Stable Audio

By Minel Gunesoglu, founder. This page is a document reconciliation, not a listening session: no music was generated for it and no plan was bought. I opened the pricing page in a browser with every FAQ panel expanded, read the company-wide contract end to end, pulled the separate licence that ships with the open weights, compared four Internet Archive copies of the same pricing URL against the live one, and read five community threads where the vendor's own record runs out. Every figure below carries the date it was read. Last updated 26 August 2026, re-checked monthly.

Four saved copies of stableaudio.com/pricing, taken by the Internet Archive on 3 September 2024, 17 November 2024, 21 April 2025 and 29 December 2025, all carry the same table. Three named licences, Personal, Creator and Enterprise, sit above a grid of what each one permits: commercial music releases, social media and podcasts, film, TV and advertisement, apps and games, commercial products above and below 100,000 monthly active users.

The live page has no table. Read in a browser on 26 August 2026, it sells four plans by monthly credit volume, starting at $12, and answers the licensing question nowhere on the page. That answer now lives in a contract governing five products at once.

This page prices and scores one of them: the hosted Stable Audio app that Stability AI sells at stableaudio.com. Three other things carry the same name, and they are kept apart below, because a sentence that is true of one is false about the others.

Stable Audio pricing: what the four plans cost, read 26 August 2026

Stable Audio's hosted app publishes one billing view. There is no monthly-versus-annual switch anywhere on the pricing page, and the words annual, yearly and billed appear beside none of the plans. That was checked by querying the page for a toggle control rather than by scanning it by eye. Every figure below is a monthly price.

(The right-hand column is ours. Stable Audio publishes the price and the credit allowance; it does not publish the division. Worth doing once, because the volume discount is smaller than the ladder looks: paying sixteen times more a month buys credits twenty-two per cent cheaper each, so the tiers are mostly about how much you need rather than about getting a better rate.)

The plan cards print those allowances with a full stop as the thousands separator, so Session reads "1.800" and Studio reads "14.000" on the page itself. Credits are not tracks, and the pricing page does not publish what a generation costs in credits, so the allowance cannot be turned into a number of songs from that page alone. Beneath the four cards is one line about renewal: "The credit amount will reset to the monthly allocated amount every month."

The Enterprise block is not a fifth price. It is a contact form addressed to "enterprises with annual revenue over $1M interested in deploying our audio models on your own infrastructure", offering fine-tuning by Stability's audio research team and implementation support. No figure is attached to it.

If you have seen $11.99, $29.99 or $89.99 quoted for this product elsewhere, none of those figures appears on the vendor's own pricing page as it rendered on 26 August 2026. Prices go stale faster than anything else here, which is why the read date sits beside the number.

Is Stable Audio free? Two answers, and they point in opposite directions

A free plan exists on the hosted app, and the pricing page publishes almost nothing about it. The word free occurs exactly once on that page, inside a collapsed FAQ panel answering a different question. The vendor's sentence, verbatim: "The free plan renews on the first of each month."

That is the entire published record of it. There is no free card among the four plans, no price, no credit allowance, no feature list, and no statement about whether work made on it may be sold. The cards begin at Solo, $12 a month. The homepage adds nothing: read the same day, the words free and trial each occur zero times on it.

The open-weight models answer the same question the other way. Stability publishes three Stable Audio 3 checkpoints on Hugging Face under the Stability AI Community License, which says it "is intended to allow research, non-commercial, and limited commercial uses of the Models free of charge" and preserves free access "for people or organizations generating annual revenue of less than US $1,000,000 (or local currency equivalent)". Commercial users are told to register with Stability, and anyone distributing the models or a derivative of them has to carry an attribution notice and display "Powered by Stability AI".

Both answers are true on 26 August 2026. Free to run yourself, under a licence with a revenue ceiling. Not free on the hosted app, apart from a plan whose terms the vendor has not published.

