PlayHT Alternatives: Where to Go After the Shutdown
PlayHT alternatives after the Meta deal: what was reported about the shutdown, what to check before you switch, and listed prices as of October 2026.
PlayHT is no longer available. Meta acquired PlayAI, the team behind it, in July 2025, and competitor guides report that the service closed on December 31, 2025, though we found no official notice. None of the replacements below imports PlayHT voices, so recreate them from your original recordings on a current tool.
What happened to PlayHT?
TechCrunch reported on July 13, 2025 that Meta acquired voice startup Play AI. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the deal to Bloomberg, and an internal memo said the "entire PlayAI team" would join Meta the following week. The memo called PlayAI's work "a great match for our work and road map." Financial terms were not disclosed.
TechCrunch had reported acquisition talks earlier, on June 27, 2025. The rest of the timeline comes from other companies rather than from PlayHT, so the table separates what is reported from what is confirmed.
| Date | Event | How well it is supported | |---|---|---| | 2025-06-27 | Meta in talks to acquire Play AI | Reported by TechCrunch | | 2025-07-13 | Meta acquisition of Play AI announced | Confirmed by a Meta spokesperson | | About 2025-07-26 | API goes offline, earlier than planned | Reported by competitors, no official source | | 2025-12-31 | Service closes | Reported by competitors, no official PlayHT notice found |
A transition guide from Murf, dated February 11, 2026, says PlayHT was preparing to shut down by December 31, 2025. Inworld goes further and says PlayHT "shut down permanently on December 31, 2025," but it cites a social media post and a community thread rather than an official notice. An independent author also could not find a PlayHT notice that confirms the date.
Our own checks on October 17, 2026 were mixed. The play.ht domain did not resolve. The www.play.ai site returned an HTTP 503 error. The documentation site at docs.play.ht still loaded, with no shutdown notice on it.
Can you recover your PlayHT voices and audio?
Competitors report that accounts, saved audio and voice clones were deleted at the sunset, with no export tool. Treat that as reported, not confirmed. The independent author mentioned above said PlayHT's deletion policy is not stated in any source he found.
If you can still log in, download everything you own before you do anything else. Then follow the same steps that the migration guides recommend:
- Use the original human recordings you made each voice from. Do not reclone from PlayHT-generated audio.
- Check how much audio each new tool needs. One author suggests 1 to 3 minutes for an instant clone and 3 to 10 minutes for training. That is one opinion, from someone who sells a local tool.
- Keep a record of who gave permission for each recording, and keep the permission itself.
Murf also offered current or recent PlayHT subscribers a free six-month subscription, with proof of subscription. That page gave no deadline, so the offer may have ended. We could not confirm that it is still open.
PlayHT alternatives at a glance
The prices below are list prices from vendor pages we read on October 17, 2026. The pricing units differ, so compare the unit column as well as the number.
| Tool | Listed entry price | Pricing unit | Notes | |---|---|---|---| | Cartesia | Pro: $5 a month for 100,000 credits | 1 credit = 1 character | Instant voice cloning on Pro | | Inworld | $25 per 1M characters on demand (Realtime TTS-2) | Per million characters | Voice cloning itself is free | | Fish Audio API | $15 per million UTF-8 bytes | Bytes, not characters | No subscription or monthly minimum for API access | | ElevenLabs API | $80 per 1M characters (Eleven v4) | Per character | The price page labels its cells per 1K characters and per minute, so verify before you budget | | Chatterbox | Free, MIT license | Self-hosted | Open model from Resemble |
What to check before you switch
- Interface. Decide whether you need an app, an API or both. Cartesia, Inworld, Fish Audio and ElevenLabs all publish API prices.
- Pricing unit. Characters, bytes and credits are not the same. Bytes can outnumber characters in non-English text, so the same script can cost more on a bytes-based plan.
- Commercial use. Read the plan terms before you publish. Fish Audio's plan page contradicts itself on whether its free plan allows commercial use, and Inworld's pricing page does not state commercial terms.
- Cloning rules. Check how much audio each tool needs and what permission it asks for. Inworld's instant cloning uses 3 to 30 seconds of audio. Cartesia says 10 seconds, which is a vendor claim.
- Languages. Check the language list for the languages you actually need, not the headline count.
- Export. Ask whether you can download your voices and audio. The PlayHT reports show why this matters.
