Standard, 1 million Neural, 500,000 Long-Form, 100,000 Generative
- Who is aheadPolly gives far more free characters
- Commercial use on the free tier
- 60dbYes
- Amazon PollyYes, under the AWS service terms
- Who is aheadTie
- Account needed
- 60dbEmail sign-up and an API key
- Amazon PollyAWS account, IAM user or role, and an SDK or CLI
- Who is ahead60db for speed of setup
- Voices
- 60db500+
- Amazon PollyDozens of voices across Standard, Neural, Generative and Long-Form engines
- Who is aheadDepends on what you need. Check Polly's voice list for your language.
- Text to speech languages
- 60db30
- Amazon PollyDozens, across many regional accents
- Who is aheadPolly, on breadth
- Voice cloning
- 60dbInstant Voice Cloning on every plan, including Free
- Amazon PollyNot offered as a self-serve clone service
- Who is ahead60db
- Audio quality
- 60db48 kHz by default; 8 to 48 kHz through the API
- Amazon PollySample rates set per request, depending on engine and format
- Who is ahead60db for the default setting
- Speech to text
- 60dbYes, 40+ languages, from the same credits
- Amazon PollySeparate service: Amazon Transcribe
- Who is ahead60db, one bill and one key
- Chat and memory for agents
- 60dbYes, on the same API key
- Amazon PollySeparate services, such as Amazon Bedrock and Lex
- Who is ahead60db for one vendor
- Team members
- 60dbUnlimited on every plan
- Amazon PollyManaged through AWS IAM users and roles
- Who is ahead60db for simple team sharing
- Concurrent requests
- 60dbFree 1, Starter 5, Creator 10, Pro unlimited
- Amazon PollySet by AWS service quotas, which can be raised on request
- Who is aheadDepends on your quota and your team's AWS skills
- Regions and data residency
- 60dbOur hosted API
- Amazon PollyMany AWS regions, so you can keep processing close to your data
- Who is aheadPolly
- Batch and long audio
- 60dbUse the API for files; queue long jobs yourself
- Amazon PollyAsynchronous Long-Form synthesis for long documents
- Who is aheadPolly
- Hosted MCP server
- 60dbYes, mcp.60db.ai with OAuth 2.1
- Amazon PollyNot a Polly feature
- Who is ahead60db
Amazon Polly prices are AWS published rates for standard regions. Some AWS regions, including GovCloud, have different rates, so check the price for your region. A 60db credit is one character of text to speech. Confirm both price lists before you buy.
What the same text costs on each service
Here is the monthly cost for three volumes of text to speech, using list prices and pay-as-you-go rates. Plan prices are left out because they include a fixed credit pool and are not built for these volumes.
| Characters per month | 60db pay-as-you-go | Polly Standard | Polly Neural | Polly Long-Form |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 million | $20 | $4 | $16 | $100 |
| 10 million | $200 | $40 | $160 | $1,000 |
| 50 million | $1,000 | $200 | $800 | $5,000 |
- 1 million
- 60db pay-as-you-go$20
- Polly Standard$4
- Polly Neural$16
- Polly Long-Form$100
- 10 million
- 60db pay-as-you-go$200
- Polly Standard$40
- Polly Neural$160
- Polly Long-Form$1,000
- 50 million
- 60db pay-as-you-go$1,000
- Polly Standard$200
- Polly Neural$800
- Polly Long-Form$5,000
Polly figures multiply the per-million list price by the volume. They do not include free tier allowances, AWS data transfer, or storage for output files. 60db figures use pay-as-you-go at $0.02 per 1,000 characters. Plan credits can lower the cost for smaller volumes. Check the 60db pricing page for the plan that fits your use.
Characters, engines and what gets counted
Both services bill by characters of input text. Spaces and punctuation count. SSML tags, such as pauses and pronunciation hints, are usually not billed as text, but check the AWS documentation for your engine before you rely on that.
Polly charges by engine. Standard is the cheapest. Neural sounds more natural and costs four times as much. Generative is the newest engine and costs more again. Long-Form is built for long documents and costs the most per character. If you pick the wrong engine for a job, the bill grows fast, so choose it on purpose.
60db charges one credit per character for text to speech on every voice. Your plan's credits are a shared pool, so you do not pay a different rate for a different voice. Top-ups are sold on the same rate as your plan, and pay-as-you-go is the fallback when you run out.
What Polly does better today
A comparison page that lists only our wins is an advert. Here is where Polly is the stronger choice.
Price per character.
Polly Standard and Neural cost less than our pay-as-you-go rate by a wide margin. If your job is high-volume narration with no need for our other features, Polly will be cheaper.
AWS integration.
Polly plugs into Lambda, S3, EventBridge, Connect and the rest of AWS. If your app is already on AWS, the audio stays inside the same security boundary and the same bill.
Regions.
You can run synthesis in the AWS regions you already use for compliance, which matters for some public sector and regulated buyers.
Long documents.
Polly's Long-Form engine handles long text as an asynchronous job, which fits book-length narration. Our API is built for requests, and you would queue long jobs yourself.
Language and voice breadth.
Polly covers far more languages and accents than our 30. If you need a rare accent or a language outside our list, Polly is the safer bet.
Engineering familiarity.
Many teams already know IAM, the AWS SDK and CloudWatch. If your ops team runs everything on AWS, that familiarity is worth something.
