I Built a Tts That's 100x Cheaper Than Elevenlabs
Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago
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A user claims to have built a TTS that's 100x cheaper than ElevenLabs, sparking discussion about implementation and web development practices.
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Sep 6, 2025 at 2:36 PM EDT
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Almost 2 years ago I started automating YouTube. At first I only had 1 channel, so paying $5 to ElevenLabs was enough. Things were going well, so I decided to scale and launch more channels.
That’s where the problem came in: if you want to use more ElevenLabs, you have to pay more. For my needs, I would’ve had to pay $1,320/month. That’s basically an average monthly salary in some European countries.
Since I’m a full-stack developer, I decided to dive into how TTS actually works. I found a repo on GitHub with tools to train and generate voices, rented a Google server with an Nvidia T4, and started training voices for my own use. After about 3 months of testing and training, I got the quality to the same level as ElevenLabs. And once I used it on my channels, I realized the cost of generating voice with my setup was way cheaper, same quality, but a fraction of the price.
That’s why I decided to make my own TTS public. Now, just 2 months later, without spending a single dollar on ads, I already have 300 active users on my site.
This is a common mistake from all web devs. Also gstatic.com is loaded. Why do this?
Firefox does not even load the page if that shit from Google is blocked. Chromium does but that is also another huge bug from web devs. You only use Chromium browsers.
Anyway, do really people use TTS from anything else than a local server?
I'm amazed. You create a service for a train station for example and internet goes down. Oh well... there goes TTS out of the window...