Amazon Polly is AWS's text-to-speech (TTS) service for converting written text into natural-sounding voice output. It is commonly used for accessibility, voice assistants, IVR, media narration, and multilingual apps.

If you are trying to estimate cost, the important part is how AWS Free Tier works now.

What "12 Months Free Credits" Means

As of July 15, 2025, AWS moved to a credit-based Free Tier model for new customers:

• new AWS accounts can get up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits
• you can use a free plan for 6 months after account creation
• if you upgrade to a paid plan, remaining credits can be used for up to 12 months from account creation

So the "12 months" applies to how long you can use remaining credits after upgrading, not an unlimited always-free Polly window.

Amazon Polly Free Character Limits

In addition to account-level credits, Amazon Polly lists monthly free character quotas:

• Standard voices: 5 million characters per month for 12 months
• Neural voices: 1 million characters per month for 12 months
• Long-Form voices: 500,000 characters per month for 12 months
• Generative voices: 100,000 characters per month for 12 months

These are listed as part of Polly pricing and are intended for the first 12 months.

Practical Cost Planning Tips

1. Track character usage per environment (dev/staging/prod) separately.
2. Start with Standard or Neural voices before moving to higher-cost tiers.
3. Set AWS Budgets and CloudWatch alarms before production launch.
4. Validate long narration workloads early, because Long-Form and Generative pricing differs from Standard/Neural.

Final Take

Amazon Polly is cost-effective for many workloads, but "free for 12 months" should be interpreted carefully in 2026:

• there are service-level monthly free character allowances
• AWS also has account-level free credits with specific timing rules

Always verify your region-specific pricing before launch.

Official sources:

• Amazon Polly Pricing
• AWS Free Tier