Voice: ElevenLabs, Rime, and Kokoro

ElevenLabs

What it is

ElevenLabs is a voice AI company. Its docs cover text to speech, voice cloning, and a voice library of more than 10,000 voices¹.

My plan

I'm on the Scale plan. As of November 5, 2026, ElevenLabs lists Scale at $299 a month, with 1.8M credits a month, 3 workspace seats, and everything in Pro plus Team Collaboration and 3 Professional Voice Clones². For comparison, Pro is $99 a month for 600k credits, and Business is $990 a month for 6M credits².

What it's good at

ElevenLabs describes Eleven v4 as "Our most emotive, high quality speech synthesis model," covering 90+ languages¹. Eleven Flash v2.5 targets real-time use at a median latency of about 100 ms, and Eleven Multilingual v2 is described as the most stable model for long-form generations¹.

Limits: character limits per request run from 5,000 (Eleven v3) to 40,000 (Eleven Flash v2.5), and text to speech costs one credit per input character¹. Credits reset monthly, and unused ones roll over for up to two months¹.

What I use it for

Voice.

The company

ElevenLabs was founded in 2022 by Piotr Dąbkowski and Mati Staniszewski, who are Polish. It is based in London, with offices in New York City, Warsaw, and San Francisco³. In February 2026 it raised $500 million at an $11 billion valuation³. ElevenLabs' own news list carries a September 30, 2026, headline saying its valuation rose to $22 billion⁴.

Kokoro

What it is

Kokoro is an open-weight text-to-speech model with 82 million parameters⁵. Its architecture comes from Li et al., building on StyleTTS 2, and it was trained by a contributor who goes by @rzvzn on Discord⁵.

My plan

There's no plan. The weights are Apache-licensed⁵, and I run the model locally, so there's no subscription to pay for.

What it's good at

Version 1.0, published January 27, 2025, supports 8 languages and offers 54 voices⁵. The model page says that with Apache-licensed weights, "Kokoro can be deployed anywhere"⁵. The model page doesn't list quality limits. The language count and voice count are the clear ceilings: 8 languages, 54 voices⁵.

What I use it for

Voice.

The company

Kokoro isn't a company's product. The model is published on Hugging Face under the account hexgrad⁵. I couldn't find a founding date, founders, headquarters, or funding for it on the page, so there's nothing to report.

Rime

What it is

Rime is a voice AI company that builds voice models for enterprise conversations. Its headline reads "Voice models made for human conversation"⁶. Its models are Prism (speech to speech), Coda and Mist (text to speech), and Rime STT (speech to text)⁶.

My plan

I haven't listed which Rime plan I'm on yet. As of November 5, 2026, Rime's pricing page lists four plans⁷:

• Free: $0 a month, no card required, with $50 of usage a month that doesn't roll over.
• Flex: no monthly fee or commitment, billed by the minute to your card.
• Scale: $100 a month, which includes $100 of credit each month, rolling over up to $200.
• Enterprise: custom pricing, billed annually.

Per-minute rates, Flex then Scale⁷: Mist v3 text to speech is $0.030 and $0.024, Coda v2 text to speech is $0.050 and $0.040, and Prism speech to speech is $0.080 and $0.064. Rime STT is $0.002 and $0.0016, and is free until November 19⁷. Text to speech is "metered by characters generated, about 1,000 characters per minute"⁷. The page doesn't label its currency⁷.

What it's good at

Rime says Coda and Mist offer "600+ voices, 50+ languages" and "Deterministic pronunciation," and claims "Sub-100ms time to first byte" for them and "570ms TTFA" for Prism⁶. It also lists SOC 2 Type II compliance with a BAA available, and deployment in a customer's own VPC or on premises⁶. These are Rime's own claims. Its customer logos include Twilio, Dialpad, LiveKit, and Mayo Clinic⁶.

The limits: Rime is built for businesses running live calls, and its pricing page is organized around per-minute API billing, not a consumer app⁷. Custom voices are Enterprise-only, the voice counts on the page are 313 for Coda v2 and 78 for Mist v3, and the page doesn't address commercial use terms⁷.

What I use it for

Voice.

The company

Rime was founded in 2022 by Lily Clifford, Brooke Larson, and Ares Geovanos, and is located in San Francisco, according to TechCrunch⁸. Clifford is CEO and co-founder⁹. On July 15, 2026, Rime announced a $24 million Series A led by M13, with Corazon Capital, Unusual Ventures, Cadenza Ventures, and Twilio Ventures⁹. TechCrunch reports an earlier $5.5 million seed round⁸. Rime's announcement also says Morgan Blumberg of M13 joined its board and Rafael Valle joined as Chief Scientist⁹.

Sign up

ElevenLabs pricing, Rime pricing, and Kokoro-82M on Hugging Face