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ToolVoicefreemiumactiveBelow 8
7/10Useful
Active

$0-$0.05/1K characters, Enterprise custom

Best plan

$0-$0

Risk: Rime's own pricing page and its per-model per-minute...

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Editorial · no paid placements

Should you use it?

Rime is enterprise conversational TTS built for phone calls, not content creation. Pick it for contact centers, IVR, and IVA where pronunciation accuracy and natural prosody matter on live calls, with on-prem/VPC and HIPAA/SOC 2 available. Skip it for podcasts, audiobooks, or creator voiceover, where ElevenLabs and Fish Audio have deeper studio workflows.

  • Buy ifContact centers and IVR/IVA replacing legacy TTS
  • Pick$0-$0.05/1K characters, Enterprise custom
  • Skip ifPodcast, audiobook, or video narration

Plan guidance

What to buy

Best plan$0-$0.05/1K characters, Enterprise custom

Watch: Rime's own pricing page and its per-model per-minute...

Price range$0-$0.05/1K characters, Enterprise custom

3,000 free minutes then $0.05/1K characters; Enterprise custom

Upgrade only ifNot for podcast, audiobook, or video narration

Rime's own pricing page and its per-model per-minute...

Current pricing source: Rime pricing

Fit

Use it for this, skip it for that

Best for

  • Contact centers and IVR/IVA replacing legacy TTS
  • Regulated enterprises needing on-prem or VPC deployment
  • Phone-based voice agents where mispronunciation breaks trust
  • Teams that need HIPAA BAA and SOC 2 compliance out of the box

Avoid if

  • Podcast, audiobook, or video narration
  • Solo creators wanting a no-code voiceover UI
  • Hobbyist projects needing the largest voice marketplace
  • Teams that just want the single cheapest per-character rate with no enterprise features
Watch out
Rime's own pricing page and its per-model per-minute figures (surfaced through third-party integrations like LiveKit) do not always match, and the FAQ section of the live pricing page was not fully populated at verification time. Confirm exact per-model rates and any volume-tier discounts directly with Rime sales before committing budget, especially since Coda just replaced Arcana as the recommended flagship on July 1, 2026.

Recent changes

Only what affects the decision

  1. Starter / Enterprise

    Live pricing page shows a simplified two-tier structure (Starter, Enterprise) rather than the December 2025 three-tier (Starter/Growth/Enterprise) layout; Growth tier was not visible at...

    Rime pricing
  2. Coda

    Coda became Rime's recommended flagship model, positioned to replace Arcana for most production traffic

    Rime Coda product page
  3. Coda

    Some third-party trackers describe Coda as shipping in May 2026 for early access; Rime's own site marks general availability as July 1, 2026

    Rime Coda product page

Alternatives

Best swaps

Build comparison
Proof and score mathVerified Jul 2

Proof

Why this recommendation is trusted

Source
Registered source
Freshness
Review due
Confidence
Low confidence
Verified
Review
Volatility
Volatile

Stale source rime-pricing.

Editorial score

Unweighted average of 4 axes · confidence high

  • Utility8/10

    How much real work it can do for a competent operator, end to end.

  • Value8/10

    What you get for the dollar relative to the closest alternative.

  • Moat6/10

    How hard it would be for a competitor to replicate the underlying advantage.

  • Longevity6/10

    How likely the product is to still be best-in-class 24 months out.

