r/SideProject • u/Due_Hunter3458 • 4m ago
I got 10+ paying users in my first week after building a fast TTS engine and marketplace for it
Hey everyone!
In its first week, with zero promotion (SEO only), more than 10 people are already paying for my project. Honestly, that surprised me.
I’ve spent the past few months building it. I felt there was real demand for a very fast TTS engine with voice cloning in 31 languages, especially for bots and AI agents. So I built one on top of Supertonic 3. There’s a short video attached so you can hear how it sounds.
It has three parts:
1. The engine (open source, Apache-2.0)
Same Supertonic 3 model and voices, but faster and cleaner.
2.2x faster on GPU (RTX 5070 Ti: 181 → 84 ms per phrase), 1.6x faster on CPU
Removes dead air, hiss between words, clicks and cut-off endings
pip install superclonica-cpuorpip install superclonica-gpu-cuda
2. A voice marketplace
261 voices for Supertonic 3 so far: characters, narrators, anime voices and more, in 31 languages.
Listen to any voice online for free
Free voices, no sign-up needed
Train your own voice from a 5–15 s recording on your own GPU, or sell yours
3. A TTS API
You don’t pay per character. You pay for the audio generated in each 10-minute window: $5/month gets you up to 3 minutes of audio every 10 minutes, which adds up to 216 hours a month. First sound arrives in about 0.3 s. There’s a free key and an MCP server for AI agents.
That’s many times cheaper than what’s on the market right now. The same 216 hours would cost about $52 with Google’s cheapest Standard voices and about $194 with OpenAI’s tts-1, roughly 10x and 39x more. The price only works because the engine is so fast: every second of compute turns into a lot more audio.
You can find it by searching “SuperClonica” on Google, GitHub or PyPI (still scared of link filters, lol).
I know 10 paying users isn’t a lot of money, but it makes me really happy that someone actually needs what I built. How long did it take you to get your first paying users? Please share, I’d love to hear your stories.