Stable Audio 3 open weights: what you can download, and what stays behind the API

The models Stability released on 20 May 2026 are not the subscription. Three checkpoints sit on Hugging Face: Stable Audio 3 Medium, Small Music and Small SFX. On 26 August 2026 their model cards reported 58,065, 13,291 and 19,199 downloads in the previous month. Those three add to 90,555, which is arithmetic done here rather than a figure printed on any page.

A fourth model does not ship at all. Stable Audio 3 Large is reachable through Stability's API only, which a community member spelled out on the issue tracker two months after the question was first asked:

Stable Audio 3 Large is not open source, which is why you can only use it via API.

GitHub issue #39, reply by irishfan3124, 31 July 2026

The inference code lives in its own repository, Stability-AI/stable-audio-3, which carried 699 stars, 87 forks and 21 open issues when its public API was read on 26 August 2026, with its last push on 4 August 2026. That repository is MIT licensed, and the MIT licence covers the code. It does not cover the weights, which carry the Community License quoted above, and it does not cover the hosted app, which is governed by Stability's Terms of Service. Three documents, three separate things, and quoting one as another gets the legal answer wrong.

Most self-hosters reach these models through ComfyUI, and that route is the roughest part of the record. The dated reports are in the community section below.

Stability also sells API access, and platform.stability.ai is a different surface again from the subscription this page prices. No evidence about its rate limits, latency or documentation is held here, so nothing is claimed about them.

Who owns what you make on Stable Audio, and which contract answers it

The contract is not Stable Audio's. The document linked from the pricing page footer is Stability AI's Terms of Service, effective 31 July 2025, and its own opening sentence says it governs "Brand Studio, Stable Audio, Stable Assistant, Stable Artisan, Stability's Application Programming Interface ("API") and our websites". Every clause below applies to Stable Audio. Not one of them was written for Stable Audio alone, and the pricing page's four tier names appear nowhere in it.

On ownership the wording is unusually strong. The contract assigns rather than licenses: "we assign to you all of our right, title, and interest (if any) in the Outputs. So as between Stability and you, you own the Output (to the extent permitted by applicable law)." The same clause states its own limit, that similar inputs can produce similar results for other people, so the assignment reaches your specific outputs and nobody else's.

Three clauses run the other way, and each is ordinary across this category rather than particular to this vendor. You indemnify Stability, and the fourth trigger listed is "INPUTS, OUTPUTS, OR OTHER DATA PROVIDED OR GENERATED BY YOU", which reaches the audio you make. Total liability to you is capped at the greater of $100 or what you paid in the six months before the claim arose. Users in the United States and Canada are placed in binding individual arbitration with a class-action waiver, with 30 days to opt out by email.

Two smaller clauses are easy to miss. Stability may use inputs and outputs to improve its services, with an opt-out you have to go and find. And an account left inactive for over a year may be terminated, along with the inputs and outputs stored in it.

The wider question of who owns AI-generated music is settled by law and by cases still running, not by any vendor's contract. What is stated above is what this vendor's own document said on 26 August 2026.

The licence table Stable Audio's pricing page used to publish, and the "Pro" tier its FAQ still names

Until at least 29 December 2025 the licensing answer sat on the pricing page itself. Every archived copy read for this page, back to 3 September 2024, carries three named licences and a grid of permitted uses. Personal covered "personal and non-commercial projects". Creator "lets you use your generated audio for commercial projects and music releases as an individual". Enterprise was for "a medium to large organization". The grid's rows were the questions buyers actually ask: commercial music releases, social media and podcasts, film, TV and advertisement, apps and games, and commercial products above and below 100,000 monthly active users.

None of that is on the live page. What survived the restructure is the FAQ, and one of its answers names a tier that is not for sale. Asked what happens to your audio licence when you cancel, the page answers that audio generated "on Pro and higher tiers remains covered under the original license even after cancellation", then points you to the Terms of Service for commercial-use details.

