Pika Labs Launches Pika Audio to Undercut Rivals

Pika Labs has expanded its generative media ecosystem with the release of Pika Audio, a family of four foundation models designed to handle diverse audio generation tasks. Available exclusively through the Pika API Club, these developer-first models are accessed via a single API key with a unified request format. The suite includes Pika Soundtrack, Pika SFX, Pika Speech, and Pika Music, positioning the company to offer a complete generative media stack alongside its existing video, image, and large language model tools.

The primary differentiator for Pika Audio is its aggressive pricing structure, which aims to severely undercut established competitors. Pika Speech, a text-to-speech model priced at $0.01 per minute, is marketed as nine times cheaper than ElevenLabs v3. Pika SFX, which generates sound effects from natural language descriptions, costs $0.0002 per second, making it up to 20 times more cost-efficient than alternative solutions. Pika Music, a reference-to-audio model, is priced at $0.015 per minute, representing a tenfold savings over comparable music generation models.

For video creators, Pika Soundtrack offers video-to-audio generation by analyzing clips to produce synchronized audio. Priced at $0.005 per second, or $0.617 per minute, Pika claims this model is twice as cheap as Hunyuan Foley, which it identifies as its only direct competitor. For developers and media practitioners, this release significantly lowers the financial barrier to building automated video-production pipelines. By consolidating voice, music, sound effects, and video synchronization under a single, highly affordable API, Pika enables developers to build rich multimedia applications without managing multiple expensive subscriptions.