"Is Sarvam AI free?" is one of the most common questions people search about India's best-known AI startup. The honest answer is: it depends which part of Sarvam you mean. Sarvam sells two quite different things — a chat app for people, and paid APIs for developers and businesses — and they're priced differently.
Everything below is as checked on Sarvam's own website and app on 17 October 2026. Sarvam changes its prices often (its flagship model's token price roughly halved between September and October), so treat the numbers as a snapshot and confirm on sarvam.ai before you budget.
The short answer
Indus, Sarvam's chat app, is free to use. It launched on 20 February 2026 as a free beta limited to India, and when we signed in on 17 October 2026 it showed no paid plan, upgrade button or billing page.
Sarvam's APIs — speech-to-text, text-to-speech, translation, its language models and voice agents — are paid. New accounts get free credits to try them, and the basic pay-as-you-go plan has no monthly fee, so you can test on your own audio or text without paying anything up front. Sarvam's pricing page doesn't say how much the sign-up credit is worth.
Indus: Sarvam's free chat app
Indus is Sarvam's answer to ChatGPT and Gemini, available on the web at indus.sarvam.ai and on Android and iOS. At launch it ran on Sarvam's 105-billion-parameter model and took text or voice input. Since then Sarvam has widened it into a workspace: the web app now has sections for Cowork (AI "teammates" that plan tasks, search the web and work inside connected apps such as Google Drive and Slack), voice agents, a content studio, document agents and code.
Being free doesn't mean unlimited. Sarvam hasn't published usage limits for Indus, and at launch its co-founder said it was rolling out on limited compute, so new users could hit a waitlist. If you rely on it for work, expect terms to change once Sarvam introduces paid plans.
Where Indus is most worth trying is speaking or typing in an Indian language — Tamil, Marathi, Bengali or code-mixed Hinglish — which is what Sarvam's models are built for. For English-first writing, coding or research, ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are still more capable; our Sarvam AI vs ChatGPT comparison covers that in detail.
Sarvam API pricing (October 2026)
Sarvam's APIs run on prepaid credits in rupees. You buy credits once and every API draws from the same balance. On the pay-as-you-go plan (₹0 a month), the main rates are:
Speech-to-text: ₹0.49 per minute of audio, real-time or batch — about ₹29 an hour. With speaker diarisation (who said what) it's ₹0.59 a minute.
Text-to-speech: ₹3 per 1,000 characters for Bulbul V3, or ₹2 per 1,000 characters for the newer Bulbul V4 Flash, built for real-time voice agents. Voice cloning is ₹2 per 1,000 characters.
Translation and transliteration: ₹2 per 1,000 characters; document translation ₹5 per 1,000 characters.
Language models, per million tokens (input / output): Sarvam 105B at ₹15 / ₹60. Sarvam also hosts third-party models — Gemma 4 at ₹35 / ₹90, GLM 5.3 Flash at ₹13.50 / ₹45 and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash at ₹25 / ₹105 — all billed in rupees.
Voice agents are priced separately, with models included; Sarvam advertises them from ₹3 a minute.
Monthly plans: Pro, Growth and Business
If you use a lot, Sarvam sells monthly credit plans that cut the unit rates: Pro at ₹2,000 a month, Growth at ₹10,000 and Business at ₹50,000. On Pro, for example, speech-to-text drops to ₹0.45 a minute and Bulbul V3 to ₹2.85 per 1,000 characters; on Growth and Business it's ₹0.41 and ₹2.70. Enterprise plans with custom pricing, higher rate limits and SLAs are available on request.
The discounts are modest, so most small teams are fine on pay as you go until monthly spend is close to the plan price.
What it costs in practice
To give a feel for the numbers at pay-as-you-go rates: transcribing 100 hours of customer calls costs about ₹2,940 (₹3,540 with diarisation). Converting a 5,000-word script — roughly 30,000 characters — into Bulbul V3 speech costs about ₹90. Translating a 2,000-word page, around 12,000 characters, costs about ₹24 per language.
Two things to add on top. GST: Sarvam is an Indian company that issues an invoice after every payment, so a GST-registered business can claim the tax as input credit in the normal way — unlike most foreign AI tools, which push you into reverse charge. And usage volume: estimate from a week of real traffic rather than a guess, because per-minute pricing scales with use.
Free alternatives worth knowing
If what you want is a free AI assistant rather than Sarvam specifically: ChatGPT and Gemini both have free tiers that handle major Indian languages in text, and Jio users on an unlimited 5G plan of ₹349 or more can claim 18 months of Google AI Pro free from the MyJio app. Krutrim, Ola's assistant, is also free. Our list of free AI tools for Indian languages compares the options.
If you're building a product and need Indian-language speech, Sarvam's sign-up credits are the cheapest way to test it properly. Run a few minutes of your own real recordings — accents, background noise, code-mixing — before committing, and compare against at least one alternative.