Cost per podcast episode with a TTS API — Audra

Budgeting a show by episode — not by API call — is how producers actually think. Here is the unit math for a 20-minute weekly episode on Audra, and where Pro's multiplier changes it.

Characters in a 20-minute episode

Spoken pace lands near 150 words a minute: 20 minutes is about 3,000 words, which is ~15k characters of script once you count punctuation and spacing. That single conversion — minutes to characters — is the whole budgeting trick.

Per-episode and per-season math

• Audra Essential (1.0×): 15k × $25/1M = $0.38 per episode.
• Audra Pro (2.0×) for richer narration: $0.75 per episode.
• A weekly show, 52 episodes a year: 780k characters ≈ $19.50 on Essential for the entire season's voiceover.

What is not in these numbers

• Mastering: −16 LUFS is already applied to the MP3 you download, so no ffmpeg line item.
• Rerenders after script edits — they meter like any other render, so keep edits in the text, not the audio.
• Intro/outro reuse: render once, reuse the file, pay once.

For the full batch-narration pipeline around these numbers, see /blog/podcast-tts-api-batch-narration. Model your own episode length on /calc.

Next steps

• Start here: /blog/podcast-tts-api-batch-narration
• Then: /calc
• Reference: /use-cases/podcasts
• More Audra guides: /blog