Sesame Pricing (2026): Free for Now, No Paid Plan Yet

Sesame costs $0 today, but that zero-dollar price buys a preview, not a production tool. Calls are capped at 30 minutes, paid tiers are unannounced, and the current terms license the service for personal use.

Verified against Sesame's live product pages, official public-preview announcement, US App Store listing, and terms on 25 August 2026. Sesame does not publish a dedicated pricing page, so the official announcement and current store listing are the first-party price record.

The verdict is simple: use Sesame while it is free if you want a personal, voice-first thinking companion. Do not replace a paid business assistant, customer workflow, or production voice stack with it. The missing price is also a missing procurement path.

Sesame Pricing at a Glance

Sesame has one public price today: $0. The US App Store lists Sesame as Free, and the vendor's launch post says the full experience is free during the initial rollout.

There are no published Starter, Pro, annual, credit, overage, API, or enterprise prices. What looks like a pricing table is therefore a map of access modes, not a ladder of paid tiers.

That last row matters more than it first appears. A normal free plan lets you pay when a cap interrupts work. Sesame gives you no published upgrade that buys longer calls, shared seats, commercial rights, support, or a hosted API. If the preview boundary becomes a problem, the current answer is to wait or switch.

The Free Preview Is Enough for Personal Voice Use

The free preview is enough when the job is talking through an idea, following a question, searching the web by voice, or saving a takeaway for yourself. Sesame's Mobile Preview includes voice and text, web search, Deep Dives, notes, reminders, and a summary after each call.

You can choose Maya, Miles, Simone, or Charlie. Each is presented as a personal agent with a distinct voice, personality, and point of view. The current Mobile Preview is available on iOS and Android, while the web Research Preview is narrower: voice calls and search only.

The 30-minute limit is a session cap, not a monthly allowance. A signed-in user can end a call and restart immediately. A signed-out web visitor gets 5 minutes per call. Sesame does not publish a monthly minute pool, a credit balance, or an overage meter.

English is the only officially supported language. Sesame also draws a firm capability line: calls, texting, search, deep research, notes, reminders, and post-call summaries are in scope; anything beyond that is not currently promised.

The $0 Price Does Not Make Sesame a Business Tool

The current license, not the sticker price, blocks Sesame from becoming a business software decision. Sesame's Terms of Use grant a personal, non-transferable, revocable license solely for your own use. They do not present the preview as a shared company service or production platform.

For a founder, that means Sesame can sit in a personal exploration bucket at $0. It should not sit in the customer-service, sales, operations, or agent-infrastructure budget. There is no public seat plan, admin layer, commercial license, service commitment, or support tier to evaluate.

The continuity risk is explicit. Sesame says it may change, suspend, restrict, or alter features or access, and its consumer terms do not warrant uninterrupted or error-free service. A free preview can be excellent for learning and still be the wrong dependency for a process that must work every Monday morning.

Data is the other noncash consideration. For logged-in users, the terms allow Sesame to use content and information to develop, train, test, or improve its models unless the user opts out of training in account settings. Incognito Mode can use past memory but does not create new memory, and Sesame says nothing new is saved to its servers in that mode.

The Cost Math: $0 per Voice Hour, With No Upgrade Break-Even

Sesame costs $0 per 30-minute session and $0 per voice hour at the current price. The math stays simple because there is no paid meter.

Take a regular user who starts 20 signed-in calls in a month and uses the full 30 minutes each time. That is 600 minutes, or 10 hours, for $0. Restarting is allowed immediately, so the session boundary creates friction but no overage charge.

There is no internal break-even between Sesame tiers because no paid Sesame tier exists. More use does not trigger a published upgrade. The decision flips when you need a capability, license, or reliability boundary that the preview does not provide.

For a normalized comparison, assume the same 10 hours of monthly use. Google AI Plus at $4.99 a month works out to about $0.50 per hour, while ChatGPT Go at $8 works out to $0.80 per hour. Those figures normalize subscription price, not guaranteed voice quotas. Google and OpenAI publish usage limits rather than promising that every buyer receives exactly 10 voice hours.

Annualized at the monthly sticker price, Google AI Plus costs $59.88 a year and ChatGPT Go costs $96 a year. Sesame costs $0 for as long as the current free preview remains in place. The money you spend on an alternative buys broader assistant capabilities and a paid account path, not merely a different voice.

Sesame vs ChatGPT and Gemini on Price

Sesame wins the sticker-price comparison, but ChatGPT and Gemini can win the workflow comparison. The explicit decision rule is this: choose Sesame for the quality and flow of personal voice conversation; choose a mainstream assistant when the recurring job extends beyond that boundary.

Sesame: Best for Free, Voice-First Personal Exploration

Sesame is the $0 choice for personal voice conversation, web search, Deep Dives, notes, and reminders. Signed-in calls cap at 30 minutes and can restart immediately. Its weakness is not a small quota. It is the lack of a public paid, business, or hosted-API path.

