Hume AI

By Minel Gunesoglu, founder. No audio was generated for this page and no voice was cloned. I read Hume's pricing page in a browser, read its Terms of Use end to end, pulled its public status page, took the Speech Arena leaderboard row that carries its model, and set the customer record from the review platforms and from four community threads against all of it. Every figure below is dated, and every one traces to a saved copy of the page it was read from. What this page cannot tell you is how Hume sounds to you.

Most pricing questions about a developer API get answered by reading the pricing page. This one does not, and the reason is a single clause sitting in a different document.

Hume publishes seven tiers. The cheapest paid one is $3 a month. If you are building something you intend to sell, that $3 plan is not available to you. Not because of a feature limit, but because section 4 of the Terms of Use says so. The first plan you can legally sell work from costs $14 a month, and $14 is the figure the pricing page prints with a line struck through it.

That is the whole page in three sentences. The rest is the evidence, the score built from it, and what the people who have paid say afterwards.

Hume AI Pricing: What Each Plan Costs, and Which Plans the Terms Let You Sell

Every figure in this section was read on the rendered pricing page on 21–22 August 2026. That matters more than usual here: the served HTML of hume.ai/pricing is about 20 KB and does not contain the plan prices at all. They are written into the page by script after it loads. A tool that fetches the page without running that script records a pricing table with the prices missing, and raises no error while doing it.

There is one billing view. No monthly/annual toggle exists on the page and the word "annual" appears nowhere in its rendered text, which makes this simpler than most pricing pages this desk reads. There is no second price hiding behind a switch.

The commercial-licence column above needs its source stated, because it is the column the rest of this page turns on. Hume's plan cards say nothing about commercial use. Below them sits a comparison table with a Commercial license row, and that row agrees with the contract exactly: a grey cross on Free and Starter, a green tick from Creator up. So there is no contradiction between what Hume advertises and what Hume signs, and none is claimed here.

What is worth knowing is that neither statement can be read as text. The ticks and crosses are icons, and an icon has no words in it: every one of those cells comes back empty from the page's own text content. The other statement lives in a separate legal document. A buyer who reads the plan cards, or any tool that reads the page as text, gets the prices and misses the restriction entirely.

Is Hume AI Free? The Free and Starter Plans Are Non-Commercial by Contract

Hume does publish a $0 tier, and it is a real one: 10,000 characters a month, roughly ten minutes of speech, one concurrent connection, five minutes of speech-to-speech.

What it does not carry is permission to sell anything you make with it. Section 4 of the Terms of Use, headed Commercial Use, reads in full:

Free Users and Starter Plan Limited to non-commercial use only. Creator Plan and Above May use the Platform for commercial purposes.

Read the first line twice, because it names two tiers and one of them is paid. The $3 Starter plan, which carries 30,000 characters, forty speech-to-speech minutes and five concurrent connections, sits on the non-commercial side of that sentence alongside the free plan.

This is unusually explicit. Most agreements this desk reads either say nothing about tiers or bury the distinction in a definitions section; Hume puts it under its own numbered heading with the plan names spelled out. The clarity is worth crediting, and it is also what makes the pricing page's headline number misleading for a commercial reader: $3 is the cheapest plan, and it is not the cheapest plan you can use.

Hume AI's $14 Creator Plan and the Price the Page Renders With a Line Through It

The Creator card is where a commercial buyer actually starts, and it is the strangest object on the page.

It carries a ribbon reading 1ST MONTH 50% OFF. Below the ribbon it prints two prices: $7 / month and $14 / month. The struck-through one, the number rendered inside <span class="text-sm line-through">$14</span>, is $14.

So the visual grammar and the ribbon point in opposite directions. A line through a price is the web's near-universal signal for this price is no longer in effect. The ribbon says the discount applies to the first month. Put together, the number wearing the strikethrough is the number you pay from month two onward, indefinitely.

This page makes no claim about why the card is built that way, and none is needed. What matters for a buyer is the arithmetic: the recurring commercial entry cost is $14 a month, the $7 is a single month, and this card's value dimension is scored on $14. That is the same treatment Fish Audio's anniversary promotion got. A first-month price is a first month, not a price.

Hume AI API Pricing: What a Character Costs Past the Included Allowance

The included allowance is the part most people read. The overage rate is the part that decides the bill.

Hume's per-character overage falls as the plan gets bigger, and the spread is wide. On Creator it is $0.15 per 1,000 characters, which works out at $150 per million. On Pro it is $0.12 per 1,000, or $120 per million. On Scale, $100 per million. On Business, $50 per million. The cheapest commercial plan is therefore the most expensive place to exceed it, by a factor of three against the largest published tier.