What you gain by building on 60db
These are the reasons teams choose 60db over Polly. Each one ties to a feature you can check.
Set up in minutes, without AWS
You sign up, copy an API key and make your first call. Polly needs an AWS account, a billing setup, an IAM user or role with the right policy, and an SDK or CLI configured on every machine that calls it. For a small team with no AWS footprint, that setup is real work.
Voice cloning on every plan
60db Instant Voice Cloning is included on the free plan. Polly does not offer a self-serve clone service, so if you need a voice that sounds like a specific person, 60db is the simpler route, provided you have the right to clone that voice.
A commercial licence from the first character
Every 60db plan, including Free, includes a commercial licence. Polly's use is governed by the AWS service terms, which allow commercial use, but you should read those terms for your own case and check any rules that apply to the voices you choose.
Speech, chat and memory on one key
A voice agent needs more than a voice. 60db gives you text to speech, speech to text (Garuda), chat completions (Vyas) and memory (Smriti) on one API key and one set of credits. On AWS you would combine Polly with Transcribe, Bedrock or Lex, each with its own quotas, pricing and IAM policy.
Studio audio by default
60db outputs 48 kHz audio on every plan by default. Polly's sample rates depend on the engine and format you pick, so you set them per request. If you want high-fidelity output with no extra settings, 60db is the simpler default.
No shared quota with the rest of your cloud
Polly runs under your AWS account's service quotas. A spike in one service can use up the limits you planned for another. On 60db, your concurrency is set by your plan, and Pro has no cap on parallel requests.
What it takes to start
To start with Polly, you create an AWS account if you do not have one, create an IAM user or role with permission to call Polly, store its keys safely, install the AWS SDK, and pick a region. That is the right path for a team that already runs infrastructure on AWS and has an owner for its access policies.
To start with 60db, you sign up, create an API key and call the text to speech endpoint with that key. The same key works for speech to text, chat and memory. Keep the key in your secret store, as you would any credential, and rotate it when people leave the team.
Both are quick for a developer who has done it before. The difference shows when a non-engineer on your team needs to test a voice. Our dashboard lets them listen and download without touching IAM.
Costs beyond the per-character rate
The per-character price is the number most people compare, but it is not the whole bill. On AWS, the audio you generate is usually stored in S3 and sent to users or to other services, and both of those are billed separately. Storage and data transfer add to the Polly line, and they grow with your audience. If you stream a lot of audio to listeners outside AWS, check the transfer charges before you commit to a volume.
Engineering time is also a cost. Someone has to set up IAM, keep the SDK current, watch quotas and handle regional settings. For a large platform team, that work is already paid for. For a two-person startup, it can be the most expensive line on the budget. Count it honestly when you compare.
On 60db, the bill is simpler. Your plan gives you a pool of credits, and the pool covers text to speech, speech to text and chat from one balance. When the pool runs out, you top up at your plan's rate or move to pay-as-you-go. You will still want to watch usage, because a long batch job can use a month of credits in an afternoon. Our dashboard shows the balance so you can plan the run.
Match the tool to the team
Polly suits a platform team that already owns an AWS estate. A data engineer can wire it to a Lambda that reads an article from S3 and writes an MP3 back to S3, with the same IAM rules and the same logs as the rest of the system. The team gets one bill, one set of quotas and one place to look when something fails. For that team, the lower price per character and the regional controls are the main reasons to choose Polly.
60db suits a product team that wants a voice feature without building an AWS practice around it. A small app team can add narration, a voice agent or an audio version of a blog post in a day. A creator or a course maker can sign up, pick a voice, listen, and download, with no engineer involved. The commercial licence and voice cloning on the free plan make it easy to test an idea before you spend a cent.
Some teams are both. They keep Polly for long, high-volume batch jobs where the price per character matters most, and use 60db for live voice features where setup speed, cloning and speech to text on one key matter more. Nothing stops you running two providers behind one interface in your own code.
How the audio sounds and how much you can tune it
Polly's Neural and Generative voices sound natural in the languages they cover, and Polly supports SSML for pauses, emphasis, pronunciation and speaking rate. It also offers lexicons, so you can teach the service how to say a brand name or a technical term. Those controls are mature and well documented, and many teams rely on them for product names and place names.
60db also gives you control over pacing and output. You can set the sample rate from 8 kHz up to 48 kHz through the API, and the default is 48 kHz on every plan. For voice agents, that means the same voice can serve a phone line at 8 kHz and a podcast at 48 kHz without changing vendors.
Test both on the sentences that matter to you. Pick a product name, a number, a date and a question from a real customer, then listen on a phone speaker and on headphones. The better voice for your product is the one your users stop noticing.
Compare the cost on your own volume
Take your real monthly character count, multiply it by the rate for each service, and listen to the same paragraph from both. The right answer depends on your volume and your team.
8 questions
60db vs Amazon Polly: common questions
Straight answers, including the ones where Polly comes out ahead.
On raw text to speech, yes. Polly Standard costs $4 per million characters and Neural costs $16. 60db pay-as-you-go costs $20 per million, and our plans work out to about $49.50 to $55 per million. If your only need is high-volume synthesis, Polly costs less. You get more for the money from 60db when you also use speech to text, chat or voice cloning.
Run your own test today
3,000 free credits a month, a commercial licence, voice cloning and 48 kHz audio. No AWS account needed.