Verified facts

  1. Best ForRime is best for enterprises building or replacing phone-based voice systems (contact centers, IVR, IVA) that need correct pronunciation, natural prosody, and low latency on live customer calls, not creator voiceover or audiobook narration.
    highDrifts2026-07-02Rime vs ElevenLabs comparison
  2. Pricing AnchorStarter plan gives 3,000 free minutes, then pay-as-you-go at $0.05 per 1K characters with 20 concurrent TTS generations. Enterprise is custom volume pricing with unlimited concurrency, unlimited voice clones, SLAs, Cloud/on-prem/VPC deployment, and BAA (HIPAA) plus SOC 2 reports. Per-model per-minute equivalents (via the LiveKit integration pricing table) run Mist ~$0.018/min, Arcana ~$0.024/min, Coda ~$0.030/min on the standard tier, with lower Mist and Arcana rates at higher volume.
    mediumVolatile2026-07-02Rime pricing
  3. Flagship ModelCoda launched July 1, 2026 as Rime's new flagship, described as the first TTS model built for enterprise conversations, with a 180+ voice library, sub-100ms model latency on self-hosted GPU, multilingual support (English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Japanese), and word-level timestamps. Rime's docs now recommend migrating existing Arcana traffic to Coda.
    highVolatile2026-07-02Rime Coda product page
  4. Watch Out ForRime's own pricing page and its per-model per-minute figures (surfaced through third-party integrations like LiveKit) do not always match, and the FAQ section of the live pricing page was not fully populated at verification time. Confirm exact per-model rates and any volume-tier discounts directly with Rime sales before committing budget, especially since Coda just replaced Arcana as the recommended flagship on July 1, 2026.
    mediumVolatile2026-07-02Rime pricing
  5. FundingRime has raised $25.1M total across two rounds: a 2023 seed round and a May 2025 seed round. The May 2025 round was publicly announced at $5.5M, led by Unusual Ventures with Cadenza Capital, Founders You Should Know, and angel investors participating.
    mediumStable2026-07-02Tracxn: Rime company profile
Full review notesLong-form details, FAQ, and source history

Enterprise conversational TTS built for the phone, not the studio. Rime targets contact centers, IVR, and intelligent virtual assistants (IVA) where correct pronunciation, natural pacing, and low latency on a live call matter more than expressive narration or a large creator voice library.

Founded in 2022 by Lily Clifford, Brooke Larson, and Ares Geovanos in San Francisco. Rime says it now powers 100 million-plus phone conversations a month, with enterprise customers including Domino’s and Wingstop. Domino’s reported a 20% lift in customer task completion after replacing Microsoft TTS with Rime’s voices.

The flagship model is Coda, which went live in the dashboard and API on July 1, 2026, one day before this page was verified. Coda is positioned as Rime’s fastest and most expressive model yet, and Rime’s own docs now recommend migrating existing Arcana traffic over to it.

System Verdict

Pick Rime if you are modernizing a phone-based voice system. IVR, contact centers, and IVAs live or die on pronunciation accuracy and prosody under real call conditions, and Rime is built specifically for that, with on-prem, VPC, or cloud deployment and HIPAA/SOC 2 compliance available.

Skip it for podcasts, audiobooks, or video narration. ElevenLabs and Fish Audio have deeper creator tooling, larger voice marketplaces, and no-code editing surfaces that Rime does not try to compete on.

Who pays what: Starter is free up to 3,000 minutes, then pay-as-you-go at $0.05 per 1,000 characters with 20 concurrent generations, good for prototyping and small production loads. Enterprise is custom, built for large-scale contact-center deployments that need unlimited concurrency, unlimited voice clones, SLAs, and on-prem/VPC hosting.

Key Facts

CompanyRime Labs, Inc., San Francisco
Founded2022
Funding raised$25.1M total across two seed rounds (2023, May 2025)
Flagship modelCoda, live since July 1, 2026
Other modelsArcana (previous flagship, migration recommended to Coda), Mist v2/v3 (fastest TTFA, English/Spanish)
Free tierStarter, 3,000 minutes free
Pay-as-you-go rate$0.05 per 1,000 characters (Starter, post-free-tier)
Per-minute equivalentsMist ~$0.018/min, Arcana ~$0.024/min, Coda ~$0.030/min (standard tier, via LiveKit integration pricing)
EnterpriseCustom pricing, unlimited concurrency and voice clones, SLAs, Cloud/on-prem/VPC
ComplianceSOC 2 reports, BAA (HIPAA) available on Enterprise
Known customersDomino’s, Wingstop
Scale claim100M+ phone conversations per month across customers

Every data point above was verified against vendor and third-party sources on 2026-07-02. See Sources.

What it actually is

An API-first text-to-speech platform tuned for one job: sounding right on a live phone call, at production scale, without mispronouncing brand names, confirmation codes, or technical terms. Rime is not trying to be a creator studio.

Coda is the current flagship, shipped July 1, 2026. Rime describes it as the first TTS model built for enterprise conversations, with a 180-plus voice library, sub-100ms model latency when self-hosted on GPU (cloud adds roughly 25-50ms network latency), word-level timestamps, and multilingual coverage across English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, and Japanese.

Arcana was the prior flagship, known for emotionally expressive speech (natural laughs, sighs, breathing) and fine prosody control. Rime’s docs now point existing Arcana traffic toward Coda, so treat Arcana as a legacy path rather than the model to build new integrations on.

