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Comment by dougdonohoe | Hacker News Reader

How much does it cost in the FAQ: Voice Isolator costs 1000 characters for every minute of audio.

Since when are characters a currency?

Their pricing page is full of weird uses of "character" as a unit too. Things like "monthly character limit", "additional character pricing", and so on.

https://elevenlabs.io/pricing

Nowhere is this novel usage of "character" defined. I know about text characters, and story characters. But this seems to be different. It's hard to imagine why they didn't define what they mean by "character" or just make the pricing model more straight-forward.

I know this is a common kneejerk reaction nowadays, but it's hard not to wonder if this is due to using AI to generate the text on these pages.

I assure you they didn't use an LLM to invent their pricing strategy. Elevenlabs subscription levels are designed around converting text-to-speech in the primary use-case. They charge by the character when converting text to speech, so characters are kind of the currency on their site. 1000 characters per minute makes sense in that context and I find it surprisingly expensive compared to generation

I still don't think I understand the pricing model based on your additional info. If characters are currency that you buy with real money, what does "characters per minute" mean? I guess if each character is $0.01 and then you want 20 minutes of audio, you can say that's $10.00 per minute for 20 minutes, but that means that the number of characters in the actual text wouldn't affect it at all, so...why even make up a different currency then?

Not to mention: What if the vocal portion of an audio clip doesn't translate to characters? What if it's all "oooh" and "ahhh," as in a choral segment?

Do you not know of character meaning, for example, a single letter?

I believe that's exactly what he means with "text characters".. as in a character (or letter) of some text.

> text characters

“Costs 1000 characters for every minute of audio” suggests this is not about the text characters in the sample. It makes it sound like a form of digital credit.

Definitely a form of credit. Of course it seems to be rather obtuse but it's still possible to make some sense of it given the information on their pricing page.

The definitely-most-popular Creator price point is 100,000 "characters" for $22, meaning, according to the FAQ, 100 minutes of audio listening costs $22. Not sure why they can't just say "100 listening minutes" or whatever.

Though I just noticed they also claim that the 100k characters is ~120 minutes of audio but 30k is 30 minutes of audio. I'm not sure where they're getting their numbers but it looks like they're either being dishonest about the former or underselling the latter.

> The definitely-most-popular Creator price point is 100,000 "characters" for $22, meaning, according to the FAQ, 100 minutes of audio listening costs $22. Not sure why they can't just say "100 listening minutes" or whatever.

Because this part of the product is per minute, but the other (and earlier) one is charged per character of text.

> Though I just noticed they also claim that the 100k characters is ~120 minutes of audio but 30k is 30 minutes of audio. I'm not sure where they're getting their numbers but it looks like they're either being dishonest about the former or underselling the latter.

It's just a very rough estimate, the comparison points are "about 10 minutes, about half an hour, about 2 hours". I think that would be clearer if it said ~2 hours.

I know that meaning, as well as the meaning from stories. What I don't know is what this has to do with removing background noise from audio.

Ah I see. Have a look at the pricing page then: https://elevenlabs.io/pricing

Everything else they bill in characters, so that's the "currency" customers have. It works out I think as costing roughly the same per minute as generating audio.

"Audio generation consumes characters. 1k characters approximate 1 minute of audio. Character counts reset each billing cycle without rollover."

This confused me as well, and made me lose interest. Intentional non-answers like this are rather grating.

The company started out doing text-to-speech and created different pricing tiers based on number of characters in the input text. Now they're branching out into other things, but want to keep the same pricing plans, so the unit is still characters.

That's lame, akin to selling cars by using pears as a unit of exchange.

It's like premium currency in games that don't want you to realize how much real money you are spending and premium currency packets are always constructed so that you overspend because you cannot get exact amount needed

Knowing how elevenlabs works, that's also pretty crazily expensive. Imagine being someone who has a 4hr podcast they want to feed through this. Oh ok just need 240,000 characters!

This comment gets me 3.06 seconds of noise removal.

I agree with your annoyance here.

I did end up clicking thru to get the full story. On their pricing page (https://elevenlabs.io/pricing) they are up front, with several monthly tiers; their "most popular" $11/month tier says "100k Characters/mo (~120 mins audio)"

This is par for the course for any text-to-speech or speech-to-text service these days, check out ElevenLabs' other service pricing and it is similar - they have monthly pricing but the character usage is capped at each level.

Actually other major cloud providers, including AWS, Azure and GCP, have similar character / token / word count based pricing as well.

Text-to-speech and speech-to-text, both involve text, which has characters. Notably, this does not.

I'm not trying to argue with you but just want to point out, this is why they made an equivalence between time and characters. We know 1min of audio == 1000 characters so now we know how to translate characters to time.

If that's really it, then why the obtuse intermediate conversion unit? Just bill by the minute.

They charge in characters per time, not money per character

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