Soul Machines in 2026: Pricing, the AppDirect Deal and How It Compares

Soul Machines is a New Zealand company founded in 2016 by Greg Cross and Mark Sagar, who supervised special effects at Weta Digital before it. It makes Digital People: 3D characters that talk, gesture and react, rendered on Soul Machines' servers and streamed to the browser over WebRTC. It calls the technology behind their behavior Experiential AI. As of 30 October 2026 its site sells four things. Studio is the self-serve builder, with templates, an Avatar Design Tool, gestures, behavior and voice settings. Digital Workforce is the enterprise version, with Digital Worker templates for customer service, HR and healthcare. Workforce Connect puts those workers into Salesforce, ServiceNow and Zapier workflows. AI Assistants is an app for talking to them. Developers get a JavaScript Web SDK and a Skills API for plugging in their own conversation logic. The homepage's newest line: "Run your OpenAI Agent as a live, embodied interface."

Soul Machines publishes Studio prices; the enterprise products are mostly quotes. As of 30 October 2026, Studio Free costs nothing but includes no conversation minutes. Basic is $12.99 a month for 40 minutes and one assistant, Plus $99 for 350 minutes and three, and Pro $2,700 for 10,000 minutes and six. Paying yearly saves 10%: $140, $1,069 or $29,160 a year. That works out to $0.24 a minute (Pro, yearly) to $0.32 (Basic, monthly). Custom LLM integration and custom embedding start on Plus; email support starts on Pro. Premium Integrations for ServiceNow and Zapier add $5,000 a year, on annual Pro or Enterprise only. Workforce Connect is $40,000 a year for six Digital Workers and 120,000 minutes, or $0.33 a minute, and Digital Workforce is "contact us for pricing". Paid plans start with a 7-day free trial, though the FAQ on the same page says 14 days. No price for extra minutes is published: the FAQ's answer to running out is to upgrade.

Plus stops at 350 minutes and no overage is published, so the next published step is Pro. At 1,000 minutes a month that means $2,700, or $2,430 a month paid yearly, with 9,000 minutes left unused. The same 1,000 minutes cost $20 on Talking Avatar Realistic Avatars, or $60 on Talking Avatar Voice Agents, which include the AI model, speech recognition and voice. At 10,000 minutes Pro fits exactly: $2,700 a month against $200 on Realistic Avatars and $600 on Voice Agents. The Realistic Avatars figure is the face for the agent you already run; Soul Machines' includes speech recognition and the voice. Soul Machines' sales team may quote something between Plus and Pro, but no such price is published. On our side, enterprise and high-volume contracts go as low as $0.005 a minute.

Soul Machines was placed in receivership on 5 February 2026, with Leon Bowker and Luke Norman of KPMG appointed receivers. On 28 September 2026 AppDirect, which runs a technology commerce platform, announced it had acquired Soul Machines; terms weren't disclosed. The announcements say Soul Machines will operate as a standalone business inside AppDirect, and that its avatars will "soon" be available in apps built on Devs.ai, AppDirect's platform for building AI apps and agents. That's all that has been announced. As of 30 October 2026, soulmachines.com, the Studio pricing page and the developer docs still load with the prices above, and neither company has said whether Studio plans, prices or the Web SDK will change. The Web SDK's latest release on npm is 15.8.1, from August 2024. If you're about to sign, ask Soul Machines in writing what your contract covers; our Soul Machines alternatives guide prices the fallbacks.

The two products split the call in different places. With Soul Machines, the user's microphone (and, if allowed, camera) streams to a Digital Person hosted by Soul Machines. Its speech recognition turns the words into text, your logic answers in text, through Studio's conversational AI or LLM integration or a web service built on the Skills API, and Soul Machines voices and animates the reply. The Web SDK's direct speak command, startSpeaking, is blocked in production, and we found nothing in the docs for sending a Digital Person your own agent's audio. With Talking Avatar Realistic Avatars, your voice agent makes the audio, from OpenAI Realtime, LiveKit Agents, Pipecat or any TTS, and we render a face that speaks it, over WebRTC to your page or into your LiveKit room. You keep your choice of model, voice and turn-taking, and can change any of them without touching the avatar. Soul Machines' extra is perception: its Digital People read the user's camera.

For a no-code assistant, compare Studio with Talking Avatar Voice Agents, not with the API. Studio gives you templates, the Avatar Design Tool to shape a 3D character, gestures and behavior settings, voice and language settings, a reporting dashboard and video downloads. Voice Agents give you a prompt, a first message, a realistic avatar, one of 160 voices in 15 languages and up to 20 tools that call your URLs, shared as a link or embedded with one script tag. The price gap is wide. Studio Basic's $12.99 buys 40 minutes; on Voice Agents it buys 216. Plus's $99 buys 350 minutes there and 1,650 here. Calls run up to 60 minutes, and our avatars are real presenters rather than designed characters: a custom avatar of a real person costs $199, one time, with their consent.

Soul Machines keeps the conversation and the face in one place, so switching means moving the conversation first. If your logic already lives in a Skill or an outside LLM, most of it carries over.

1. Export what you can from Studio (conversation content, knowledge sources, transcripts) and list each page or app that runs a Digital Person.
2. Move the conversation to your own stack: your Skill's logic or Studio prompt becomes the prompt and tools of an OpenAI Realtime, LiveKit Agents or Pipecat agent, or of a Voice Agents agent if you want it hosted.
3. Pick speech recognition and a voice: Soul Machines supplied both, so now your realtime model or TTS does (Voice Agents include both).
4. Create a Talking Avatar Realistic Avatars account ($1 of free credits), create an API key and pick a ready-made avatar, or order a custom one for $199, one time, with the presenter's consent.
5. Replace the Web SDK's Scene and video element with our LiveAvatarView player, and send your agent's audio to the session over WebRTC or into your LiveKit room.
6. Rebuild any content cards as ordinary page elements next to the video.
7. Run both on a slice of traffic and compare the cost per conversation before your Studio plan renews.