How are characters charged?

Google provides a free quota of 4 million characters every month. If your website consumes more, then each next million characters will cost $4. Here is Google Pricing. In the Google settings, there are quotas for dropping money from the card, and you can set them to $0. And when the free characters quota ends, the plugin will stop working until next month. If your site is small or medium in terms of content, most likely you will have enough free quota. But if your website has hundreds of publications and they are constantly being added, you have to pay Google.

How characters are counted

Each time you Create or Re-create audio for your posts, a certain number of characters are subtracted from your quota. It is included the text, SSML tags, newlines, and spaces of the current post.

Please note: the characters are only counted during audio generation and it does not matter how many times users/visitors listen to the generated audio.