Mist (v2 and v3) is the speed-optimized line. Mist v3 targets the fastest time-to-first-audio (~37ms P50) in English only; Mist v2 adds Spanish and custom pronunciation control with ultra-fast on-prem latency (~70ms), useful when brand-name pronunciation needs manual overrides.

Deployment flexibility (cloud, on-prem, or dedicated VPC) plus SOC 2 and HIPAA BAA availability on Enterprise are the enterprise-sales wedge against consumer-first TTS vendors.

When to pick Rime

  • Replacing legacy IVR or contact-center TTS. Rime’s whole positioning is correct pronunciation and natural pacing under live-call conditions, the exact failure mode of older robotic TTS.
  • Regulated industries needing on-prem or VPC. Healthcare, finance, and other compliance-heavy buyers can deploy Rime off the public cloud entirely and still get HIPAA BAA and SOC 2 reports.
  • High call volume where latency compounds. Sub-100ms self-hosted model latency matters when a system is handling large simultaneous call loads.
  • Teams standardizing on a phone-first voice stack. Rime’s roadmap (Coda succeeding Arcana) is aimed squarely at enterprise conversation quality, not creator features.
  • Budget-conscious prototyping. 3,000 free minutes on Starter is a meaningful runway to test call quality before committing spend.

When to pick something else

  • Podcast, audiobook, or video narration: ElevenLabs. Deeper studio tooling, larger voice marketplace, and expressive long-form narration workflows Rime does not target.
  • Real-time voice-agent infrastructure with bundled STT/LLM orchestration: Cartesia. Line platform bundles TTS, STT, and orchestration in one stack with native LiveKit/Daily/Twilio integrations.
  • No-code creator UI: ElevenLabs or Fish Audio. Rime is API-first with no consumer-facing voiceover editor.
  • Cheapest raw per-character multilingual API: compare directly against current per-minute or per-character rates on Cartesia and other AI Voice options before committing to volume pricing.

Pricing

Pricing verified 2026-07-02 via rime.ai/pricing:

PlanPriceWhat’s includedWho it’s for
StarterFree up to 3,000 minutes, then $0.05/1K characters20 concurrent TTS generations, public Slack supportPrototyping, small production loads
EnterpriseCustomUp to unlimited concurrent generations, unlimited custom voice clones, SLAs plus dedicated support, Cloud/on-prem/VPC deployment, BAA (HIPAA) and SOC 2 reportsLarge-scale contact-center and regulated deployments

Per-model per-minute equivalents, sourced from Rime’s LiveKit integration pricing table rather than Rime’s own pricing page: Mist ~$0.018/min, Arcana ~$0.024/min, Coda ~$0.030/min on the standard tier, with Mist and Arcana dropping further at higher-volume tiers while Coda held steady at ~$0.030/min. A separate December 2025 Rime blog post described an older three-tier Starter/Growth/Enterprise structure with per-character rates (Arcana $40/1M chars on Starter, $30/1M chars on Growth; Mist $30/1M chars on Starter, $20/1M chars on Growth) plus signup credits. That structure does not match what the live pricing page shows in July 2026, so treat the current Starter/Enterprise two-tier page as the source of truth and confirm exact per-model rates with sales before budgeting.

Prices verified 2026-07-02 via Rime pricing, LiveKit pricing, and Rime’s December 2025 pricing announcement.

Against the alternatives

RimeElevenLabsCartesia
Primary use caseContact center, IVR, IVAContent creation, narrationReal-time voice agents
Flagship modelCoda (July 2026)Current flagship TTS modelSonic-3.5
Free tier3,000 minutesLimited character credits20K model credits
DeploymentCloud, on-prem, VPCCloudCloud (on-prem on Enterprise)
ComplianceSOC 2, HIPAA BAASOC 2SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, PCI L1
Agent stackTTS-focused, no bundled STT/LLMConversational AI add-onLine (TTS + STT + LLM orchestration)
Best viewed asPhone-call pronunciation specialistCreator platform defaultReal-time agent specialist

