Tokens & Pricing
What operations cost, how to top up, and how spending is tracked
Overview
Tokens are the organization's shared balance for generation work. Every member and every API key draws from the same pool. New organizations start with 1,000 tokens; a low-balance warning appears under 50. Browsing, saving, playing existing audio, and managing content never cost tokens — only generation does.
Cost Table
Speech generation
| Operation | Cost (tokens) |
|---|---|
| TTS — external voice (dashboard, API, or live endpoint) | 5 |
| TTS — internal Voice Studio voice | 10 |
| Voice preview — external | 5 |
| Voice preview — internal | 10 |
Voice Studio
| Operation | Cost (tokens) |
|---|---|
| Design voice previews (per run) | 25 |
| Save a designed voice | 25 |
| Clone a voice | 100 |
Sound effects
| Operation | Cost (tokens) |
|---|---|
| SFX generation | Per second of requested audio (provider rate, with optional free seconds and a minimum) |
Cache hits are free
Live endpoints only charge when audio is actually generated. Serving cached audio — including stale audio while a refresh runs — costs nothing.
Charging and Refunds
- •Charged up front, refunded on failure. Generation reserves its tokens before work starts; if the provider errors or times out, the reservation is refunded automatically. A failed generation never costs anything.
- •Insufficient balance →
402. Dashboard flows show the shortfall; API responses use theinsufficient_tokenserror code. Live endpoints keep serving cached audio with atokenErrornote instead of failing. - •Provider fees are separate. External voice usage (e.g. ElevenLabs character quota) is billed by the provider to your own account; ToneBoard tokens cover ToneBoard's processing.
Buying Tokens
- 1Go to Purchase Tokens (also linked from the Tokens page).
- 2Pick a pack — Starter (500 tokens) or Standard (1,000 tokens) — and check out with Stripe.
- 3Tokens are credited the moment payment completes; the purchase appears in the audit log.
Safe checkout
Fulfilment is idempotent — a retried webhook or a refreshed success page can never double-credit a purchase.
Tracking Spend
The Tokens page shows the current balance and the audit log: every add and spend with a timestamp, message, and balance after. Entries carry metadata — which operation, which live endpoint or generation, which project — so API-driven spending is attributable. Spends from API keys are recorded like any other, making it easy to see what an integration costs.
- •Watch for repeated
MISSgenerations from a live endpoint with a too-short TTL — lengthening the TTL is usually free money. - •Voice cloning (100) and design runs (25) are the big one-off costs; per-line TTS is cheap.
- •Scope API keys tightly (see API Keys & Scopes) so only intended integrations can spend.