Thanks for the kind words!
Yeah, Eleven is very expensive (not for a hobby project like this -- but at scale). I think we'll see a lot of commoditization of TTS services in the next 6-12 months - but Eleven seems to be in the lead for now.
Lots of discussion on TTS services & costs here: https://twitter.com/wagieeacc/status/1727091991635464370
Eleven Labs is blocked by my organization at work. I don't know why. But I did find that Azure has a way to train custom text to speech models here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/speech-s...
I'll also check out some of the other services described in sibling comments.
I wish ElevenLabs didn't require a subscription to test voice cloning but I might try it out this month and see if it's cool enough to continue. It could be a really fun way to get my 7yo exposed to stuff like this.