(Those per-million figures are our own arithmetic on the vendor's per-1,000 rates. Hume prints the $0.15, $0.12, $0.10 and $0.05; it does not print the products.)

Rate limits move with price too, from 15 requests per minute on the free and $3 tiers to 225 on Business, and concurrent connections from 1 to 30. For anyone sizing a real workload, the RPM ceiling on the cheap tiers is likely to bind before the character allowance does.

Hume AI Commercial Use and Licence: What the Terms of Use Commit You To

The commercial-terms dimension on this card reads four clause positions off Hume's own agreement, retrieved 22 August 2026. All four are answered, which is less common than it sounds, because most agreements this desk reads leave at least one silent.

Who Indemnifies Whom in Hume AI's Terms, and the $100 Liability Cap

Section 14 runs one way:

Users defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Hume and affiliates from claims arising from user access, applications, breaches, or infringement of intellectual property rights.

No indemnity running in the other direction appears anywhere in the document. That is the ordinary shape of this market, since 19 of the 25 agreements read across this site say the same thing, and it scores where "ordinary" scores rather than as a failing. Note it anyway if you are building a product for clients on top of Hume: if a third party brings an IP claim, the contract puts you in front of it, not the vendor.

Section 16 sets the ceiling on what you could recover from Hume in return:

Aggregate liability is limited to $100 USD.

Gross negligence, death, bodily injury, fraud and willful misconduct are carved out of that cap. Everything else is inside it. A hundred dollars is a low number for a dependency you would build a product on, and it is stated plainly rather than hidden.

On what you keep, section 5 says users "retain rights to their input and output, except as specified in these terms," and section 4 permits commercial use from Creator up. Rights are retained rather than assigned, which is a licence position, not an ownership grant. Running the other way, and worth reading before you send anything sensitive through the API:

Users grant Hume a perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, sublicensable license to use input for platform improvement and product development.

That licence is over your input, not your output. Whatever text or audio you send is covered by it.

Hume AI Refunds and Cancellation: "All Sales Are Final"

Two sentences settle this one. Section 12:

Charges occur on a transaction basis; all obligations are non-cancelable and non-refundable except as specified.

And section 13:

All sales are final; refunds offered only at Hume's discretion.

Subscriptions renew automatically, and usage above the plan volume bills as overage. Discretion is mentioned but no criteria for exercising it are published, which is why this scores as non-refundable rather than as a published case-by-case policy. A discretion with no stated criteria is not something a buyer can plan against.

Every Row on the Hume AI Card Answers Its Own Question: Reading the 69.7

The composite is the geometric mean over those four, and it lands at 69.7, in the average band. Nothing on this card is a substitute axis. Every row answers the question its own heading asks, and because some cards elsewhere on this site carry a renamed criterion instead, that is worth stating beside the numbers rather than leaving a reader to assume it.

Two of those cells rest on evidence far thinner than the other two, and the card says so rather than burying it. Capability sits on 3,181 blind comparisons; usability sits on twelve reviews. Those are not the same kind of number and should not be read as if they were.

Hume AI Octave 2 on the Speech Arena: Elo 1,057, and the Price in the Same Row

The capability figure comes from the Artificial Analysis Speech Arena, Provider Voices view, read 22 August 2026. Hume's current model, Octave 2, sits at Elo 1,057 with a confidence interval of ±12, on 3,181 samples, in a field of 100 ranked rows, at rank 58 inside a tie band running from 50 to 64.

The view is part of the figure. The board publishes two, and an Elo without its view is ambiguous. So is the entry name: a second Hume row sits lower on the same board, Octave TTS at Elo 1,029 on 4,982 samples, released February 2025. That is the previous generation. Reading it instead would have cost 28 Elo points and fourteen places.

A blind-preference Elo measures which of two prompt-matched clips listeners picked. It is not a verdict on quality and it is not a test this desk ran.

The board also publishes an API price in the same row as the Elo, and its own two columns produce a comparison worth putting in front of a buyer. Octave 2's row reads $87.5 per million characters. Two other rows sit on the identical Elo of 1,057: Rime's Coda at $50.0 per million, and Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash TTS (December 2025) at $9.2 per million. Same blind-vote score, three prices, and the widest gap between them is roughly nine-fold.

