Compare · Last verified 2026-10-30

Cartesia vs Phonic: pricing, limits, and which to use

Verdict

Both launched on 2026-10-29. Cartesia Managed Agents lists a standard $0.03 a minute plus LLM tokens billed separately (and $0.014 a minute more on a Cartesia number), paid from prepaid agent dollars (a free plan includes $1 a month), and runs its speech models around an LLM you choose. Phonic-1 is a single speech-to-speech model at $0.07 a minute on Starter or $0.065 on Pro with a $200 monthly minimum, with no separate LLM charge. Checked 2026-10-30 on cartesia.ai/pricing and phonic.ai/pricing. Benchmark rankings on both launch posts are vendor-reported and not reproduced by us.

Pick Cartesia Managed Agents for: Lower base per-minute rate, a free plan to test, and control over which LLM does the reasoning.
Pick Phonic-1 for: One all-in per-minute price with no LLM bill, published concurrency per plan, and tool calls while the caller is still talking (vendor claim).

Side-by-side

	Cartesia Managed Agents	Phonic-1 (speech-to-speech)
Vendor	Cartesia	Phonic
Category	Voice agent API	Voice agent API
Price	Voice agents at a standard $0.03 a minute, paid from prepaid agent dollars: Free plan $1/month (about 33 minutes), Startup $49/month, Scale $299/month includes $299 for agents. Enterprise custom. [Verified 2026-10-30 on https://cartesia.ai/pricing] Telephony add-on: +$0.014 a minute when the call uses a Cartesia-provided number. The per-minute rates exclude LLM usage, which is billed separately at the chosen model’s token prices (GET /v1/agents/models lists them). [Verified 2026-10-30 on https://docs.cartesia.ai/pricing]	Starter $0.07/min, no minimum. Pro $0.065/min with a $200 monthly minimum (about 3,100 minutes). Enterprise custom. No LLM pass-through or per-token charges. [Verified 2026-10-30 on https://phonic.ai/pricing]
Limits	Concurrent agent calls: Free 8, Pro 12, Startup 20, Scale 60, Enterprise custom. Cartesia-provided numbers: 1, 3, 5, 10, custom. Agents have their own concurrency pool, separate from TTS and STT. [Verified 2026-10-30 on https://cartesia.ai/pricing] Batch calling queues up to 5,000 recipients and dials as capacity frees; direct outbound dialing rejects numbers beyond your concurrency limit instead of queuing. [Verified 2026-10-30 on https://docs.cartesia.ai/line/integrations/telephony/outbound-dialing] Official SDKs: JavaScript/TypeScript (npm install @cartesia/cartesia-js, github.com/cartesia-ai/cartesia-js) and Python (pip install cartesia, github.com/cartesia-ai/cartesia-python). API key sent as X-API-Key. [Verified 2026-10-30 on https://docs.cartesia.ai/tools/client-libraries]	Starter: 10 concurrent calls, 10 agents, 3 seats. Pro: 50 concurrent calls, 50 agents, 30 seats. Enterprise: custom. [Verified 2026-10-30 on https://phonic.ai/pricing]
Status	Launched 2026-10-29; no beta label on the launch post or docs. [Verified 2026-10-30 on https://www.cartesia.ai/blog/managed-agents] Ranked #1 of 30 on Artificial Analysis Speech Agent Arena (Elo 1115) and top on EVA-Bench (87.4% accuracy, 90.7% experience), per Cartesia, with GPT-5.5 as the reasoning model. [Vendor-reported, checked 2026-10-30 on https://www.cartesia.ai/blog/managed-agents; not reproduced by AgentAPIList]	Launched 2026-10-29 with a $27.5M Series A. No beta label on the launch post. [Verified 2026-10-30 on https://phonic.ai/blog/phonic-1] #1 on the Artificial Analysis Speech to Speech Index and 83.2 on Sierra τ³-Voice multilingual, per Phonic. [Vendor-reported, checked 2026-10-30 on https://phonic.ai/blog/phonic-1; not reproduced by AgentAPIList]
Fit notes	Good for production phone or app voice agents that need tools and knowledge bases with your choice of LLM. A free plan exists ($1 prepaid agent usage a month) for testing.	Good for natural, low-latency calls where tone matters and you want one per-minute price with no separate LLM bill. HIPAA BAAs, SLAs and VPC deployment are Enterprise-only.

FAQ

Is Cartesia cheaper than Phonic?

On list price, yes: $0.03 a minute standard for Cartesia Managed Agents versus $0.07 (Starter) or $0.065 (Pro) for Phonic-1, checked 2026-10-30. But Cartesia’s per-minute rate excludes LLM tokens (billed separately) and adds $0.014 a minute on a Cartesia number (docs.cartesia.ai/pricing), while Phonic says it has no LLM pass-through.

Can I pick my own LLM?

Cartesia: yes, its docs describe a choice of managed LLMs. Phonic-1 is one speech-to-speech model, so there is no separate LLM to choose.

Do both support tool calls?

Yes. Cartesia has system, webhook and client tools; Phonic has webhook, WebSocket and context tools.

Methodology

Every fact in the table is copied from the vendor's official page (or OpenRouter where noted) and labeled with the date it was last verified. Items we could not confirm are marked unverified. Prices are list prices per 1M input tokens before regional or volume adjustments. See our methodology.