Cartesia Pricing 2026: Sonic TTS Credits, Voice Agent Minutes and Plan Limits
Short answer: Cartesia has a free plan, then Pro at $5 a month, Startup at $49 and Scale at $299, with Enterprise on a quote. Each plan buys two allowances: credits for text-to-speech and speech-to-text, and the same dollar amount again as prepaid voice agent usage, billed at $0.03 per call minute. Checked on Cartesia's pricing page, 30 October 2026.
That two-wallet design is the thing to understand before you pick a plan. Credits pay for the Sonic and Ink models; agent dollars pay for Cartesia's managed voice agents. Spending one does not draw down the other, so a team that only needs speech generation gets the agent allowance as a bonus it may never use.
Cartesia pricing at a glance
| Plan | Price | Credits a month | Prepaid agent usage a month | Text-to-speech minutes (approx.) | Key additions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 20K | $1 | ~27 | TTS and STT, no commercial license |
| Pro | $5/mo | 100K | $5 | ~133 | Commercial use license, instant voice cloning |
| Startup | $49/mo | 1.25M | $49 | ~1,667 | 2 professional voice clones |
| Scale | $299/mo | 8M | $299 | ~10,667 | 4 professional voice clones, priority support, higher concurrency |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom | Custom | Volume pricing, SSO, DPAs and BAAs, shared Slack channel |
From Cartesia's pricing page, read on 30 October 2026. Plans renew monthly on the purchase date.
The free plan is for testing only, because the commercial use license starts on Pro. For anyone shipping audio in a product, a video or an ad, $5 a month is the real entry price, which is low enough that the free tier mostly matters for developers checking latency and voice quality before they wire Cartesia into an app. If you are comparing free tiers across vendors, whether ElevenLabs is free covers the main rival's limits.
How do Cartesia credits work?
Credits are the currency for the speech models. Sonic text-to-speech costs 1 credit per character, which Cartesia says works out to about 750 to 800 credits per minute of audio. Ink speech-to-text costs 3 credits per second of audio, and Cartesia quotes that as $0.39 per hour on the Scale plan. Each break tag in a TTS request also counts as 1 credit.
Unused credits roll over, up to twice your plan's monthly allowance. That cushion helps teams with uneven months: a slow month on Startup can bank credits for a launch month, as long as the balance stays under 2.5M. Upgrading adds the new tier's credits to your balance at once, and downgrading or cancelling keeps the credits you paid for.
When credits run out, paid plans can switch on overages and keep generating past a zero balance. With overages off, new requests are blocked at zero, which is the safer setting for a prototype with a public demo but the wrong one for a production voice line that cannot go silent.
| Plan | Included credit price per 1M (our arithmetic) | Overage per 1M credits |
|---|---|---|
| Pro | $50 | $65 |
| Startup | $39.20 | $45 |
| Scale | $37.38 | $38 |
Overage rates from Cartesia's pricing page FAQ; the included price is the plan price divided by its credits.
Dupple data: a credit bought inside the $299 Scale plan costs 25% less than one bought inside Pro, our arithmetic from Cartesia's pricing page on 30 October 2026. The saving is real but modest, so the stronger reasons to pay for Scale are its concurrency limits and priority support.
What does an hour of Cartesia speech cost?
At 750 credits a minute, an hour of generated speech uses about 45,000 credits. Here is what that hour costs on each plan:
| Plan | Cost per hour, inside the plan | Cost per hour, on overage |
|---|---|---|
| Pro | $2.25 | $2.93 |
| Startup | $1.76 | $2.03 |
| Scale | $1.68 | $1.71 |
Our arithmetic: 45,000 credits × the per-credit price in the table above. At 800 credits a minute, each figure rises by about 7%.
The more useful question is which plan is cheapest for your monthly volume, because overage can beat upgrading:
| Speech a month | Credits needed | Cheapest option | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 hours | 90K | Pro | $5 |
| 10 hours | 450K | Pro with overage | $27.75 |
| 25 hours | 1.125M | Startup | $49 |
| 100 hours | 4.5M | Startup with overage | $195.25 |
| 200 hours | 9M | Scale with overage | $337 |
Our arithmetic at 750 credits a minute, before rollover, with overages switched on.
Two break points come out of that table. Pro with overage stays cheaper than Startup up to about 777,000 credits, roughly 17 hours of speech a month. Startup with overage stays cheaper than Scale up to about 6.8M credits, roughly 151 hours. Below those lines, upgrade for features (voice clones, concurrency), not for price.
How much do Cartesia voice agents cost?
Managed voice agents bill per minute of call, at $0.03 on every self-serve plan. A Cartesia-provided phone number adds $0.014 a minute for telephony, and the LLM the agent uses is billed separately. Evaluations are free for a limited time.
