Why I built it
I still build things by hand. It keeps my technical judgement honest, and it is how I learn what AI tools can and cannot do. echo3s turns written books into audiobooks, identifying the characters and giving them different AI voices.
The cost problem
The speech provider changed its pricing, and the cost of narrating one book went from about $20 to about $100. That broke the business case.
I evaluated the alternatives and moved to a self-hosted open-source model on servers that start on demand and shut down when idle. Cost per book fell to about $10.
What it taught me
Running a real product is where my opinions on tools and architecture come from. The same lessons on cost and vendor risk go straight into my training.
