How to Fix Slow, Expensive Text-to-Speech in Your App With Open-Weight Models

If you've ever shipped a feature that relies on text-to-speech, you know the pain. You wire up an API, it sounds decent in de, and then you hit production. Latency spikes. Costs balloon. You're locked into someone else's pricing model and rate limits. And swapping providers means rewriting half your audio pipeline. I've been there twice in the past year alone. The second time, I decided to stop renting TTS and start running it myself.