# Cartesia pricing (2026): plans, cost, and compliance

**Entry price:** $0 (free)/mo (Free). Among the 13 ai voice agents we track it is the cheapest; median entry $0/mo.
**Domain:** cartesia.ai
**Free tier:** Yes
**Compliance:** HIPAA Yes · SOC 2 Yes · GDPR Yes
**Integrations:** LiveKit, Pipecat, Twilio, SIP trunking
**Best for:** Latency-critical agents where time-to-first-audio is the product; Teams already on LiveKit or Pipecat who need the fastest TTS in the pipeline; Developers who want STT, TTS, orchestration and a phone number from one bill

## Plans

| Plan | Monthly | Annual | Billing | Notes | Source |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Free | $0 | — | hybrid | Forever-free tier: roughly 27 minutes of Sonic TTS or ~1h 51m of Ink STT, plus $1 of prepaid voice-agent credit. Concurrency is published as three separate limits: 2 concurrent TTS requests, 8 concurrent STT requests and 8 concurrent calls. Voice agents meter at $0.06/min of call duration; telephony on a Cartesia-provided number adds $0.014/min. Allowances draw on one shared credit pool, so TTS, STT and agent minutes compete for it. | cartesia.ai |
| Pro | $5 | — | hybrid | $5/month: ~133 minutes of TTS or ~9h 16m of STT, $5 of prepaid voice-agent credit. Concurrency: 3 TTS requests, 12 STT requests, 12 calls. Voice agent calls bill at $0.06/min against that credit; Cartesia-provided phone numbers add $0.014/min. The agent credit equals the plan price, so the subscription effectively prepays roughly 83 agent minutes rather than bundling them on top. | cartesia.ai |
| Startup | $49 | — | hybrid | $49/month: ~1,667 minutes of TTS or ~115h 44m of STT, $49 of prepaid voice-agent credit. Concurrency: 5 TTS requests, 20 STT requests, 20 calls. Agent calls $0.06/min, Cartesia telephony +$0.014/min. | cartesia.ai |
| Scale | $299 | — | hybrid | $299/month: ~10,667 minutes of TTS or ~740h 44m of STT, $299 of prepaid voice-agent credit. Concurrency: 15 TTS requests, 60 STT requests, 60 calls. Agent calls $0.06/min, Cartesia telephony +$0.014/min. | cartesia.ai |
| Enterprise | quote-only | — | custom | Quote-only, so monthlyUsd is null: custom allowances, custom concurrency and negotiated rates. Optional zero-data-retention is the enterprise-relevant control Cartesia advertises. | cartesia.ai |

## Price changes

No change record has cleared two sources yet, so nothing is published on the wire.

**Key features:** Sonic state-space TTS built for very low time-to-first-audio, the specific problem Cartesia was founded on; First-party STT (Ink) alongside first-party TTS, so one vendor covers both legs of the pipeline; Voice agents at $0.06/min with optional $0.014/min first-party telephony, cheaper than bolting on a third-party carrier; Optional Zero Data Retention plus SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, PCI-DSS (service level provider) and GDPR compliance; Entry paid tier at $5/month is the lowest in this set, so the step off free is nearly free.

**Plan limits:** Three separate concurrency meters per tier, and they are not interchangeable: TTS requests 2/3/5/15, STT requests 8/12/20/60, and concurrent calls 8/12/20/60 — the call limit, not the TTS limit, is what caps simultaneous live calls; The voice-agent credit included in each plan equals the plan price, so agent usage is prepaid rather than bundled on top of the subscription; Compliance answers are hidden behind a client-side FAQ accordion on the pricing page; the claims are verifiable only from Cartesia's own blog post; No BAA availability is stated anywhere, despite the HIPAA claim — a blocker for PHI workloads; Zero data retention is opt-in, not default.

Sources: 1 · Last verified 2026-09-10
Provenance: Re-verified against cartesia.ai/pricing on 2026-09-10. All four published monthly prices confirmed unchanged ($0 / $5 / $49 / $299) with no annual toggle on the page. ONE MATERIAL CORRECTION: the draft treated the per-tier concurrent-TTS-request cap (2/3/5/15) as the ceiling on simultaneous calls. The page publishes a SEPARATE and substantially higher concurrent-call limit per tier — 8 / 12 / 20 / 60 — plus separate STT concurrency of 8/12/20/60, so the TTS cap does not gate call concurrency. Plan notes and limits corrected. The pricing page's compliance FAQ renders client-side and returned only question headings, so compliance flags come from Cartesia's own GDPR-compliance post, which was independently fetched and verified; it states GDPR, SOC 2 Type II, PCI-DSS and HIPAA with optional Zero Data Retention, and does NOT mention a BAA, so baa stays null.
Canonical: https://frontdeskreview.com/software/ai-voice-agents/cartesia/
Cite: Per The Front Desk Review, Cartesia's entry plan was $0 (free)/mo as of 2026-09-10 — https://frontdeskreview.com/software/ai-voice-agents/cartesia/
License: CC BY 4.0. Price history: https://frontdeskreview.com/data/price-history.jsonl