Failure modes

  • Pricing pages disagree with each other. The live rime.ai/pricing page, Rime’s own December 2025 blog post, and third-party integration pricing (LiveKit) do not present a single consistent number for per-model rates. Get a written quote before committing budget.
  • Coda just launched. As of this page’s verification date (2026-07-02), Coda has been generally available for one day. Expect rough edges, incomplete documentation, and rapid iteration in the weeks after launch.
  • No creator UI. Rime is API-first. Solo creators or small teams without engineering resources should look at ElevenLabs or Fish Audio instead.
  • Smaller company, thinner track record than ElevenLabs. $25.1M total raised is modest next to better-funded voice AI competitors, which matters for longevity risk on multi-year enterprise contracts.
  • Enterprise features are gated behind custom pricing. Unlimited concurrency, unlimited voice clones, on-prem, and HIPAA BAA all sit on the Enterprise tier, not Starter, so serious production deployments should expect a sales conversation.
  • FAQ section on the live pricing page was not fully populated at verification time, which suggests the page was mid-update. Re-verify before treating any single number here as final.

Recent developments

  • Coda shipped July 1, 2026 as Rime’s new flagship TTS model, replacing Arcana as the recommended default for new applications. Rime’s docs explicitly recommend migrating existing Arcana traffic to Coda.
  • Domino’s and Wingstop are cited as enterprise customers, with Domino’s reporting a 20% increase in customer task completion after switching from Microsoft TTS to Rime.
  • Rime’s pricing structure has shifted at least twice in the last seven months: a December 19, 2025 three-tier Starter/Growth/Enterprise revamp with per-character model pricing, followed by a simpler Starter/Enterprise structure visible on the live pricing page in July 2026. Confirm current terms directly before budgeting.
  • Total funding sits at $25.1M across two seed rounds (2023 and May 2025), with the May 2025 round publicly announced at $5.5M led by Unusual Ventures.

System verdict

Rime is a credible specialist pick for one job: making phone-based voice systems sound less robotic without breaking on pronunciation. It is not a general-purpose TTS platform and should not be evaluated as one. Enterprises replacing legacy IVR, or building new contact-center voice agents, should shortlist Rime alongside Cartesia. Creators and studios should look elsewhere entirely.

FAQ

Is Rime free?

The Starter plan includes 3,000 free minutes. After that, it bills pay-as-you-go at $0.05 per 1,000 characters. There is no unlimited free tier.

What is Coda?

Coda is Rime’s flagship text-to-speech model, live in the dashboard and API since July 1, 2026. Rime describes it as the first TTS model built for enterprise conversations, with a 180-plus voice library and sub-100ms self-hosted model latency. It replaces Arcana as the recommended default model.

Does Rime support on-premises deployment?

Yes, on the Enterprise plan. Rime offers Cloud, on-prem, or VPC deployment options along with BAA (HIPAA) and SOC 2 reports for regulated industries.

How is Rime different from ElevenLabs?

Rime targets enterprise voice applications like contact centers and IVR, built for pronunciation accuracy and natural pacing on live calls. ElevenLabs targets content creation like audiobooks and video narration with a larger creator-facing voice library and editing tools. Full comparison at /tools/elevenlabs/.

How much has Rime raised?

$25.1M total across two seed rounds, per PitchBook and Tracxn: a 2023 seed round and a May 2025 seed round. The May 2025 round was publicly announced at $5.5M, led by Unusual Ventures.

What happened to Arcana?

Arcana was Rime’s previous flagship model, known for expressive, emotionally nuanced speech. As of July 2026, Rime’s documentation recommends migrating existing Arcana traffic to Coda, the new flagship, though Arcana remains available.

Sources

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According to aipedia.wiki Editorial at aipedia.wiki (https://aipedia.wiki/tools/rime/)
aipedia.wiki Editorial. (2026). Rime: Editorial Review. aipedia.wiki. Retrieved August 2, 2026, from https://aipedia.wiki/tools/rime/
aipedia.wiki Editorial. "Rime: Editorial Review." aipedia.wiki, 2026, https://aipedia.wiki/tools/rime/. Accessed August 2, 2026.
aipedia.wiki Editorial. 2026. "Rime: Editorial Review." aipedia.wiki. https://aipedia.wiki/tools/rime/.
@misc{rime-editorial-review-2026, author = {{aipedia.wiki Editorial}}, title = {Rime: Editorial Review}, year = {2026}, publisher = {aipedia.wiki}, url = {https://aipedia.wiki/tools/rime/}, note = {Accessed: 2026-08-02} }
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