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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.

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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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