Cartesia provides text-to-speech (Sonic), speech-to-text (Ink) and voice agent APIs for developers, with voice cloning on paid plans. Free plan has 20K credits a month; Pro is $5 a month.
Cartesia is an AI company building speech products on State Space Models. Its home page lists three main products: Sonic, a text-to-speech model; Ink, a streaming speech-to-text model; and Managed Agents, a platform for building voice agents. Voice cloning is listed as a capability. The meta description says Sonic supports 44 languages, and a languages page is linked.
Deployment options include cloud with regional API endpoints, on-premise and on-device. The site mentions data residency and compliance frameworks in connection with in-region inference and links to a Trust Center, but no certification names appear in the text we read, so we record none.
Pricing uses credits. For Sonic, one credit equals one character; for Ink, three credits equal one second of audio. The Free plan includes 20,000 credits a month and $1 of prepaid agent usage, without instant voice cloning. Pro is $5 a month with 100,000 credits and instant voice cloning. Startup is $49 with 1.25 million credits and two professional voice clone slots, and Scale is $299 with 8 million credits and four slots. Enterprise is custom. Plans renew monthly from the purchase date. Overages are optional on paid plans, at $65, $45 and $38 per million credits for Pro, Startup and Scale; if overages are off, requests stop when credits run out. Managed Agents calls cost $0.06 per minute from prepaid dollars.
This is a developer service, so voice generation happens through its API or playground rather than a full audio editor.
Yes. Free includes 20,000 credits a month and $1 of prepaid agent dollars, but not instant voice cloning.
Instant voice cloning starts on Pro at $5 per month. Professional voice clones start at Startup ($49) with two slots.
Paid users can enable overage billing; with overages off, requests are blocked until the credits renew.
Website: https://cartesia.ai/
Company: Cartesia
Developer-oriented text-to-speech, speech-to-text and voice agent platform with voice cloning from $5/month. Free 20K credits. Credit-based and API-first rather than a full voice editor.
| Pricing model | Freemium |
|---|---|
| Free tier | Yes · 20K credits per month plus $1 prepaid agent dollars; no instant voice cloning |
| Starting price | $5 / month |
| Data residency | Multiple regions — The home page mentions regional API endpoints and in-region inference. |
| Compliance (as stated by vendor) | Not verified |
| Integrations | Not verified |
| Public API | Yes |
| Self-hostable | Yes |
| Official site | Online (redirects) (auto-checked 2026-10-12) |
| Can a general AI assistant replace it? | A general chatbot can read text aloud in a basic voice but offers little control or voice cloning; Cartesia suits custom voices and low-latency apps. |
| Last verified | 2026-10-10 by editor |
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