Open source TTS vs paid APIs: How to choose wisely

This article compares open source and paid text-to-speech APIs, noting that both can produce high-quality speech and that the choice depends on team capacity and workload scale. It explains that self-hosting offers control and data sovereignty at the cost of infrastructure and engineering overhead, while managed APIs provide turnkey, scalable access with per-character pricing. It also distinguishes open weight from open source models, covers licensing considerations, and offers criteria for evaluating voice quality, latency, reliability, and total cost of ownership.