There is no Pro plan. The page sells Solo, Session, Producer and Studio. The word appears nowhere in the company-wide Terms of Service, nowhere on the homepage except as "Pro Tools", the Avid DAW in a list of supported hosts, and in no archived copy read for this page, the earliest dated 3 September 2024. This desk makes no claim about which wording is current or how the mismatch arose. The practical consequence is concrete: if post-cancellation rights matter to your project, that sentence does not tell you whether the plan you are on has them, and the contract answers per account rather than per plan.

Stable Audio refunds, credit expiry and what cancelling actually does

Two vendor surfaces answer the refund question differently, and both are live.

The pricing page FAQ publishes discretion with named criteria: an accidental purchase by a friend or family member, a charge nobody the account holder knows made, or a request "submitted within 48 hours of the subscription charge" where "your usage is below 2% of the allotted monthly generations". Requests are processed manually, the stated reply time is 2 to 3 business days, payments run through Stripe, and money reaches a bank in 5 to 10 business days. There is no refund button: the answer routes you to a contact link and says "you can contact us here", so a request inside that 48-hour window has to be written and sent rather than clicked. Cancelling is a different route again, through the account page and a Stripe email, which the same FAQ sets out step by step.

The Terms of Service says this: "All payments are non-refundable, except where required by law."

Read together, the published criteria are the part a buyer can act on and the contract is what governs if it comes to that. The 48-hour window with usage under 2% is the sentence worth writing down before you subscribe, because it is short and it is measured in generations rather than in days of access.

Credits then carry two different expiry rules under one word, on two different documents. Monthly plan credits do not roll over: the FAQ answers "No, your unused generations don't roll over", and the plan block says the balance resets every month. Purchased service credits, which the contract treats as prepaid rather than allocated, "expire one year after the date of purchase or issuance". The same section makes service credits non-refundable, non-transferable and suspendable. A reader who takes "credits expire in a year" as the whole rule will over-estimate what a monthly allowance is worth.

Cancelling is unconditional on its face. You may cancel at any time from the account page, and an upgrade is charged pro rata inside the current billing month. What happens to your rights afterwards is the sentence with the missing tier in it.

How Stable Audio scores 68.2 out of 100, cell by cell

Because the rows combine as a geometric mean, the lowest one drags hardest, and capability is doing exactly that. How each row is built is set out separately.

Capability reads a blind-listen leaderboard rather than any listening done here. On the Artificial Analysis Music Arena's instrumental board, read 26 August 2026, the entry is "Stable Audio 2.0" at Elo 959 across 4,696 samples, ranked 15th of 18 with a 95% interval of plus or minus 9, on a board running from 864 to 1,186 that day. Two qualifications belong beside that number rather than in a footnote. Stable Audio appears on the instrumental view only, and holds no row on the vocals view of the same board, so no vocal-track measurement exists for it here. And the graded entry is version 2.0, while the vendor's homepage names Stable Audio 3.0 as what its DAW plugin runs.

The row labelled Access terms is not a satisfaction score, and the card says so rather than letting a reader assume otherwise. No consumer record exists for this product on any platform reachable from here, which the next section counts rather than asserts, so the row publishes a different measurement under its own name: what the vendor commits to in writing about getting and keeping access. Four readings, all taken 26 August 2026. Usage limits published as a number on every tier (92). A public status page with month-by-month incident history (92). Availability published as an exclusion list, the export-control clause, rather than as a worldwide grant (74). One published support route for a paying subscriber, the contact form named in the refund answer (70). One qualification rides with it: the status page covers a single component called "Stability.ai Platform & Services" and never names Stable Audio, so it reports the platform's health rather than this product's. A column assembled from two kinds of evidence does not read like for like against a card whose rows all measure their own axis, and this composite contains one such row.

Value at 80.0 reads the $12 entry against what the plan publishes for it, on the same price ladder every card on this site uses.

Commercial terms at 78.5 reads four clause positions in the documents quoted above, and it is a reading of what the paper says on a stated date rather than a rating of the company. The indemnity runs one way, which is the market default. Paid output rights are an assignment to the user, which is the strongest reading available on that scale. Refund posture is discretion with published criteria. The fourth position, whether free-plan output may be used commercially, is genuinely unanswered by both the pricing page and the contract, so it carries no value and sits outside the row's arithmetic.

