Cartesia Alternatives for Voice Agent TTS Compared (2026)
Cartesia sells monthly credit plans for its Sonic 3.6 text-to-speech: Free with 20K credits, Pro at $5/mo for 100K, Startup at $49 for 1.25M and Scale at $299 for 8M. One credit is one character, and Cartesia says a minute of audio takes about 750–800 credits. Each plan also includes prepaid dollars for its hosted agents ($0.06/min). The alternatives below price text-to-speech per character or per hour: ElevenLabs at $0.04 per 1K characters for Flash / v4 Turbo ($0.08 for v4, v3 and v2 Multilingual), Rime Mist v3 at $0.03 per 1K, Deepgram Aura-2 at $0.030 per 1K, Speechmatics at $0.011 per 1K with the first 1M characters free, and Soniox at about $0.70 per hour of generated speech. Prices are from each vendor's own pricing page.
Cartesia sells credits; the others mostly price per 1K characters. For Sonic TTS one credit is one character, so $5 for 100K credits works out to about $0.05 per 1K.
ElevenLabs, Rime, Deepgram, Speechmatics and Soniox compared with Cartesia on published text-to-speech pricing, free tiers and languages.
ElevenLabs Agents- Starting price
- Agents: $0.08 per minute
- Best for
- Builders who want ElevenLabs' voices and speech models in one agent pipeline
Rime- Starting price
- From $0.03 per 1K characters (~$0.03/min)
- Best for
- Per-character-priced TTS for phone agents
Deepgram- Starting price
- Nova-3 streaming $0.0048/min ($0.29/hr); $200 free credit
- Best for
- Streaming speech-to-text for voice agents
Speechmatics- Starting price
- From $0.24/hr pay as you go (as low as ~$0.12/hr with discounts)
- Best for
- Multilingual transcription with language switching
Soniox- Starting price
- ~$0.10/hr async; ~$0.12/hr real-time
- Best for
- Very low-cost speech-to-text
TTS models compared
- Price
- $0.04 / 1K chars
- Latency
- ~75 ms (model inference)
- Languages
- 32
- Cloning
- Yes
- Price
- $0.04 / 1K chars
- Latency
- ~100 ms median (model inference)
- Languages
- 90+
- Cloning
- Yes
- Price
- Free tier; from $5/mo (100K credits)
- Latency
- —
- Languages
- 44
- Cloning
- Yes (instant, paid plans)
- Price
- $0.03 / 1K chars (~$0.03/min)
- Latency
- 37 ms P50 time-to-first-audio
- Languages
- 4 (en, fr, de, es)
- Cloning
- Enterprise
- Price
- $0.05 / 1K chars (~$0.05/min)
- Latency
- 96 ms P50 time-to-first-audio
- Languages
- 8
- Cloning
- Enterprise
- Price
- $0.030 / 1K chars
- Latency
- —
- Languages
- 7 (en, es, de, fr, nl, it, ja)
- Cloning
- —
- Price
- $0.045 / 1K chars
- Latency
- —
- Languages
- —
- Cloning
- —
- Price
- $0.011 / 1K chars; first 1M chars free
- Latency
- —
- Languages
- —
- Cloning
- —
- Price
- ~$0.70 / hr of speech
- Latency
- Real-time streaming
- Languages
- —
- Cloning
- —
See all voice models · Latency and prices as each vendor publishes them.
What to check before you choose
- Convert credits to characters. Cartesia Pro ($5 for 100K credits) is about $0.05 per 1K characters, Startup ($49 for 1.25M) about $0.039 and Scale ($299 for 8M) about $0.037. Overage, if you turn it on, is $65 per 1M credits on Pro.
- Treat latency figures as vendor claims. Rime lists 37 ms median time to first audio for Mist v3 and ElevenLabs about 75 ms for Flash; measure from your own servers before you decide.
- Check languages. Rime Mist v3 covers 4 languages and Coda 8; Deepgram Aura-2 covers 7; ElevenLabs v4 Turbo lists 90+.
- Voice cloning differs by plan. Cartesia includes instant cloning from Pro ($5/mo) and professional cloning from Startup ($49/mo); Rime's custom voice clones are on Enterprise.
- Test on free allowances. ElevenLabs' free plan includes 20,000 Flash / v4 Turbo characters a month; Speechmatics gives the first 1M characters free; Deepgram's $200 credit also covers text-to-speech. Rime's plan card says about 800 free minutes while its FAQ says 3,000, so plan on 800.
- Need a BAA? Cartesia, Rime and ElevenLabs each list BAAs on their Enterprise plans.
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Prices from vendors' official pricing pages, checked October 19, 2026. Not sponsored; order isn't a ranking.