Why I Built TTSForFree — The Story Behind My Free Text-to-Speech Website

Hello everyone,

I’m Thai — a web developer with almost 3 years of experience.

Today I want to share the real reason I created TTSForFree.com, a completely free text-to-speech tool built for everyone.

This isn’t a marketing article or an SEO trick.

It’s my personal story — starting back in 2023 when I had just begun working as a developer and was trying to make extra income on YouTube.

1. It all started with my YouTube journey

When I first started working, I also wanted to grow a YouTube channel, and I chose the niche of story reviews.

But the workflow was painful:

1. using Google Translate to translate the story
2. screenshotting text → copying it through OCR tools
3. converting the text into audio to add into videos

Doing this for a few videos was fine.

But once I started producing more content, the problems hit hard:

1. TTS websites had strict character limits
2. many voices sounded robotic
3. some tools were slow or unstable
4. free sites had low quality
5. I needed around 10,000 characters per day just for short videos

Every step felt slow and frustrating.

2. FPT.AI was good — but not reliable

At that time, FPT.AI was the best option:

1. great Vietnamese voices
2. free
3. easy to use

But during peak hours it became:

1. slow, unpredictable
2. prone to timeouts
3. sometimes entirely unavailable

When you’re chasing YouTube deadlines, a slow TTS tool feels like the world is ending.

3. I built my first personal tool using gTTS

Since no tools worked the way I needed, I wrote my own TTS script using gTTS.

It was great because:

1. it was free
2. it supported 50+ languages
3. the voice surprisingly fit story narration

But one day, the service rate-limited me:

1. multiple parallel requests failed
2. max output was about 80,000 characters/hour
3. the tool became unreliable for daily use

That’s when I realized:

“If even I — a developer — struggle this much,

how hard must it be for normal users?”

And that was the moment the idea of building my own TTS website was born.

4. March 2025 — the first version of TTSForFree

I wanted to build a website that was:

1. free
2. fast
3. stable
4. easy to use
5. with good-quality voices
6. suitable for students, teachers, creators, storytellers
7. and didn’t force users to log in

I deployed the first version on Google Cloud in May 2025.

5. The downtime months (July–September) — and rebuilding everything

After a few months, my free cloud credits ran out,

and the website went down for almost the entire July–August–September period.

I didn’t have the money to pay for a stronger server at that time.

But I didn’t want to let the project die.

So at the end of September 2025, I rebuilt everything from scratch:

1. moved to a Linux VPS
2. dockerized the whole system
3. optimized performance
4. added OCR
5. added Books search
6. added Speech-to-Text
7. fixed hundreds of issues

I did everything alone — but it felt cleaner, more stable, and more professional.

6. Yes, I want to earn money — but fairly

Let me be honest:

Yes, I want this website to eventually earn money.

Building and hosting it costs time and real money.

But I want to do it the right way:

1. useful for everyone
2. free to use
3. fair limits
4. no abuse

The reality is:

some users were converting millions of characters per day,

causing queue congestion and slowing down the whole site.

So I had to implement limits to:

1. protect the server
2. keep costs manageable
3. ensure real users get stable performance

Limits aren’t here to stop anyone —

they exist to make sure everyone can use the service smoothly.

7. November 2025 — the surprising growth

Right now, TTSForFree has:

1. 60–140 visitors per day
2. hundreds of TTS conversions daily
3. many returning users

Some people use it for teaching,

some for short videos,

some for reading stories — just like I used to.

Every time I see active users increase, I genuinely feel happy.

8. Final thoughts — I hope this tool helps more people

I built TTSForFree because I personally struggled with TTS tools in Vietnam.

I want to offer:

1. a simple tool
2. with quality voices
3. free to use
4. accessible for everyone

In the future, I’ll continue improving:

1. better voices
2. audio from PDF
3. stronger OCR
4. more accurate Speech-to-Text
5. more helpful tutorials and blog posts

Thank you so much for using TTSForFree ❤️

It means more to me than you know.