Each plan's prepaid agent dollars cover this much call time at the standard rate, by Cartesia's own count:
| Plan | Prepaid agent usage | Call time covered | Phone numbers | Concurrent calls |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $1 | 33 minutes | 1 | 8 |
| Pro | $5 | 2 hours 47 minutes | 3 | 12 |
| Startup | $49 | 27 hours 13 minutes | 5 | 20 |
| Scale | $299 | 166 hours 7 minutes | 10 | 60 |
Covered time excludes telephony and LLM usage. When the prepaid dollars run out, calls keep running at the plan's rate.
Every 1,000 agent minutes costs $44 before LLM usage with a Cartesia number: $30 of call time plus $14 of telephony (our arithmetic). A support line handling 5,000 minutes a month therefore runs about $220 in call and telephony charges, and on Startup the first 1,633 minutes of call time come out of the $49 already paid. The LLM line can be larger than both, so budget it from your model provider's rates; our Retell AI pricing breakdown shows how another voice agent platform bundles it.
What do the plan limits mean in practice?
Concurrency is where the cheap plans pinch. Text-to-speech allows 2 concurrent requests on Free, 3 on Pro, 5 on Startup and 15 on Scale. A voice app with ten users speaking at once needs Scale or Enterprise even if its monthly volume would fit inside Pro.
Speech-to-text and agents have their own, larger pools: 8, 12, 20 and 60 concurrent requests or calls by tier. Cartesia says the three pools are separate, so a busy transcription job never slows your agents.
Voice cloning follows the ladder too. Instant voice cloning starts on Pro. Professional voice clones need Startup (2 slots) or Scale (4 slots), counted per organization. Training a professional clone is free, and speech from a clone costs the normal 1 credit per character. Adding an accent to a voice costs 225 credits per accent, a trivial sum on any paid plan.
The costs that surprise Cartesia buyers
- No commercial use on Free. The license starts on the $5 Pro plan.
- Overage is optional, and off means blocked. Leave it off and requests fail at zero credits; turn it on and the Pro overage price is 30% above the in-plan rate.
- Agent minutes are not the whole agent bill. Telephony and the LLM sit on top of the $0.03 call rate.
- Concurrency forces upgrades. Three simultaneous TTS requests on Pro can block a live app long before the credits run out.
- Rollover has a cap. Credits above twice the monthly allowance stop accumulating.
How we checked these prices
We read Cartesia's pricing page, including its plan comparison table and FAQ, on 30 October 2026. Per-hour costs, break points and agent totals are our own arithmetic from those list prices, assuming 750 credits per minute of speech, the low end of Cartesia's stated range. Cartesia also offers on-premise and virtual private cloud deployment through sales. A summary of the plans sits on Cartesia's Toolradar pricing profile.
To compare Cartesia with other voices, see the best AI text-to-speech tools, AI voice generators and ElevenLabs alternatives. For agents, the best AI voice agents covers the platforms, and voice cloning tools the cloning side. If you transcribe more than you generate, Deepgram pricing and AssemblyAI pricing cover two speech-to-text specialists.
FAQ
How much does Cartesia cost in 2026?
Cartesia is free for 20K credits a month, then $5 a month on Pro, $49 on Startup and $299 on Scale, with Enterprise on a quote. Each paid plan includes credits for speech models plus the same dollar amount of prepaid voice agent usage.
How many minutes of speech do Cartesia's credits cover?
Sonic costs 1 credit per character, about 750 to 800 credits per minute. Cartesia estimates about 133 minutes a month on Pro, 1,667 on Startup and 10,667 on Scale.
What happens when I run out of Cartesia credits?
On a paid plan you can turn on overages at $65 per 1M credits on Pro, $45 on Startup or $38 on Scale. With overages off, new requests are blocked until credits renew.
How much do Cartesia voice agents cost per minute?
Call time costs $0.03 a minute on every self-serve plan, plus $0.014 a minute for telephony on a Cartesia-provided number. LLM usage is billed separately.
Do Cartesia credits roll over?
Yes, up to twice your plan's monthly credits. If you change tier, the cap resets to twice the new plan's allowance, and you keep every credit you paid for.
Can I use Cartesia's free plan commercially?
No. The commercial use license starts on Pro at $5 a month, which also adds instant voice cloning.
Bottom line
Start on Pro for any commercial project and switch on overages: it stays the cheapest option up to about 17 hours of speech a month. Move to Startup for professional voice clones or more volume, and to Scale when concurrency, not credits, becomes the limit. For voice agents, budget $44 per 1,000 minutes plus your LLM, and treat the prepaid agent dollars as a discount, not the full bill.
Cite this: Dupple, "Cartesia Pricing 2026: Sonic TTS Credits, Voice Agent Minutes and Plan Limits", November 2026.
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