That is the leaderboard's arithmetic on its own columns, not ours, and no cell on this card reads it. It is context for the reader, not an input. It is also volatile in a way worth stating, and the board counts itself so nobody has to: the copy saved on 12 August 2026 says "15 open weights models out of 93 total" and the copy saved on 22 August says 100. Seven entries joined in ten days, and the top of the board changed hands over the same stretch, from SpeechifyAI's Simba 3.2 at Elo 1,231 to Cartesia's Sonic 3.6 at 1,285. A rank is a position in a field that is still filling, so any sentence built on one is stale in both directions at once, which is why the saved copy behind these figures carries an expiry date.

Where Hume AI's Usability Figure Comes From, and Why 4.9 Publishes as 78.0

Product Hunt shows Hume AI at 4.9 across 12 reviews. The published cell reads 78.0, and the distance between those two numbers is the point.

Twelve is barely above the minimum sample this engine will score at all. A rating that small is pulled hard toward a neutral anchor before it is published. The shrink weight here is 0.29, meaning the final figure sits closer to the neutral prior than to the 4.9. That is the correct treatment of a twelve-person sample, and it should be read as we do not know much yet, not as a softened rating.

The composition is on the page and belongs on ours: Product Hunt splits its own twelve into 8 founder reviews and 4 others. The eight are written by people who built products on Hume's API and say so in the review text: "used Hume AI to build Rocket Journal", "used Hume AI to build Jammy Chat". Product Hunt counts all twelve in the 4.9 it publishes, and this desk reports the platform's own figure rather than re-weighing it. Every one of the twelve is roughly a year old.

Hume AI Reviews: What the Customer Record Actually Says

Two platforms carry a usable record here and they disagree sharply. Before either number means anything, though, the name has to be settled, and on this product that is not a formality.

The Three Hume AI Name Collisions That Corrupt the Review Numbers

Three separate profiles carrying the word "Hume" would have handed this card another company's numbers.

Trustpilot. The profile at trustpilot.com/review/www.hume.ai shows 3.0 across 4 reviews. One of the four is about a bathroom scale: "The Hume band is terrible, the scale is barely functional… I replaced it with Garmin products." That is Hume Health, a different company selling body-composition hardware. Trustpilot's own sidebar lists Hume Health at 3.6 across 6,000 reviews, HumeBand at 1.4 across 431, and Hume Health Body Pod at 1.7 across 183, right beside this profile. The published 3.0 is computed across at least one review of another company's product.

Product Hunt. The obvious URL, producthunt.com/products/hume, is a Web3 music company: "pioneering music in the metaverse", launched 2022, zero reviews. The right product lives at /products/hume-2.

G2. The page renders a visible "4.3/5" that belongs to Clarifai, in the Top-Rated Alternatives box. G2's own count for Hume AI is 2.

Each of those three is the first result a reasonable person would take, and each would have shipped a wrong number that no later check could catch, because nothing downstream compares a rating against the identity of the thing it rated.

Hume AI Reviews on Reddit and Trustpilot: Four Sources, Ten Months, One Word

The Trustpilot rating is unusable at four reviews, one of them about hardware and well below the threshold this engine scores at. What the reviews say is a different matter, and one pattern in them is specific enough to check against your own use case.

On 14 December 2025, a reviewer in Great Britain wrote:

The voices are actually excellent, BUT they have three main problems

1. It hallucinates and jumps words mid-sentence.
2. It hallucinates and sometimes says words that are not there and mixes them with words that are there.

On 7 August 2026, a reviewer in the United States, unconnected to the first, wrote:

The system is buggy, as it skips over words, hallucinates, doesn't produce anything or just sit there while I hit generate over and over again.

Eight months apart, two people describing the same failure in nearly the same words. Two Trustpilot reviews are two data points rather than a measurement, and on their own they would not be worth this much space. What makes them worth reading is that two further sources, on a different platform and about a different Hume product, say the same thing.

On 28 October 2025, a developer answering a question about Hume's Expression Measurement API on r/LanguageTechnology reported that "the results are quite inconsistent", and described moving Hume behind keyword detection as a fallback rather than a primary input. That is emotion analysis, not speech, and it is a different product from Octave; it is here because the word is the same one.

And on 12 June 2026 the most detailed public assessment of this market that could be found, a practitioner's comparison of local and cloud engines running to some 54,000 characters on r/LocalTextToSpeech, scores Hume Octave 8-9 out of 10 on voice quality and 8-9 on expressive control, names it under "Best cloud emotional control direction", and then writes that it is "not consistently top quality in expressive quality for all" voices. Its recommendation is conditional: "If I had to stay in cloud and emotion mattered, I would test Hume."

