Amazon Polly Hidden Costs 2026
What they don't show you on the pricing page
Amazon Polly costs $4 to $100 per million characters as of June 2026, with 4 plans available. Plans: Standard Voices at $4/million characters, Neural Voices at $16/million characters, Generative Voices at $30/million characters, and Long-Form Voices at $100/million characters. Pricing depends on your chosen tier, contract length, and negotiated discounts.
Use the interactive pricing calculator to estimate your exact cost based on team size and requirements.
- Free tier: No free tier available
Amazon Polly offers 4 pricing tiers: Standard Voices, Neural Voices, Generative Voices, Long-Form Voices. Paid plans include Standard Voices at $4/million characters, Neural Voices at $16/million characters, Generative Voices at $30/million characters. The Neural Voices plan is high-quality voice applications and conversational interfaces.
Amazon Polly true cost runs -99% above the listed $4-$100/million characters price as of June 2026. For a 25-person team, expect ~$100 in year-one costs vs the $6,900 base license. Key hidden costs: data transfer costs: $0.09/gb for outbound data transfer, s3 storage costs for audio files: $0.023/gb per month, aws support plans: $29-$15,000/month depending on tier. Verified from 5 sources by CostBench.
Example: True Cost for 25 Users
| License (25 × $23 × 12) | $6,900/yr |
| Implementation (one-time) | +$15,000–$50,000 |
| Premium Support (20%) | +$1,380/yr |
| Training (25 × $500) | +$12,500 |
| Admin (part-time) | +$15,000–$25,000/yr |
| Estimated Year 1 Total | ~$100 |