AI Voice Agents · pricing · Updated November 2026
Cartesia pricing (2026)
Cartesia's paid plans start at $5/mo (Pro) as checked on 2026-11-01, read from Cartesia's own pricing page; 5 plans. Best for Latency-critical agents where time-to-first-audio is the product. Every figure below links to its source and the date we captured it.
At a glance
- Entry price: $5/mo (Pro)
- Free tier: Yes
- Compliance: HIPAA Yes · SOC 2 Yes · GDPR Yes
- 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
As of · every figure below links to its source
Cartesia plans & pricing
| 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 | Quote-only, so no monthly price is recorded: custom allowances, custom concurrency and negotiated rates. The card also lists DPAs and BAAs for compliance, a shared Slack channel and SSO. | cartesia.ai |
Last verified 2026-11-01. 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: an earlier version of this record 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 no BAA is recorded.
Price changes
Price on record
$5/moFirst on record 2026-10-16
A new dated entry is stamped here each time the price moves — the record builds itself.
Tracked since October 2026. No change record has cleared two sources yet, so nothing is published on the wire.
Corrections to this record
Changes we made to our own record of Cartesia, newest first: a figure read again on the vendor's page, a plan it no longer lists, a note. None of them is a price change by Cartesia. Every correction on the site is in the corrections log.
-
Enterprise. Re-read 2026-11-01: the plan is still sold by quote. The note said optional zero data retention was advertised; the page now reads "DPAs and BAAs for compliance", and zero data retention is not mentioned.
Capabilities
Integrations: LiveKit, Pipecat, Twilio, SIP trunking.
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.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Cartesia cost?
Cartesia's paid plans start at $5/mo (Pro), and it lists a $0 plan (Free); it has 5 published plans. Verified 2026-11-01.
Does Cartesia support HIPAA?
Yes — Cartesia states HIPAA support on its public pages. Its public pages also state SOC 2 and GDPR compliance.
Does Cartesia have a free plan?
Yes — Cartesia publishes a free tier.
Cartesia vs alternatives
Compare all AI voice agents · Cartesia alternatives · True cost of AI voice agents · SOC 2 claims in AI voice agents · HIPAA claims in AI voice agents · GDPR claims in AI voice agents · Open data · MCP
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This standing as a plaque
Cartesia currently holds a gold deskmark here — Rank 3 of 13 · AI Voice Agents. Anyone may show it. There is nothing to apply for, nothing to pay, and displaying it changes no score: the standing comes from the published algorithm, which never reads commission data. We never ask anyone to show it, and its link carries rel="nofollow".
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