Why Stable Audio 3 has no blind-vote score yet, and what three surfaces still say

Stable Audio 3 shipped on 20 May 2026. Three public surfaces still describe the product as 2.0: the arena's only Stable Audio row, Wikidata's entry for the product, whose version statement reads 2.0 and was last modified on 29 March 2025, and a third-party review published on 8 June 2026 that calls it 2.0 throughout.

Surfaces agreeing gets scrutinised harder, not less, and this set does not survive the scrutiny as one finding. A fourth was checked and dropped: a tutorial video titled "Stable Audio 2.0 Tutorial", which turned out to have been uploaded on 14 May 2024, two years before version 3 existed. A 2024 tutorial about the 2024 version is accurate, not stale, and counting it would have inflated this. The three that remain have three different explanations between them. Wikidata is simply stale: its version statement was last edited on 29 March 2025, more than a year before the release, so nobody has been back. The arena is not stale at all, because a leaderboard seats what has been entered; a missing 3.0 row means the model has not been submitted to it, not that the board is behind. The review is the sharpest of the three and the one that cannot be explained by timing at all: it was published on 8 June 2026, nineteen days after the release, and still describes the product as 2.0 throughout. So the claim this page makes is narrow. Three public surfaces still say 2.0: one because it predates the release, one because a version was never entered, and one despite being written nineteen days after the fact. What that is evidence of is how thinly this release has been absorbed, not four confirmations about the software. It matters because the capability figure on this page grades a version the vendor no longer leads with.

What this page cannot tell you is how Stable Audio 3 sounds. Nothing here is a listening trial, and the one blind-vote figure that exists for this product grades the version before it. The closest thing to an answer is the next section, and it is a handful of dated opinions from people running the open weights, not a measurement.

What Stable Audio users report, and why there are almost no reviews to read

Start with the count, because the absence is the finding. Four consumer platforms were opened in a browser on 26 August 2026. G2's profile for Stable Audio, by Stability AI, shows 0/5 and "(0)" reviews. Product Hunt carries the product with 6 followers, 4 points and an empty Reviews tab. Trustpilot has no profile for stableaudio.com at all, returning its own not-found page. Capterra does not list it.

Trustpilot does hold a profile for stability.ai at 1.8 from 15 reviews, and that is not this product's record. Across those 15 reviews the phrase Stable Audio occurs zero times and the word music occurs zero times, while credit occurs 19 times and image 8. Pooling them into this card would import another product's ratings, so they are left out and no rating is published here.

The open-weight side of the same release is busy. The launch discussion on Hacker News drew 99 points on 20 May 2026. The issue tracker carried 21 open issues when it was read. And 90,555 downloads in a month is not a quiet product. What those people say is dated and specific, and it divides along genre:

It sounds too much like general midi. It is better for electronica than for any other genre.

Hacker News launch thread, comment by rafadc, 20 May 2026

For electronic music creation, this medium one is amazing!

Hugging Face discussion #4 on stable-audio-3-medium, opening post by owao, 1 June 2026, testing a 145 BPM acid-trance prompt

Speed drew no complaint in the launch-week record read here. The same Hacker News commenter wrote, "Less than 2 seconds for 120 seconds of audio in my 3090."

Bugs reported on the tracker get answered fast. A generation-length fault that capped every output at exactly two minutes was reported on 29 May 2026, root-caused by another user on 5 June and confirmed fixed by the maintainer the same day. A broken Discord invite reported at 13:11 UTC on 22 June 2026 was closed that afternoon.

The ComfyUI path is the exception, and it is the path most self-hosters use. On 13 June 2026 a user reported that the integration was using a different sampler internally and producing noise the official demo did not have from the same prompt:

comfyui used lcm, which results have many electric noises,not high quality

GitHub issue #48, opening post by zwukong, 13 June 2026

No maintainer replied. Seven weeks later a second and unrelated user reported that the workflow would not run at all, and that comment was still the last one on the issue when it was read on 26 August 2026:

I cannot get the ComfyUi workflow to run.

