From a reader for millions to an API for developers

Speechify is no newcomer to the market. Its consumer text-to-speech app has been around for nearly a decade and has accumulated tens of millions of users in that time. It's precisely this massive user base that is key to what the company is now offering developers. "Most AI labs built models for benchmarks and priced them for enterprise. We built for listeners and priced for production deployment," wrote Luke Oliff, who heads developer relations at Speechify, on Product Hunt. In other words: years of tuning speed and efficiency, necessary to keep paying customers happy, have now been turned into an API that anyone can use.

Simba 3.2: Numbers that speak for themselves

The Simba 3.2 model currently holds first place on the independent Artificial Analysis leaderboard with an Elo of 1,234, just ahead of Google Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS (1,214) and Cartesia Sonic 3.5 (1,207). On Voice Arena, where real people decide on voice quality in blind tests, Simba 3.2 is the best real-time model and also the most affordable in the TOP 10. Key parameters:

• Latency under 100 ms — response comparable to human conversation
• Streaming-native architecture — no waiting for the full response, the model generates audio continuously
• Emotional expression — 13 preset emotions including joy, sadness, excitement, and calm
• SSML support — full control over prosody, speed, and speech intonation
• 1,500+ voices in 30+ languages — including Czech (via the simba-multilingual model)

Voice agents: All-in-one for a single price

The most interesting part of the entire launch, however, is the Simba Voice Agents platform itself. Speechify didn't just come with a TTS API — it offers a complete solution for building voice agents, with everything included in the price: LLM inference, speech-to-text (STT), text-to-speech synthesis (TTS), and telecom orchestration. In practice, this means the developer pays a single line item per minute of conversation — no additional token counting for the language model, no passthrough fees for STT or TTS. This is a fundamental difference compared to competitors, where each component is typically billed separately.

Price comparison of voice agent platforms

Platform	TTS price (per 1M chars)	Voice agent (per min)	What's included
Speechify Simba	$6–10	$0.068–0.075	LLM + STT + TTS + telephony
ElevenLabs ElevenAgents	$50–100	$0.08	TTS + orchestration (LLM separate)
Deepgram Voice Agent	$15–30	$0.05–0.075	STT + TTS (LLM separate)
Vapi	—	$0.05 + passthrough	Orchestration only

Prices are indicative for comparison. Speechify: Scale/Pro tier, ElevenLabs: Standard, Deepgram: Standard tier, Vapi: Build plan. As of July 2026.

Pricing plans for every project size

Speechify takes a transparent pricing approach with no annual commitments:

• Free — $0/month: 50,000 TTS characters, 60 minutes of voice agents, 3 concurrent calls
• Starter — $10/month: 1M characters + $10/1M over limit, 120 minutes of agents + $0.075/min over limit
• Pro — $99/month: 3M characters + $8/1M, 1,200 minutes + $0.07/min, professional voice cloning
• Scale — $499/month: 10M characters + $6/1M, 6,000 minutes + $0.068/min, 30 concurrent calls, custom LLM capability
• Enterprise — custom pricing: volume discounts, SOC 2 Type II, SSO, dedicated support

All paid plans work on prepaid credit with auto-recharge — so production operations never stop.

Voice cloning: With confidence, but caution

Speechify also offers zero-shot voice cloning — just upload a 10–30 second sample and the model creates a digital copy. For Simba English and Simba Multilingual models, cloning is fully self-service, but for the newest Simba 3.2 it still requires manual approval by the Speechify team. The company is responding to growing concerns about deepfakes — with a model of this quality, they want to ensure the technology is not misused.

Developer tools: TypeScript, Python, and REST

Speechify Developer Platform comes with a clean REST API and first-party SDKs for TypeScript and Python. A Speechify Cookbook is also available on GitHub with ready-made migration examples from other platforms. For larger deployments, Speechify offers so-called Forward-Deployed Engineers — engineers who join your team and help with the transition, from voice mapping and load testing to production deployment.

What this means for the Czech market

For Czech companies and developers, it's significant that the platform supports Czech through the Simba Multilingual model, which handles 30+ languages with locally recorded voices. That means natural pronunciation without a foreign accent. Affordability is another plus: at $6 per million characters (roughly 650 standard pages of text), Simba 3.2 is the cheapest path to top-tier speech synthesis. For smaller Czech startups and projects that can't afford ElevenLabs enterprise pricing (where TTS can run up to $100/1M characters), this is a fundamental difference. Regarding regulation, Speechify communicates SOC 2 Type II certification for enterprise customers. For companies subject to GDPR, it will be crucial to verify whether Speechify offers data processing on European servers — this information is currently missing from the documentation, which is a certain handicap compared to Deepgram (which has a dedicated EU endpoint).

Is Simba 3.2 really the best choice?

The strengths are clear: top-tier quality verified by independent benchmarks, aggressive pricing, an all-in-one approach to voice agents, and a massive user base that has tested the model in real-world operations. But there are limitations too. Simba 3.2 currently only supports English — multilingual deployment requires the older Simba Multilingual model, which doesn't hold the top spot on Artificial Analysis. Competitor ElevenLabs, by contrast, offers fully multilingual TTS with 32 languages on their latest models. And if you primarily need speech-to-text (STT), Speechify doesn't yet offer this service as a standalone API — unlike Deepgram or ElevenLabs. Still, Speechify's entry into the developer market is one of the most interesting events in the voice AI space in recent months. A company that spent years quietly building technology for its own app is now opening the gates to everyone — and with prices that force competitors to rethink their own pricing.