Voice and text-to-speech Cartesia vs Piper
Can you ship a game made with Cartesia or Piper? By stored vendor quotes: Cartesia: "Paid plans, with caveats", cheapest verified commercial plan $5/mo; Piper: "Partly verified".
Both columns are the ledger's stored values. Open the tool page for the full quote and source link. This page does not invent a winner.
Paid-plan commercial use is on the record. Read the caveats before you ship.
Commercial terms are only partly verified. This is not a yes.
Built only from rows with a stored vendor quote. Open each tool page for the exact sentence, source link, and fetch date.
| Fact | Cartesia | Piper |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Cartesiaverified Free is $0/mo with 20K credits per month. | Piperverified Piper is software you install yourself (pip install piper-tts). There is no paid plan; compute is on you. |
| Commercial use | Cartesiaverified A commercial use license is listed under Pro, in the 'Everything in Free, plus' block, not in the Free feature list above it. | Piperverified Piper's voice docs say Piper is intended for personal use and TTS research, that it adds no restrictions of its own on voice models, and that some voices have restrictive licenses. Check each voice's MODEL_CARD. |
| Ownership of outputs | Cartesiaunverified Unverified. | Piperunverified Unverified. |
| License caveat | Cartesiaverified Docs say credits are only used by successful requests, and that managed agents are billed per minute in USD rather than credits. A terms page for output ownership was not fetched. | Piperverified The piper-tts package is GPL-3.0-or-later. That governs the engine's code if you ship or modify it, not the audio you generate. |
| Steam disclosure | Cartesiaverified Player-facing art, sound, narrative, or localization made with this tool is the kind of shipped content Steam's Content Survey asks about (Pre-Generated). This is Valve's rule, not a statement from the vendor. | Piperverified Player-facing art, sound, narrative, or localization made with this tool is the kind of shipped content Steam's Content Survey asks about (Pre-Generated). This is Valve's rule, not a statement from the vendor. |
| Engines and export | Cartesiaunverified Unverified. | Piperverified Piper has a command-line tool, a web server, a Python API and a C/C++ API, and a Java binding is listed. It names no Unity, Godot or Unreal plugin. |