Same issue, reply by Magenta-6, 1 August 2026

The ComfyUI project's own launch post, published 21 May 2026, is titled "Stable Audio 3.0 Day-0 Support in ComfyUI". Both things are on the record, one day after the release and seven weeks after it.

Day one also produced a defect users solved for each other. Two people on the showcase thread reported the same symptom on 21 May 2026, and one of them posted the fix himself in a comment the platform marks as edited: "I gave it a go and all I get is a constant buzzing noise." from DrStalker, then "Ok i just removed sage attention from the launcher and it worked" from 3deal. The workaround reached other people through a comment thread rather than through anyone's documentation.

One feature named in the release notes has not landed for self-hosters. A user went looking for audio inpainting on 30 May 2026 and found no workflow or tutorial. Six weeks later, on a different subreddit, the same user asked again:

Plus+1 for an update on Stable Audio. For me the attraction was the feature they included in the initial release notes regarding "Audio In-painting". But nothing was ever said again, and it was never documented anywhere.

r/comfyui, "Any update on LoRAs for Stable Audio 3.0?", comment by Tuckerdude615, 10 July 2026

Two limits on all of the above. Reddit refused every automated route available to this desk, so five threads were read in a logged-in browser instead, and the 80-comment release announcement was read at post level only, which leaves its discussion unmined. And every opinion in this section is about the open weights. The hosted app at $12 a month has no rated record anywhere reachable from here, which is itself the most useful thing a prospective subscriber can know about it.

Which Stable Audio site is the official one

Stability AI's product is at stableaudio.com. Other domains use the words stable audio in their name, and one of them, stableaudio.net, came up alongside the vendor's own page when this desk searched for Stable Audio pricing in a browser on 26 August 2026. No figure above is read from that site.

The check before you enter a card anywhere takes seconds. The vendor's own pricing page names Stability AI in its footer and links its Terms of Service to stability.ai/terms-of-service. Wikidata's entry for Stable Audio gives stableaudio.com as the official website. The homepage also offers a link labelled "Use Legacy Stable Audio", which on 26 August 2026 returned to the site root, so the legacy surface is either retired behind that redirect or behind a login this desk does not hold.

Stable Audio alternatives that carry a card on this site

This site does not stage head-to-head contests, and the music tools scored here are ordered by their composite at build time rather than by anyone's preference. Three others carry cards, and one fact each is what this page's evidence supports:

• Suno's headline output includes vocals, and no vocal-track measurement exists in this page's evidence at all.
• AIVA is positioned around instrumental output, the same ground the product priced above works on.
• Treblo carries its own card in this category, built from its own dated sources.

If licensing rather than sound is what decides it for you, the comparison that matters is not between vendors. It is between the hosted plan and the open weights of this same product, which answer the commercial-use question differently and cost differently.

Who should pay $12 a month for Stable Audio, and who should not

Pay for the hosted app if you want Stable Audio 3.0 inside a DAW without building anything, if an assignment clause reading "you own the Output" is what you need on paper, and if $12 for 660 credits is small enough that a withdrawn licence table is not a blocker.

Do not pay for it if you need vocals, because the product holds no row on the vocals board and nothing here measures them. Do not pay for it if you are choosing on sound quality alone, because the one blind-vote figure that exists grades the previous version and the loudest dated opinions about the current one come from people running it locally rather than from subscribers. Do not pay for it if your annual revenue is under US $1,000,000 and a local GPU is realistic for you, because the same company gives you three checkpoints for nothing under a licence that permits commercial use at that scale.

And if post-cancellation licensing is the reason you are reading this, get the answer in writing from Stability before you subscribe. The vendor's own FAQ answers that question with the name of a tier the page does not sell, and that is a five-minute email now rather than an argument later.

Every figure above carries the date it was read and names the source it was read from. More about how this desk works, or find Minel Gunesoglu on LinkedIn.