Standby seats for the vendor’s bad night.

A standby failover seat is capacity you hold but do not use: it runs beside your current TTS provider and activates automatically when that provider goes dark. It prices the insurance separately from the capacity — which is what makes the insurance worth holding.

$20

a month per standby seat

How it works

You keep your primary vendor. Standby seats sit behind our endpoint, integrated and tested, at $20 a month each.
Activation is automatic when the primary stops answering — the failover path is exercised before the outage, not written during it.
An activated standby serves at the same measured figures as any seat: 107 ms first audio, single stream, on the production API.

the integration you already have, pointed at a second base URL

const PRIMARY = "https://tts.your-current-vendor.example"
const STANDBY = "https://tts.gandr.ai"  // integrated, tested

async function synthesize(req) {
  try {
    return await speak(PRIMARY, req)
  } catch {
    // same three surfaces, same request shape —
    // the standby is the integration you already wrote
    return await speak(STANDBY, req)
  }
}

Why it is a separate product

Failover sized as a second full fleet doubles the voice bill against an event measured in hours a year, so most teams skip it and hope. A standby seat prices the readiness itself — the socket that is integrated, tested, and waiting — apart from the talking, which makes holding the insurance rational. Our own serving practices the same discipline, drawn on the reliability sheet.

Notes — an engineer's checklist

01When does a standby seat start billing as a full seat?

It does not — a standby is $20 a month whether it activates or not. If you keep traffic on it permanently, that is a committed seat and the honest move is to buy one at $150.

02How do I test the failover path without an outage?

Point a canary share of traffic at the standby base URL on a schedule — the request shape is identical, so the test is a config change. An untested failover path is a hope, not a plan.

03Does the standby clone the same voices?

Yes — the reference clip rides inside each request, so the same clip produces the same identity on the standby that it does anywhere else. No voice migration is involved in an activation.