GUIDE

A Cartesia alternative when you need hours of speech, not minutes

Cartesia builds fast Sonic voices for real-time apps, and its plans are sold in credits: one credit per character, about 750 to 800 credits for a minute of audio. The Pro plan at $5 a month gives 100,000 credits, roughly two hours of speech; Startup at $49 gives 1.25 million and Scale at $299 gives 8 million, according to the Cartesia pricing page in October 2026.

The SuperClonica speech API sells time instead: $5 a month for up to 216 hours used without a break. This guide compares the two honestly.

Get a free API key Hear the voices free Or run the engine yourself

What $5 buys

On Cartesia, $5 a month buys 100,000 credits, about two hours of audio, with overage at $65 per million credits on that plan. On SuperClonica, $5 a month buys 3 minutes of audio in every 10-minute window, up to 216 hours a month. At Cartesia’s own 750 to 800 credits a minute, 216 hours take about 10 million credits: the $299 Scale plan plus about 2 million credits of overage at $38 per million, about $375 in all.

  • Free: 1 minute of audio a day.
  • Starter, $5: up to 216 hours a month.
  • Author, $10: up to 576 hours.
  • Pro, $20: up to 1,440 hours.
  • Studio, $50: up to 4,680 hours.

Voices and streaming

A paid SuperClonica plan uses every voice of the catalog through the API, characters, narrators and announcers made by authors, and voices you train from your own recording on the site. The audio streams out as it is made: in our measurements the first sound came from 300 ms whatever the length of the text, and about 16,000 characters were voiced in 25.6 seconds.

Switch a request over

Post JSON to https://superclonica.com/api/v1/speech with Authorization: Bearer and your key: {"text": "...", "voice": "F1", "language": "en", "format": "mp3"}. Add "stream": true to play the audio as it comes. The answer is the audio itself; a 429 or 503 answer carries Retry-After.

When Cartesia is the better choice

Cartesia is built for real-time voice agents: it takes text as a stream over WebSocket, offers instant and professional voice cloning, speech to text and managed agents in one place, and more languages, including Chinese. If your app speaks a few minutes a day in a live conversation, it is likely the better fit. If it voices articles, books, videos or bots for hours, compare the price per hour.