Built by one developer who got tired of overpaying.

Who's behind this

Hi — I'm Rapha. I've been building and shipping products for years before this one. SpeakEasy is the latest in a line of things I've sent out into the world as a solo technical founder.

I got into indie building for one reason: I like owning the thing I make. No committee. No quarterly roadmap written by someone who's never opened the code. Just ship, measure, fix, ship again.

Why I built SpeakEasy

Honestly? I kept hitting the same wall. Every side project that touched audio — transcription, voice UI, a podcast tool — needed a speech API. And every time I priced one out, I had the same reaction: these numbers can't be real.

Google Cloud at $0.96 an hour. Azure at $1.00. IBM Watson somewhere past $0.60. For a model that costs a fraction of that to run. The reality is the big clouds aren't pricing speech — they're pricing enterprise procurement.

Independent developers and small teams end up paying an enterprise tax for a feature they wire up in one afternoon. That gap is SpeakEasy.

What SpeakEasy actually is

An affordable Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech API. One flat rate. OpenAI SDK compatible, so you swap a base URL and keep your code. $0.20 per hour of audio instead of $0.36 or $0.96. Same Whisper large-v3 model the expensive options use.

That's it. No bundled NLP suite. No seat-based pricing. No "contact sales." If you need transcription or voice generation and you'd like to keep your margin, that's who this is for.

How I work

Small, lean, and honest. I answer support emails myself. If something's broken, I'd rather tell you than spin it. If a competitor is a better fit for what you're building, I'll tell you that too — there's a whole comparison post where I rank us against seven other providers and don't pretend we win every category.

The influences you'll see in how I write and what I build: Paul Graham on clear thinking, the indie hacking crowd on staying bootstrapped, and every developer who's ever looked at a GCP bill and whispered "what."

Where this is headed

The 90-day plan is simple: keep shipping, get to Product Hunt, convert the first paying users. The long plan is to stay small enough to keep pricing honest and fast enough to keep the API boring in the best way — it just works.

If you want to talk, the best ways are the contact form or just emailing support@tryspeakeasy.io. That goes straight to me.