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Comment by jnsaff2 | Hacker News Reader

The AWS example is $4 per million char. The starter of this service is $7.92. And the cheapest option is $2 per million which is 2x cheaper, not 8x. Yes the AWS (and google) neural voices are $16 but then the front page voice sampled is not from the neural AWS Polly but standard (Matthew IIRC).

Shady, really shady. It's a shame, I would not mind a good competitor to Polly/Google.

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This is incorrect. The AWS example is Polly Neural Matthew voice which costs $16, not $4. Neural Matthew: https://unreal-tts-live-demo.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/aws/... Standard Matthew: https://unreal-tts-live-demo.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/aws/...

As an AMZN stock holder, I love that this "competition" to AWS is hosted on AWS. Amazon still wins!

Well, not exactly! We have clusters on GCP actually, sorry to break the news. But we did train models on AWS.

Ah, ok. I saw the S3 URLs and assumed that's the platform you're using.

The stuff on GCP is a long story, which makes us an edge case. "Amazon still wins" is generally the case. Hold on to the stock.

Well anyway Amazon will win because they have the full source-code and training set for the model (the result is sounding great btw)

Intellectual property rights doesn’t exist here?

Only if you have better lawers than Amazon (lawops?)

Plus this service starts at $249/month for the first non-"evaluation" plan compared to AWS & GCP which are fully Pay as you go. That's a complete deal breaker for anyone who wants to use it for a side project.

Yes, that's true. We're currently not targeting side projects at the moment as we do not have infrastructure to do so. I hope do be able to support smaller developers (like myself) soon. Step-by-step!

Who are you targeting at the moment then?

I’d say businesses that already spend $$$ on a 3rd party TTS service and know how expensive it is or have content but haven’t pulled the trigger due to the prohibitive cost. I wrote this on the Product Hunt page: > “… read aloud apps (e.g. Pocket, Speechify, etc), UGC platforms (e.g. Medium, SubStack, etc), publications (e.g. Bloomberg, NY Times, etc), and e-learning platforms (e.g. Duolingo, Pearson, etc). We’re also interested in providing discounts to non-profits (e.g. Wikipedia, etc)”

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