Pika Labs has quietly been one of the most aggressive movers in the generative media space, and its latest move makes that crystal clear. The company just launched Pika Audio, a family of four foundation models covering every major category of generative sound , and it's pricing them at levels that make every established audio AI provider look expensive.
Four models, one API key
The Pika Audio family is available now exclusively through the Pika API Club, the company's developer platform. All four models share a single API key and a consistent request shape, making it easy to swap between them or chain them together in a pipeline. Here's what each one does:
- Pika Soundtrack , Video-to-video: takes your clip and generates a synchronized soundtrack that matches the visual content. Priced at $0.005/sec.
- Pika SFX , Text-to-audio: describe a sound effect in natural language and get it back as audio. Priced at $0.0002/sec.
- Pika Speech , Text-to-audio: text-to-speech generation. Priced at $0.01/min.
- Pika Music , Reference-to-audio: generates music. Priced at $0.015/min.
The pricing is the headline. Pika is claiming these are the cheapest models in their respective categories on the market , and the numbers they cite are hard to argue with.
The numbers that matter
Pika made specific cost comparisons in its announcement, and they are aggressive:
- Pika Soundtrack at $0.617/minute is claimed to be 2x more cost-efficient than Hunyuan Foley, described as the only model with comparable video-to-audio functionality.
- Pika SFX is claimed to be up to 20x more cost-efficient than alternatives.
- Pika Speech is positioned as