Options in more detail
Cartesia
Cartesia's current stable model is Sonic 3.6, with 44 languages. The Pro plan costs $5 a month for 100,000 credits and includes instant cloning. Artificial Analysis ranks Sonic 3.6 fourth in its blind listening arena. Our Cartesia Sonic explainer covers its models, latency claims and pricing in more depth.
Inworld
Inworld's Realtime TTS-2 is listed at $25 per million characters on demand, falling to $15 on a $300 monthly plan. The Flash variant is $15 on demand. The TTS page lists no free tier, while a second Inworld page mentions one, so we do not quote a free tier here.
Fish Audio
The Fish Audio API bills $15 per million UTF-8 bytes for its s2.1-pro and s2-pro models. Speech to text costs $0.36 per audio hour, and voice design costs $0.01 per request. The older s1 model is deprecated and retires on December 31, 2026. The app's Plus plan is listed at $11 a month, shown next to a $15 list price, with 250,000 credits.
ElevenLabs
Artificial Analysis ranks Eleven v4 Turbo first at 1330 Elo and Eleven v4 second at 1329, as of October 2026. Elo measures blind listening preference. It says nothing about cost or speed. ElevenLabs' API list prices are $80 per million characters for v4 and $40 for v4 Turbo. Its app plan prices conflict across the pricing page, so we leave them out.
Chatterbox
Chatterbox is an open model family from Resemble, released under the MIT license and free to run yourself. Its English models range from 110 million to 500 million parameters, and Chatterbox-Multilingual V3 covers 23 languages. Every output carries a PerTh watermark. The GitHub repository documents the models.
Murf
Murf's pricing page returned unreadable content when we checked, and its own pages list different prices. We therefore do not quote Murf prices in this comparison.
Names that no longer work as replacements
Two names often appear on PlayHT replacement lists. Neither is a good fit for a new voice-generation purchase.
- Resemble AI said in an August 13, 2026 post that it is "supporting our existing customers but not taking new ones." It now sells deepfake detection, and it does not currently sell voice generation to new customers.
- Hume AI Octave runs on a TTS API that ends on November 13, 2026 at 12:01 a.m. EST. Account data is deleted permanently after that date. Read our Hume AI Octave shutdown guide before you spend time on it.
Where OndaLabs fits
OndaLabs, formerly NeoSpeech, is a voice studio. Its tools are text to speech, two-speaker dialogue, speech to text, custom voices, image generation and music generation. Text to speech includes 30 prebuilt voices that can be used in every supported language.
If you recreate a voice, OndaLabs custom voices are one place to do it. You can clone a voice from a recording you have permission to use, or design one from a text description. Each clone or design costs 1,500 credits. Creator, at $22 a month, includes 3 custom voices. Pro, at $49, includes 10, and Business, at $199, includes 30. The free plan includes 2,000 credits a month, about 2 minutes on Onda Lite. Commercial use is included on Starter and above, which costs $9 a month.
OndaLabs credits are per character: Onda Lite uses 1 credit per character and Onda Flash uses 1.5. Starter's 170,000 credits therefore cover 170,000 characters on Onda Lite. Cartesia Pro gives 100,000 characters for $5. These are different products and tiers, so compare them against the work you actually do. You can see custom voices in the app or compare plans and credits on the pricing page.
Frequently asked questions
Is PlayHT still available?
No. Competitor guides report that it closed on December 31, 2025. The play.ht domain did not resolve when we checked on October 17, 2026, and we found no official PlayHT notice. Plan as if the service is gone, and export whatever you can.
Did Meta buy PlayHT?
Meta acquired Play AI, the company behind PlayHT, according to a TechCrunch report dated July 13, 2025. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the deal. Financial terms were not disclosed, so no deal value is quoted here.
Can I recover my PlayHT voice clones?
Reports say accounts, saved audio and voice clones were deleted at the sunset, with no export tool. That is unconfirmed, so check your own account first. If your clones are gone, recreate them from the original recordings, not from PlayHT-generated audio.
Is there an open-source PlayHT alternative?
Chatterbox, from Resemble, is an open model under the MIT license that you can run yourself. It supports zero-shot cloning from a reference clip. Its English models are joined by Chatterbox-Multilingual V3, which covers 23 languages. The README does not state a minimum reference length, so test with your own audio.
Which PlayHT alternatives have an API?
Cartesia, Inworld, Fish Audio and ElevenLabs all publish API prices. Fish Audio says it has no subscription fees or monthly minimums for API access. Check each vendor's current documentation before you build, because API prices and models change.