Published by TonePerfect. List prices from each vendor's public pricing page on 10 September 2026; enterprise discounts, regional rates and free-tier quotas are excluded. Confirm current prices before deciding.
The four models
| Vendor | Model | Unit price (scripted) | Minimum / plan |
|---|---|---|---|
| SpeechSuper | Per request, invoiced quarterly | Word $0.004 · sentence $0.006 · paragraph $0.008; 15% off from $500 prepaid, 30% off from $2,000 | $20 per month |
| Speechace | Monthly plan with included requests + overage | $0.008 per extra 15-s request ($0.0125 on Premium) | Basic $40 (5,000) · Pro $80 (10,000) · Premium $125 (10,000) |
| Azure AI Speech | Per audio hour, as speech-to-text | About $1 per audio hour, standard real-time; add-ons for some scores (prosody) | None; free-tier hours available |
| TonePerfect | Monthly plan with credits; extra packs | $0.004 per credit (Starter), $0.0033 (Builder), $0.003 (Scale); packs $0.004 less 10–20% | Starter $10 (2,500) · Builder $50 (15,000) · Scale $150 (50,000) |
Worked examples
Assumptions: every recording is one short sentence up to 15 seconds (average 5 seconds of audio); scripted scoring only; no unscripted, exam or prosody add-ons; no enterprise discount; all requests succeed.
| Recordings / month | SpeechSuper (sentence) | Speechace | Azure (STT time) | TonePerfect |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $20 (minimum; usage $6) | $40 (Basic) | ≈ $1.40 | $10 (Starter) |
| 10,000 | $60 | $80 (Pro, or Basic + overage) | ≈ $14 | $50 (Builder) |
| 100,000 | $600, or ≈ $420 on the $2,000+ prepaid tier | $800 (Pro + 90,000 × $0.008) | ≈ $139 | $310 (Scale + two 25,000 packs at 20% off) |
Reading the table honestly
Azure is the cheapest engine for short clips
Per-hour pricing rewards short recordings: 100,000 five-second clips is 139 hours of audio. If your recordings are short, you are comfortable with the Speech SDK, and you do not need Mandarin syllable structure or per-unit decisions, Azure wins on price by a wide margin. The costs that do not appear in the table are engineering time (SDK integration, result parsing, threshold tuning) and add-on scores.
Per-request vendors do not get cheaper with shorter audio
SpeechSuper, Speechace and TonePerfect all charge per assessment, so a 3-second word drill costs the same as a 14-second sentence. If your product is dominated by single-word drills, SpeechSuper's word API ($0.004) matches TonePerfect's Starter rate; TonePerfect's Builder and Scale plans are lower ($0.0033 and $0.003).
Minimums and gating matter at low volume
At 1,000 recordings a month, SpeechSuper's $20 minimum and Speechace's $40 entry plan cost two to four times TonePerfect's $10 Starter. Speechace also gates fluency behind Pro and spontaneous speech behind Premium; TonePerfect includes every dimension a pack supports on every plan, and SpeechSuper prices features per product.
Recordings over 15 seconds
TonePerfect charges two credits between 15 and 30 seconds; Speechace bills per 15-second unit; SpeechSuper bills per request regardless of length within a product; Azure bills the seconds. If your average recording is 20 seconds, double TonePerfect's and Speechace's figures above and multiply Azure's by four.
Failed requests
Mobile audio fails often — silence, wrong sentence, background noise. TonePerfect does not charge for requests that fail or are unassessable. Check how the other vendors treat them; a 10% failure rate is a 10% price difference.
A quick formula
Monthly cost ≈ max(minimum, volume × unit price × length factor) + plan fees + add-ons − failed-request refunds. Plug in your own numbers; the point of the table is the shape of each model, not the exact dollars.
Beyond price
Price rarely decides this purchase. Languages, the unit of feedback (word vs phoneme vs Mandarin component), decisions vs raw thresholds, audio retention and integration effort matter more once the numbers are in the same order of magnitude. The comparison pages cover those for each vendor.