Put those four side by side and the complaint is never that the output is bad. It is that you cannot predict which output you will get. The ceiling those sources describe is high, and the floor is not, and a single average cannot carry both. Note also which way the dates run: the twelve Product Hunt reviews behind the 4.9 are all roughly a year old, and the two most recent reports on any platform are the two negative ones.

One line from that same practitioner list cuts against this page's own price framing, so it belongs here rather than nowhere: its summary names ElevenLabs, not Hume, as the "Highest price at serious usage". A per-character rate off a leaderboard row and a bill at production volume are different quantities, and this page has only the first.

Two things are worth knowing about how thin the community record is underneath all of this. There is no Hume AI subreddit, so every mention above sits inside somebody else's thread. And in a thread on r/TextToSpeech from 29 June 2026 asking specifically which production APIs give inline emotional tag control, which is the exact job Octave is marketed on, Hume is named once across sixteen comments, in a comment scored -4 that also links a product its author is recommending. An absence in one thread measures the thread rather than the product. It is mentioned because the thread's subject and the product's marketing are the same subject.

The same August reviewer also wrote that "at first support was great, now they don't respond at all." Below Enterprise, every paid tier on Hume's pricing page names exactly one support channel: Discord. Enterprise gets Slack.

On the infrastructure itself, Hume publishes a status page, and it is more forthcoming than most: APIs at 99.54% uptime across a May-to-August 2026 window, websites and payments at 100%. It carries no incident history of any kind. The words incident, outage, degraded and maintenance appear nowhere on it, so it tells you the aggregate and not what happened on any particular day.

Is Hume AI Still Operating in 2026? The Google DeepMind Move, Dated

Anyone choosing a voice API is choosing a dependency, so this belongs on the page rather than in a footnote.

On 22 January 2026, TechCrunch reported that Google DeepMind was bringing on Hume AI's CEO and several of its top engineers as part of a licensing agreement. Wired reported it first. The figure, attributed to Wired: founder and CEO Alan Cowen and about seven other engineers moved to work on Gemini's voice features.

The company continued. Andrew Ettinger, an investor and technology executive who had joined the week before, took over as CEO and told TechCrunch that Google holds a "non-exclusive right to certain technologies, and we'll be infusing that into their processes." He said Hume would release new models in the coming months and was on track for $100 million in revenue that year, a projection given by the company rather than an audited figure. No financial details of the deal were disclosed.

Two dates are worth holding beside each other, with nothing inferred from the pairing. The Speech Arena entry that fills this card's capability row, Octave 2, is dated October 2025. The departures were reported in January 2026. This page draws no line between those facts and none is established by anything in the record above. A leaderboard entry predating a personnel change is a fact about a release calendar, not evidence about anything else.

Hume AI Alternatives: What Else Carries a Scored Card Here

Two other voice tools on this site carry their own scored cards, each measured on the same four dimensions and each with its own dated evidence: ElevenLabs and Fish Audio. The voice generators hub orders them by composite, and that order is computed at build time rather than written by hand, so it moves whenever a rescore moves a number.

Reading across those cards has one trap in it that is specific to this category. All three capability figures come from the same blind-vote board, and that board's field changed by 23 rows in ten days. A rank read from it on one date and a rank read on another are not comparable quantities, however similar they look. That is why every capability figure on this site is printed with the board, the view, the sample count and the day it was read, and why a figure without those is not a figure.

What Hume does that neither sibling claims is emotional expression: its Octave models are marketed on reading and reproducing prosody, and its EVI product on speech-to-speech conversation that responds to tone. No public board measures that separately, so no cell on this card scores it. If that capability is why you are here, the honest position is that this page can tell you what Hume charges for it and what the contract says about it, and cannot tell you whether it works.

The Verdict on Hume AI

Pay for it if you need emotionally-expressive speech specifically, you can start on the $14 Creator plan rather than the $3 one, and your volume stays inside the included allowance, because the overage rate on that tier is the highest Hume publishes.

Look harder before committing if the workload is large. The per-character economics improve steeply with plan size, and the arena's own price column puts Octave 2's rate well above two other entries sitting on the identical Elo.

Walk away if you need a contractual backstop. The indemnity runs one way, aggregate liability is capped at $100, sales are final, and support below Enterprise is a Discord server. Every one of those is stated plainly in Hume's own documents, which is more than many vendors manage. Stated plainly is not the same as favourable.

And if your deciding question is whether the voice will skip words on your text, no figure on this card answers it. Two dated reports say it did for them; twelve older ones say nothing about it. That is a gap in what can be measured from outside, not a finding about the product.

The methodology sets out what this desk measures and what it declines to assert; the about page says who does it.