🧾 AI Music Generator Pricing: What Every Plan Actually Costs

Every serious AI music plan now clusters between $8 and $30 a month, and the subscription price is the least interesting number on the page. The meter that matters moved. From September 3, 2026, Suno counts what you download, and that changes which plan you should buy more than any credit bundle does.

You're not buying songs anymore. You're buying the right to leave with them.

By the numbers#

• Suno Pro: $8/month ($6.40/month billed annually) for 2,500 credits, up to 500 songs, with commercial use on songs created while subscribed (Suno pricing)
• Suno Premier: $24/month ($19.20/month annually) for 10,000 credits, up to 2,000 songs (Suno pricing)
• Suno free: 50 credits a day (about 10 songs), personal use only, and zero downloads starting 9/3/26 (Suno pricing)
• Download caps from 9/3/26: Pro 20/month, Premier 60/month; Studio users keep unlimited downloads (Suno pricing, Variety)
• Credits do not roll over — day to day or month to month (Suno pricing)
• Udio: roughly $10 Standard (~2,400 credits) and ~$30 Pro (~6,000 credits), with downloads currently disabled for most users during the UMG licensing transition — covered in depth in our Udio v3 guide
• ElevenLabs Music API: $0.30 per minute of generated audio, pay-as-you-go, no subscription required (ElevenLabs, detailed in our Music API guide)
• Stable Audio 3 Small/Medium: $0 self-hosted under Stability's Community License while your organization stays under $1M annual revenue (Stability AI)

The subscription is not the price#

Here's the math nobody puts on a pricing page. Suno Pro gives you 2,500 credits, enough to generate around 500 songs a month, and from September 3 it lets you download 20 of them. Premier quadruples the credits and triples the downloads. Divide it out and both plans land on the same number: $0.40 per song you actually keep.

That's not an accident. It's the shape of the business now: generation is cheap to give away, files are the product. Your 480 undownloaded Pro-plan songs aren't a bonus. They're the demo.

So price plans by your shipping rate, not your experimenting rate. If you publish four tracks a month to a channel, Pro's 20 downloads is headroom. If you're producing background music for a YouTube channel at volume, count the tracks you exported last month before you assume you need Premier.

Suno, priced by what you keep#

The free tier's 50 daily credits still make it the right place to learn prompting — that hasn't changed, and our Suno guide covers the craft side. What changed is the exit: after September 3 a free account can generate and listen, and that's all. No downloads. Commercial rights were already paid-only, and they apply to songs created while subscribed, so a track you made on free doesn't retroactively clear when you upgrade. Make the song again on the paid plan. Annoying, cheaper than a dispute.

One more asterisk worth reading twice: credits don't carry over. Skip a month of generating on Premier and the 10,000 credits just evaporate.

Udio: a price on hold#

Udio's ~$10 and ~$30 tiers look like Suno's until you try to leave with a file. Downloads of audio, video and stems have been switched off for most users during the Universal Music Group licensing transition, reopening only in short announced windows. I won't tell you a service that can't export is worth $30 a month, whatever the model quality, and the model quality is genuinely good. Treat Udio as on hold for deliverable work and watch our Suno vs Udio comparison for when that flips.

Paying per minute instead#

ElevenLabs prices music like a utility: $0.30 per minute of generated audio, so a 3-minute song costs about $0.90, and re-rolling a chorus twice barely registers. No subscription needed — pay-as-you-go works standalone. The quieter selling point is legal: ElevenLabs says its music model trained exclusively on licensed data and is cleared for commercial use, a contrast it draws itself against the label litigation still hanging over Suno and Udio (our Music v2 breakdown digs into that claim).

For anyone who ships client work, that sentence is doing more than the price is.

The $0 route with a revenue clause#

Stable Audio 3's Small and Medium models are open-weight: download them, run them on your own GPU, keep every output, pay nothing while your revenue stays under $1M a year; past that line, Stability's Community License requires an enterprise conversation. The catch that matters more for most people: no vocals, in any variant. It's an instrumental engine. If that fits your work (beds, cues, ambient tracks), the local setup guide gets you running, and the per-track price is genuinely zero after hardware.

Which plan, by what you ship#

• Learning, listening, drafting: Suno free. Accept that nothing leaves.
• Publishing up to 20 tracks a month with commercial rights: Suno Pro, $8. The best per-file deal in the category right now.
• Shipping 20–60 tracks or working in Studio: Premier, $24.
• Occasional song inside a scripted pipeline or client project: ElevenLabs API at $0.90 per 3-minute track, with the cleanest licensing story in the group.
• Instrumentals at volume, own hardware, under $1M revenue: Stable Audio 3 locally, $0.
• Udio: wait, unless creation-without-export is genuinely your use case.

Prices were checked on the vendors' own pages on August 16, 2026; Udio's figures are approximate because its plans have moved with the licensing situation. The September 3 switch is three weeks out as I write this — if you're sitting on a free-tier library you care about, the download button is the one part of this page with a deadline.