You're building an app that needs music. You've ruled out commercial tracks (copyright), free download sites (also copyright, just delayed), and streaming APIs (playback only). An AI music API is the right answer.
Then you look at pricing pages, and most of them say "Contact sales." If you're an indie developer, that phrase means one thing: this product is not priced for you. So, what can you actually get for under $50 a month, without a sales call?
First, avoid the classic trap: consumer plans are not API plans
Every AI music company has a cheap consumer tier. Mubert's creator plans run $14–39/month, while Beatoven's start at a few dollars, Epidemic Sound's personal plans sit around $10–30/month. However, none of them license music for use inside your product. They license you to put music in your own content. The moment music is generated or distributed through your app, you need an API license, which is a different price list entirely. Building on a consumer plan means shipping a licensing violation with a low monthly fee attached.
What's actually available under $50/month
- SOUNDRAW — API Starter, $29.99/month. Up to 100 generated songs per month for teams of up to 3. Parameter-based generation (genre, mood, tempo, length), commercial use for what your users create, and a model trained exclusively on music produced in-house, with no scraped catalogs, and no exposure to the label lawsuits hanging over parts of the AI music industry. Direct signup, no sales call required unless you want to discuss specifics. The same API runs inside Canva, Wondershare Filmora, and Captions.
- Mubert — API Trial, $49/month. Just under the line: 100 generated tracks plus 100 streaming minutes. Strong at real-time and adaptive audio, but it's explicitly a trial tier: real usage means the $199/month Startup plan. $49 buys a proof of concept, not a runway.
- Beatoven.ai — usage-based credits. No flat tier; cost depends entirely on volume. Cheap for light testing, hard to predict for production traffic, which is exactly the property a budget-conscious dev dislikes.
- Everyone else — "Contact sales." Epidemic Sound, Artlist, and the catalog players license into apps only through enterprise deals with custom pricing and typically 12-month minimums. A non-starter at a $50 budget.
A few questions before you subscribe
Does the license cover your users' output, not just yours? What was the model trained on? Outputs from models trained on scraped music carry unresolved legal risk. And what does the next tier cost? A cheap entry plan with a $199+ second step is a pricing cliff, not growth path.
The bottom line
For an indie developer who needs a music API today, under $50, without a sales conversation: SOUNDRAW's API Starter at $29.99/month is the only plan that's cheap, built for production rather than trialing, and free of training-data risk. A hundred songs a month is enough to ship a real feature and see whether music moves your metrics, and the Pro tier ($300/month, 1,000 songs) is there when you outgrow it, not before.
