Voice layer · secondary to AI receptionists
PlayHT appears to be shut down: phone-ready alternatives
Cartesia Pro ($5/mo) is the cheapest plan with a published commercial license among the alternatives to PlayHT. PlayHT (PlayAI) appears to be shut down: its sites were unreachable when we checked on 2026-10-22. These phone-ready voice tools publish prices and formats you can check.
PlayHT (PlayAI): the product appears to be shut down (its sites were unreachable when we checked), so these are the alternatives for phone use.
How do Cartesia and ElevenLabs compare?
Tools whose published plan includes a commercial license come first, by lowest published price; then the rest, by price. Affiliate status never changes the order. Not published means the vendor does not publish it, or we have not yet read it with a date.
Ordered by: commercial license published first, then lowest published price.
| # | Tool | Monthly price from (USD/mo) | Free tier | Commercial use | API | μ-law output | SOC 2 | HIPAA BAA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cartesia | $5 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Not published | Yes | Enterprise only |
| 2 | ElevenLabs | $6 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Not published | Enterprise only |
| 3 | Deepgram | Not published | Yes | Not published | Yes | Not published | Yes | Enterprise only |
| 4 | Murf | Not published | Yes | Not published | Yes | Yes | Yes | Not published |
Prices, sources and check dates for every value are in the full table.
See all fields (16 columns with sources and dates)
Ordered by: commercial license published first, then lowest published price.
| # | Tool | Monthly price from (USD/mo) | Annual billing (USD/mo equivalent) | Free tier | Included audio (minutes/mo) | Overage (USD per minute) | Price per 1,000 characters (USD) | Price per minute of audio (USD) | Commercial use | Voice cloning | API | μ-law output | 8 kHz output | Languages (count) | Voices (count) | SOC 2 | HIPAA BAA | Price source and date checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cartesia | $5 | Not published | Yes | — | Not published | Not published | Not published | Yes | Yes | Yes | Not published | Not published | — | — | Yes | Enterprise only | cartesia.ai/pricing, checked |
| 2 | ElevenLabs | $6 | $5 | Yes | — | Not published | Not published | Not published | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Not published | 74 | — | Not published | Enterprise only | elevenlabs.io/pricing, checked |
| 3 | Deepgram | Not published | Not published | Yes | — | Not published | $0.015 | Not published | Not published | Not published | Yes | Not published | Not published | — | — | Yes | Enterprise only | deepgram.com/pricing, checked |
| 4 | Murf | Not published | Not published | Yes | — | Not published | $0.01 | Not published | Not published | Yes | Yes | Yes | Not published | — | — | Yes | Not published | murf.ai/pricing, checked |
Telephony formats: 8 kHz is narrowband phone audio; μ-law (G.711) is the encoding most US phone lines use. A voice needs one of these to play on a phone line without resampling.
Audio samples coming
Top pick per use case
Prices come from each vendor pricing page, checked 2026-10-28. No partners in voice yet, so vendor names are plain text.
Chosen only on free tier, commercial rights, price, published phone formats and compliance claims.
| Use case | Top pick | Why (published facts) |
|---|---|---|
| Live voice agents | Cartesia | $0.06/min agents, SOC 2 Type II |
| Business greetings / IVR files | ElevenLabs | μ-law output documented; commercial from $6/mo |
| Pay-per-character API | Murf | $0.01 per 1k characters (Falcon) |
What happened
- July 2025: Bloomberg (July 11, 2025) reported that Meta acquired PlayAI, the company behind PlayHT. TechCrunch's July 13, 2025 report cites Bloomberg, so treat these as one line of reporting rather than two independent confirmations.
- Shutdown date: some migration guides give 31 December 2025 for the full shutdown. We have not found a primary source or two independent press reports confirming that date, so we don't state it as fact.
- 2026-10-22: we checked play.ht, play.ai and playht.com, and none of them responded, so PlayHT appears to be shut down. No official PlayHT page was reachable to confirm any of this.
Migrating
Re-clone only from your original human recordings, with the speaker's consent. Rebuild your prompts from the source scripts.
ElevenLabs
- Commercial from Starter $6/mo; μ-law/A-law/PCM in API
Cartesia
- Pro $5/mo; agents $0.06/min
Murf
- Falcon $0.01 per 1k characters; ULAW output in API
Deepgram
- Aura-1 $0.015 per 1k characters; SOC 2 Type 2
What do people ask most?
These are the questions we get most, answered from published vendor data.
Can I still log in to PlayHT?
Probably not. No official PlayHT site responded when we checked on 2026-10-22.