> Cartesia
Cartesia provides Sonic text to speech, Ink speech to text and Managed Agents voice agents, priced through credits and prepaid agent minutes with unlimited workspace seats on every plan. The Free plan costs $0 and includes 20,000 credits per month (about 27 minutes of Sonic-3.6 text to speech) plus $1 of prepaid agent minutes; Pro is $5 per month with 100,000 credits, Startup is $49 per month with 1.25M credits, and Scale is $299 per month with 8M credits. Agent calls bill at $0.06 per minute on every tier, and telephony is $0.014 per minute when using a Cartesia-provided phone number.
// pros
- Free plan includes 20,000 credits per month, which the pricing comparison equates to roughly 27 minutes of Sonic-3.6 text to speech, plus $1 of prepaid agent minutes and 1 Cartesia-provisioned phone number.
- Pro at $5 per month raises the allowance to 100,000 credits (about 133 text-to-speech minutes) and adds instant voice cloning, while Startup at $49 per month reaches 1.25M credits (about 1,667 minutes) and includes 2 professional voice clones.
- Speech-to-text Ink-2 is bundled into the same credit pool with published hourly equivalents, from about 1 hour 51 minutes on Free up to about 740 hours 44 minutes on Scale.
- Call pricing is flat across tiers at $0.06 per minute, and telephony drops to $0.014 per minute with a Cartesia-provided number, so agent cost does not change as you upgrade.
- Localizing a voice into additional accents is priced at a fixed 225 credits per added voice accent, and evaluations plus LLM usage for UI-created agents are free for a limited time.
// cons
- Professional voice cloning is unavailable on Free and Pro: it starts at the Startup tier with 2 clones and rises to 4 on Scale, while text-to-speech concurrency on Free is capped at 2 concurrent requests.
- Concurrency is tier-gated across every product line at once: 8 concurrent calls on Free and Pro, 20 on Startup and 60 on Scale, and 8 concurrent speech-to-text requests on Free versus 60 on Scale.
- The same Ink-2 speech-to-text model includes about 1 hour 51 minutes per month on Free and about 740 hours on Scale, so the free allowance is roughly 0.25% of the top-tier allocation.
- Two cost-relevant items are explicitly temporary on the pricing page: LLM usage during calls is free for UI-created agents for a limited time, and evaluations are free of charge for a limited time only.
Use the Free plan to confirm Sonic-3.6 voice quality and measure credit burn per script, then move to Pro at $5 per month for instant cloning before considering Startup, which is the first tier with professional voice clones and 5 concurrent text-to-speech requests. For voice agents, budget against the flat $0.06 per call minute plus $0.014 per minute telephony, and do not assume the currently free LLM-in-call and evaluation features stay free.
written by Mike Fleming, Uprouter editorial · verified against official sources September 16, 2026
- Cartesia pricing page (plan prices, credits per tier, minutes and hours included, concurrency limits, agent and telephony per-minute rates, cloning availability) ↗
- Cartesia developer documentation (Sonic text to speech with roughly 90 ms first-byte streaming, Ink 2 streaming speech to text with turn detection, Managed Agents wiring Ink, a chosen LLM and Sonic together, voice cloning from a 10-second clip into 40+ languages and accents) ↗
Value taken from the provider’s own published free-tier terms, expressed in USD.
note: Free plan grants 20,000 credits per month (about 27 minutes of Sonic-3.6 text to speech) plus $1 of prepaid agent minutes; the credits are worth about $1.00 at the Pro plan rate of $5 per 100,000 credits, giving roughly $2.00 combined, an estimate because Cartesia does not price the free allowance in USD (cartesia.ai/pricing, checked 2026-09-16).
| Plan | Type | Monthly | Input /1M | Output /1M | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free Tier | free | — | — | — | 20K credits/month. |
| Pro Subscription | subscription | $5.00/mo | — | — | 100K credits/month. |
| Free | free | — | — | — | ~27 min Sonic-3.6 TTS + ~1h51m Ink-2 STT monthly; 2 concurrent TTS / 8 concurrent STT requests |
| Pro | subscription | $5.00/mo | — | — | $5/mo, 100K credits/month, ~133 min TTS, ~9h16m STT, commercial license, instant voice cloning |
| Startup | subscription | $49.00/mo | — | — | $49/mo, 1.25M credits/month, ~1,667 min TTS, ~115h44m STT, professional voice cloning |
| Scale | subscription | $299.00/mo | — | — | $299/mo, 8M credits/month, ~10,667 min TTS, ~740h44m STT, priority support, high concurrency |
| Voice agent call duration (all paid plans) | payg | — | — | — | $0.06 per call minute; telephony $0.014/min with Cartesia-provided number |
Pricing normalized from public sources — always verify with the provider.
// model prices
$ Does Cartesia have a free tier?
Yes — Cartesia offers a free tier that we value at roughly $2.00 in free credits. Always confirm current limits on Cartesia's official pricing page — free tiers change without notice.
$ How much does Cartesia cost per 1M tokens?
Cartesia does not publish simple per-1M-token pricing (it may bill per request, per output, or via a subscription plan). Check their official pricing page for exact figures.
$ Is Cartesia safe to use?
Uprouter rates Cartesia as low risk. Medium risk. Voice cloning terms are the policy-sensitive element, and access is tier-gated: professional voice cloning requires Startup ($49 per month) or higher, while instant voice cloning starts at Pro, so free-tier experimentation cannot legally or technically include cloned voices. Cost stability is the other risk, because the pricing page marks LLM usage during calls and evaluations as free only for a limited time, meaning an agent built today can acquire new line items later. Concurrency caps also step sharply between tiers, from 8 concurrent calls on Free and Pro to 20 on Startup and 60 on Scale. Risk ratings are editorial, evidence-based, and never influenced by affiliate relationships.
Raw community sentiment, shown unblended. Votes never feed into objective data fields like price, risk, or status — and never into sort order.
No published reviews yet — be the first.
// more_informationprice history · live status · risk & confidence · code snippets
price_history
No recorded changes yet.
live_status
current: unknownNo probes recorded yet.
Uprouter runs its own probes; best-effort, not a guarantee. Probe results depend on our network location and cadence — for production, always use the provider’s own status page.
risk_&_confidence
Medium risk. Voice cloning terms are the policy-sensitive element, and access is tier-gated: professional voice cloning requires Startup ($49 per month) or higher, while instant voice cloning starts at Pro, so free-tier experimentation cannot legally or technically include cloned voices. Cost stability is the other risk, because the pricing page marks LLM usage during calls and evaluations as free only for a limited time, meaning an agent built today can acquire new line items later. Concurrency caps also step sharply between tiers, from 8 concurrent calls on Free and Pro to 20 on Startup and 60 on Scale.
Confidence reflects how much verifiable evidence (official docs, probe history, community reports) backs this entry. Risk is our editorial assessment of operator reliability and terms — not financial advice.
code_snippets
# Cartesia's own API — get a key from their dashboard
curl https://cartesia.ai/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer THEIR_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "cartesia/sonic-3.6",
"messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "Hello" }]
}'Direct to the provider — Uprouter receives nothing; verify their current pricing before purchasing.
Ranked by neutral similarity signals only — live status, free-tier shape and free-credit proximity. Commercial relationships never influence this list.