Pick Sesame if the conversation itself is the product. Skip it when a workflow needs shared access, commercial terms, guaranteed continuity, or actions outside its currently stated capability set.

ChatGPT: Best When Voice Is One Part of a Broader Assistant

ChatGPT starts at $0 with limited voice chats. ChatGPT Go costs $8 a month and includes more voice chats, more messages with tools, more uploads, more image creation, and longer memory than Free.

Pay for ChatGPT Go when voice is attached to a wider recurring workflow and the Free limits interrupt it. Skip the paid plan if occasional limited voice is enough. ChatGPT's published pricing page does not quantify the exact voice-minute allowance, so do not turn the $8 sticker into a promised cost per minute.

Gemini: Best Low-Cost Paid Step-Up for Google Users

Gemini Free costs $0 and includes Gemini Live. Google AI Plus costs $4.99 a month and offers twice the overall usage access of Free, alongside more access across Google's AI products.

Choose Gemini Free first if Gemini Live already covers the voice job. Pay $4.99 for Google AI Plus when the broader Google bundle and higher overall usage limits have a recurring use. The 2x statement applies to overall access, not a guaranteed doubling of voice minutes.

If cited cross-web research is the recurring job rather than natural voice conversation, the Perplexity pricing breakdown uses a different decision rule. The right comparison follows the outcome you need, not the personality of the assistant.

Hidden Costs: Preview Risk, Personal Terms, and the API Split

Sesame's hidden cost is the absence of a purchasable upgrade. There is no annual-lock trap, auto-renewal decision, credit expiry, or overage rate today because there is no public paid checkout. There is also no separate student price to chase and no current paid consumer purchase to refund.

That simplicity can be mistaken for maturity. A company cannot pay to remove the preview risk, buy seats, raise limits, or obtain public commercial terms. A heavy personal user cannot pay for longer calls. The normal conversion path from free plan to paid plan simply has not been published.

The app and the model are also different products. Sesame separately publishes CSM-1B, its base speech-generation model. The official repository says CSM-1B requires a CUDA-compatible GPU and is not a general-purpose multimodal language model; a separate language model is needed for text generation.

That repository is not a free hosted Sesame API. Self-hosting shifts the bill from subscription price to compute, engineering, monitoring, and safety work. Sesame publishes no hosted API rate that can be normalized against the consumer preview. A per-minute Sesame API price would describe a product the vendor does not currently sell publicly.

Who Should Choose What

Choose Sesame if you want a personal voice companion, can work within 30-minute sessions, and do not need commercial deployment. At $0, it is the cleanest way to evaluate whether voice presence changes how you think through ideas.

Choose ChatGPT Free or Go if voice needs to live beside broader tool use, uploads, images, memory, and general assistant work. Start at $0. Move to the $8 Go plan only when the free limits repeatedly stop a useful workflow.

Choose Gemini Free or Google AI Plus if Gemini Live and the Google ecosystem are already where the work happens. Start free. The $4.99 plan is the lower paid entry point when higher overall access earns a recurring place in your week.

Choose none of these consumer plans as a substitute for a production voice-agent platform. If software must answer customers, access systems, maintain logs, honor commercial terms, and stay available, evaluate a product sold for that job.

The Monday Move

On Monday, give Sesame one signed-in 30-minute session with a bounded, non-confidential task: talk through a product decision, ask it to search a public fact, and save the conclusion as a note. Then compare the usefulness of that note with the assistant you already pay for.

Keep Sesame if the better conversation changes the quality of your thinking. Stop the adoption test if you need shared seats, customer data, an API action, a guaranteed service level, or commercial rights. The budget move is $0 for personal evaluation and $0 moved out of the production stack until Sesame publishes a business product you can actually procure.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does Sesame AI cost per month?

Sesame AI costs $0 per month during the current public preview. Sesame has not published a paid monthly plan, annual plan, credit pack, or overage rate.

Is Sesame AI free?

Yes. Sesame's official 27 May 2026 launch announcement said the full experience was free during the initial rollout, and the US App Store still lists the app as Free as of 25 August 2026.

Does Sesame charge a monthly fee?

No current monthly fee is published. The Mobile Preview and Research Preview both cost $0, and Sesame does not publish a paid upgrade tier.

Does Sesame offer a student discount?

No separate student discount is published. Students pay the same current price as everyone else: $0 during the preview.

Can I get a refund from Sesame?

There is no current paid consumer checkout to refund, and Sesame does not publish a paid-plan refund policy for the preview. If a paid tier launches, verify its checkout and refund terms before subscribing rather than assuming the preview's rules will carry over.

Did Sesame pricing change in 2026?

Sesame launched its public iOS preview at $0 on 27 May 2026, and the current listing remains Free. The availability expanded to iOS and Android, but Sesame has not announced a paid consumer price.

Does Sesame offer API pricing?

No hosted Sesame API price is publicly listed. CSM-1B is a separate speech-generation model that requires your own CUDA hardware and a separate language model; it is not a metered API tier inside the Sesame app.

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