Deepgram vs Cartesia: Features, Pricing and User Reviews 2026

Deepgram uses usage-based pricing with three main options. Pay As You Go is free to start with a $200 credit, no minimum spend, and no credit card required, making it a solid choice for developers and startups.

• Pay As You Go: Pay only for what you use, with rates as low as $0.0042 per minute for transcription and $0.027 per 1,000 characters for text-to-speech.

• Growth ($4,000+ per year): Prepaid annual credits unlock lower per-unit rates and higher concurrency limits, with savings of up to 20 percent.

• Enterprise: Custom pricing through sales for large volumes, custom models, dedicated support, and flexible deployment options.

Add-ons like redaction and entity detection are priced separately per minute, while smart formatting and speaker diarization are included at no extra cost on every plan.

Cartesia offers five pricing plans, from a free plan to a custom Enterprise option, so both small projects and large companies can find a fit.

• Free ($0/month): 20K credits a month plus $1 in prepaid agent usage, with access to Text to Speech and Speech to Text.

• Pro ($5/month): 100K credits a month, commercial use rights, and instant voice cloning.

• Startup ($49/month): 1.25M credits a month, professional voice cloning, and organization accounts.

• Scale ($299/month): 8M credits a month, priority support, and higher concurrency limits.

• Enterprise (Custom pricing): Custom credits, volume pricing, custom concurrency, SSO, and compliance agreements.

Extra charges apply for things like phone numbers ($0.014 per minute) and voice agent call minutes ($0.06 per minute), and subscriptions can be paused or cancelled anytime.