Cartesia

What is Cartesia?

Cartesia is a voice AI platform for developers that offers Sonic text-to-speech, Ink speech-to-text and hosted Managed Agents for phone and voice conversations. Usage is metered in credits: text-to-speech costs roughly one credit per character, speech-to-text depends on the model and audio duration, and agent calls are billed in dollars per minute at $0.06, plus $0.014 per minute when using a Cartesia phone number. Each plan includes a monthly credit pool and prepaid agent dollars. Instant voice cloning starts on the Pro plan, and Professional voice cloning trained on 30 minutes of audio starts on Startup. Developers building voice agents, assistants and contact-center tools use the API, with separate concurrency limits for each service. The Free plan costs $0, Pro $5, Startup $49 and Scale $299 per month, with custom Enterprise pricing.

Use cases

• Generate speech in real time
• Transcribe streaming audio
• Build voice agents that take calls
• Clone a voice from short samples
• Create a professional voice clone
• Localise a voice with added accents

Who it's for

• Developers
• Voice app builders
• Contact center teams
• Enterprises

Why use Cartesia

• One platform covers speech generation, transcription and hosted voice agents.
• A free tier with 20K credits a month lets you prototype before paying.
• Plans include prepaid agent dollars on top of model credits.
• Clear per-endpoint credit costs and concurrency tables make usage easier to predict.

Cartesia features

• Sonic text-to-speech over bytes, SSE and WebSocket endpoints
• Ink speech-to-text with realtime WebSocket endpoints
• Managed Agents billed per minute
• Instant voice cloning from 10 seconds of audio on Pro and above
• Pro voice cloning from 30 minutes of audio on Startup and above
• Infill that generates audio bridging two clips
• Separate concurrency pools for TTS, STT and agents
• Credit rollover up to twice the monthly plan amount
• Overage billing you can switch on or off

How to get started with Cartesia

1. Create an account on the Free plan and get an API key.
2. Call the Sonic text-to-speech or Ink speech-to-text endpoints from your application.
3. Add a Managed Agent for phone or voice conversations and connect a phone number if you need one.
4. Watch credit and agent usage on the usage page, and move up a plan or enable overages as volume grows.

Cartesia limitations

• Free plan allows 2 concurrent TTS requests and $1 of prepaid agent usage per month
• Pro voice cloning is not included on the Free and Pro plans
• Agent per-minute rates exclude LLM usage and phone number costs
• With overages off, requests fail once the monthly credits are used

Cartesia pricing

Yes, Cartesia has a free plan. Paid plans start at $5 per month, according to the official pricing page on 24 Oct 2026.

Cartesia plans

• Free

  $0

  • 20K credits per month
  • $1 prepaid agents per month
  • Text to Speech
  • Speech to Text

• Pro

  $5/mo

  • 100K credits per month
  • $5 prepaid agents per month
  • Commercial use license
  • Instant voice cloning

• Startup

  $49/mo

  • 1.25M credits per month
  • $49 prepaid agents per month
  • Pro voice cloning
  • Organizations

• Scale

  $299/mo

  • 8M credits per month
  • $299 prepaid agents per month
  • Priority support
  • High concurrency limits

• Enterprise

  Custom

  • Custom credits and agent usage
  • Custom concurrency limits
  • DPAs and BAAs
  • SSO

Plans as listed on the official pricing page on 24 Oct 2026. Prices can change and may vary by country or exclude tax. Check the official pricing page.

Cartesia alternatives

The main Cartesia alternatives listed on Debuly are ElevenLabs, Deepgram, Rime, Hume AI, Qwen3-TTS and CAMB.AI. The table compares pricing and platforms; order is A–Z.

1. 

   CAMB.AI

   AI dubbing, text-to-speech, translation and voice cloning across 140+ languages, with a studio app and developer API.

   Audio and voiceVideoDeveloper platforms
   FreemiumVisit CAMB.AI (official site)
2. 

   Deepgram

   Voice AI platform with speech-to-text, text-to-speech and Voice Agent APIs, available as a managed API, in-VPC or self-hosted.

   Audio and voiceDeveloper platformsAutomation and agents
   FreemiumVisit Deepgram (official site)
3. 

   ElevenLabs

   AI audio platform for text to speech, voice cloning, dubbing, transcription, music and conversational voice agents, via app or API.

   Audio and voiceAutomation and agentsVideoDeveloper platforms
   FreemiumVisit ElevenLabs (official site)
4. 

   Hume AI

   Expressive text-to-speech and empathic voice agent APIs that let developers direct emotion, tone and pacing in generated speech.

   Audio and voiceDeveloper platformsAutomation and agents
   FreemiumVisit Hume AI (official site)
5. 

   Qwen3-TTS

   Open-source text-to-speech model family from Qwen with voice cloning, voice design from a text description and low-latency streaming.

   Audio and voiceDeveloper platforms
   Open sourceVisit Qwen3-TTS (official site)
6. 

   Rime

   Text-to-speech and speech-to-text API for voice agents, with low-latency Mist and Coda voices, 10 TTS languages and self-hosting.

   Audio and voiceDeveloper platforms
   Free trialVisit Rime (official site)

Cartesia FAQ

Sources & verification

Facts on this page come from the official sources below, each with the date we read it. Written by Debuly; the vendor did not review this page.

Image credits

• Logo: from cartesia.ai · fetched 23 Oct 2026 · Vendor trademark, used only to identify the product; removed on request
• Cover: none collected yet, so a generated tile is shown.

Spot an error? Report an issue with this listing. We also remove a logo or image on the owner's request.