Can it clone a voice?

Not the ElevenLabs product. Piper speaks trained voices you download. Read each voice license.

Coqui TTS is archived. Piper is the maintained local engine.

Stacks / AI chat

Easy

Piper

Speech you host. Piper is GPL-3.0 — ElevenLabs without the character meter.

The problem

ElevenLabs meters characters for hosted voices. You wanted text-to-speech on a box you run. Piper (Open Home Foundation, GPL-3.0) is a local neural TTS engine with an HTTP API. Each voice file has its own license — read the model card. This is not ElevenLabs voice cloning or every studio voice. Coqui TTS is archived; do not start there.

Replaces

ElevenLabs

Replace ElevenLabs

Estimated SaaS saved

$1,200

per year, small team, before lock-in

Start on Railway

Open WebUI if this is chat, not speech

Sponsor this stack Tip jar

Placeholder: Piper HTTP API plus a volume for voice models. CPU is enough for many voices. No one-click template in this repo yet — Start on Railway.

The stack

Piper
GPL-3.0 local neural text-to-speech

Cost table

You stop paying	Typical / year	Self-host instead
ElevenLabs paid (small team)	$1,200	Piper + voices on a volume

Agent setup prompt

Replace ElevenLabs with Piper (https://github.com/OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl).

- Run the HTTP API. Persist voices on a volume. Synthesize one sentence you actually ship.
- Check each voice model's license. Do not claim cloning or ElevenLabs studio parity.
- Write AGENT_PROMPT.md.

Also as markdown: /stacks/piper-tts.md

FAQ

Can it clone a voice?: Not the ElevenLabs product. Piper speaks trained voices you download. Read each voice license.
Why not Coqui?: Coqui TTS is archived. Piper is the maintained local engine.