Cartesia Managed Agents review

Cartesia is best known for its Sonic text-to-speech model, and Managed Agents puts its speech models behind a full voice agent. Cartesia handles listening, turn-taking, interruptions, tool calls and knowledge retrieval, while an LLM you choose writes each reply. The pricing is the lowest we found: agent minutes cost $0.03, and each plan includes prepaid agent dollars equal to its price, so Pro at $5 covers about 2 hours and 47 minutes of agent time and Startup at $49 about 27 hours. LLM usage is billed separately, and calls on a Cartesia number add $0.014 a minute. Agents take inbound calls and can dial batches of up to 5,000 numbers through a Cartesia, Twilio or SIP number. You can call an agent from the browser and score the call with metrics you write, and every call keeps a recording, transcript and summary. Integrations are thinner than on the no-code builders above.

Who it is for

Builders who want the lowest published per-minute agent rate and are happy to bring their own LLM.

Price

Free plan with $1 of agent usage a month; Pro $5 per month with $5 of agent usage; agents $0.03 per minute plus LLM and telephony.

Pro $5 /mo Select Pro 100K credits / month $5 prepaid agents / month
Quoted from the vendor pricing page on November 6, 2026.

Key features

• Listening, turn-taking, interruptions and tool calls handled as one managed system
• Inbound calls plus outbound batches of up to 5,000 numbers
• Cartesia, Twilio or SIP phone numbers
• Browser test calls scored on metrics you write
• Recordings, transcripts and summaries for every call

Strengths and weaknesses

• Strength: Lowest published agent rate here at $0.03 per minute
• Strength: Plans include prepaid agent dollars equal to the plan price
• Strength: Free plan includes one phone number and 8 concurrent calls
• Weakness: LLM usage during calls is billed separately
• Weakness: Telephony adds $0.014 per minute on Cartesia numbers
• Weakness: Smaller integration catalog than no-code builders

Key facts

• Plans: Free, Pro $5, Startup $49, Scale $299, Enterprise
• Speech languages: 44
• Compliance: HIPAA, SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR

Where it ranks

Cartesia Managed Agents is No. 5 in our Best AI Voice Agents verdict.