ANALYSIS VERDICT
Deepgram leads on autonomy (73 vs 70), while Cartesia starts at $0/mo. Select Cartesia for unmatched sub-100ms audio generation speed; consider Deepgram if you prioritize industry-benchmark nova-3 speech recognition accuracy.
| Metric / Feature | Cartesia Visit cartesia.ai ↗ | Deepgram Visit deepgram.com ↗ |
|---|---|---|
| Autonomy Score (AES) | 70/100 Core 80 · -10 setup | 73/100 Core 83 · -10 setup |
| Value-to-Cost Ratio | 5.01 | 5.89 |
| Starting Price | $0/mo | $0/mo |
| Pricing Model | freemium | freemium |
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Pricing tier comparison
Cartesia tiers
Free
$0 /month
- 20K credits / month
- $1 prepaid agents / month (~33 agent minutes)
- Text to Speech (Sonic-3.6, ~27 min)
- Speech to Text (Ink-2, ~1h 51m)
- 2 concurrent TTS requests, 8 concurrent STT requests
Pro
$5 /month
- 100K credits / month
- $5 prepaid agents / month (~2h 47m)
- Commercial use license
- Instant voice cloning
- 3 concurrent TTS requests, 12 concurrent STT requests
Startup
$49 /month
- 1.25M credits / month
- $49 prepaid agents / month (~27h 13m)
- Pro voice cloning (2 slots)
- Organizations support
- 5 concurrent TTS requests, 20 concurrent STT requests
Scale
$299 /month
- 8M credits / month
- $299 prepaid agents / month (~166h 7m)
- Priority support
- High concurrency limits (15 TTS, 60 STT)
- Pro voice cloning (4 slots)
Enterprise
Custom /custom
- Custom credits & agent usage
- Volume pricing
- Custom concurrency limits
- DPAs and BAAs for compliance
- Shared Slack channel & SSO
Deepgram tiers
Pay as you go
$0 /month
- Free $200 credit, then pay-as-you-go
- No minimums, no expiration, no credit card required
- Speech-to-text from $0.0077/min (Flux STT / Nova-3)
- Text-to-speech from $0.0150/1k characters (Aura-1)
- Voice Agent API from $0.075/min
- Up to 150 concurrent streaming STT connections
Growth
$4,000 /year
- $4,000+ / year pre-paid credits against usage
- Save up to 20% across STT, TTS, and Voice Agent
- Up to 225 concurrent streaming connections
- Volume discounts
Enterprise
Custom /custom
- Custom volume commitments & discounted rates
- Self-hosted VPC / on-prem container deployment
- HIPAA BAA & enterprise SLA
- Custom concurrency & named account team
Neither quite right? Tell us your team and budget and we'll pick the top 3.