Not sure why it would be a worthwhile endeavor to roll up your own text to speech system when basically all major cloud providers give that service for a price,

Not sure why it would be a worthwhile endeavor to roll up your own text to speech system when basically all major cloud providers give that service for a price, unless this cost would make a significant fraction of your total costs. Unless that's the case, why not use this service until the day comes when Google might raise prices and then we could decide what to do about it? It's still an API call, afterall. While I agree that Google maps price increase was a bit much, I'm sure Google realizes they can't offer services to businesses and viably keep doing this kind of 180 too ofren, especially if they offer it as part of their Google cloud. So it's not very likely they will pull the rug under this service again.