Discontinued listing · Updated 2026-09-03
PlayHT is discontinued — do not buy
PlayHT, later branded PlayAI, no longer exists as a product. Meta confirmed it had acquired the team on 13 July 2025, the Voice API and text-to-speech service were deprecated within weeks, and as of 3 September 2026 the play.ht domain returns no DNS record at all. This page is kept as a correction, because the tool is still recommended widely in older articles and courses.
The timeline
| Date | Event | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| 13 July 2025 | Meta confirms acquisition of the PlayAI team, described in an internal memo as the "entire PlayAI team" joining, to work on AI Characters, Meta AI, wearables and audio content creation. | TechCrunch; Meta spokesperson confirmed to Bloomberg. |
| 30 July 2025 | AudioStack tells its customers that "PlayHT has officially deprecated support for its Voice API and TTS services", noting that as part of the acquisition the voices "no longer work". | AudioStack deprecation changelog. |
| 31 December 2025 | Reported full sunset of studio, API and Voice Agents, with user data deleted and no export tooling. | Consistent across migration write-ups, but not first-party verified — the vendor site is gone. |
| 3 September 2026 | play.ht returns no DNS record. | CartSignal resolution check on the date shown. |
What PlayHT was used for, and what replaces it
PlayHT was usually chosen for one of two jobs. Match yours to pick a replacement rather than defaulting to the best-known name.
- Cheap TTS or a voice API — this was the most common reason to pick PlayHT over ElevenLabs. Cartesia occupies that slot now: Free at 20K credits a month, Pro at $5 a month for 100K credits or roughly 133 minutes of speech, Startup at $49 for about 1,667 minutes, per its official pricing page in September 2026.
- Voice realism and cloning — ElevenLabs, at $6 a month for Starter and $22 for Creator as officially listed in September 2026. Watch the credit burn rate rather than the sticker price: text to speech is 1 credit per character, but dubbing runs 2,000 to 10,000 credits a minute.
- A browser voiceover studio with team seats — Murf AI, from $19 a month on annual billing, with separate meters for Studio, API and Dub.
- Governed cloning with watermarking and detection — Resemble AI.
The migration page works the cost-per-minute arithmetic across these, and the voice alternatives shortlist covers the wider set.
If you still have a PlayHT dependency
- Any code calling the PlayHT API is dead, not degraded — it has been non-functional since 2025.
- Voice clones are not portable files. Re-consent and re-clone with the new vendor under its policy.
- Rebuild needed audio from source scripts; assume nothing is recoverable from the old account.
- If you publish synthetic voice into the EU, check Article 50 labelling duties before you ship the replacement.
Source links
- TechCrunch — Meta acquires voice startup Play AI
- AudioStack — PlayHT deprecation notice
- Former official domain: play.ht — no longer resolving, link removed