Every guide to free AI music generators counts the same thing: how many songs you can make.
That is the wrong number. Across the tools I checked, generating songs is the part they give away, and keeping them is the part they sell. Suno's free plan will make you roughly three hundred songs a month and let you download exactly none of them.
So this post counts downloads and licences instead, because those are what decide whether you end up with something you can use.
Suno, and the two numbers that are not the same
Suno is the tool most people mean when they say AI music generator, so it is worth being precise about.
The free plan gives you fifty credits that renew daily, which Suno describes as about ten songs a day. That is genuinely generous by the standards of this category. Three hundred songs a month at no cost.
Then the same page lists two lines that most articles skip.
No monthly song downloads. Not a limited number. None.
No commercial use. Also in plain words on their pricing page.
You can generate, listen, remix and explore. You cannot take a file away, and you cannot use what you make for anything with money attached.
The download meter continues on paid plans
Here is the part that surprised me, and it is the reason the download number matters more than the generation number.
| Suno plan | Price per month | Songs you can generate | Songs you can download |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | about 300 | 0 |
| Pro | $10 | up to 500 | 20 |
| Premier | $30 | up to 2,000 | 60 |
Pro lets you generate five hundred songs and keep twenty. Those are separate meters, and only one of them appears in the comparisons you will find elsewhere.
If you are exploring ideas, generation is what you care about and Pro is plenty. If you are producing finished tracks for videos, twenty downloads a month is the constraint that decides whether the plan works, and nobody tells you that before you subscribe.
A correction I have to make about the price
You will see Suno Pro quoted at $8 nearly everywhere. It was quoted at $8 on this site too, in three separate posts, until I fixed it the day before writing this.
Suno's pricing page opens on the annual view. The figures it shows are $8 and $24, and next to them it says saves $24 and saves $72 by billing yearly. Do that arithmetic and the monthly prices are $10 and $30.
I checked that against the page's own underlying data rather than trusting my own sums. It carries five prices: 0 for the free plan, 10 and 96 for Pro, and 30 and 288 for Premier. Ninety-six dollars a year is eight a month, two hundred and eighty-eight is twenty-four, and the gaps against twelve months at the monthly rate are exactly the $24 and $72 the page advertises. Four numbers, all agreeing.
So Pro is $10 a month, or $8 if you commit to a year. I had written a section warning readers about exactly this pattern two weeks earlier and still walked into it, which is a reasonable argument for checking the toggle before you quote any subscription price.
AIVA, where you can download but you do not own it
AIVA takes the opposite approach and is unusually honest about it.
| AIVA plan | Price | Downloads per month | Copyright |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free, Forever | 0 euros | 3 | Owned by AIVA |
| Standard | 11 euros | 15 | Not transferred |
| Pro | 33 euros | 300 | Owned by you |
Those copyright lines are AIVA's own wording, printed on their pricing page. Free downloads exist, and the ownership stays with them.
The middle tier is the interesting one. Paying 11 euros gets you five times the downloads and still does not get you the copyright. Ownership arrives at 33 euros and not before.
I would rather have this than the vaguer licensing language elsewhere in the category, because at least you can read it and know where you stand. But read it before you put a track in something you are selling.
Soundraw, and pricing that reads backwards
Soundraw's plans look wrong at first glance.
Their cheapest paid plan, Creator at $5.99 a month, includes commercial use, unlimited monthly track downloads, and the right to distribute and monetise on Spotify and Apple Music. Their Artist plans cost more and give you fewer downloads: $10.49 for ten a month, $12.59 for twenty with wav and stems, and $17.49 for unlimited.
That inversion makes sense once you see they are sold for different jobs. Creator is for using music behind something else, a video or a podcast, where you want a lot of tracks and do not care about the stems. The Artist tiers are for releasing music as your own work, where you want fewer tracks at higher quality with the parts separated.
At $5.99 with commercial use included, Creator was the cheapest verified route to a track you can actually publish out of everything on this page.
What free actually gets you, across the category
Putting the verified tools together.
| Tool | Free tier | Downloads on free | Commercial use on free |
|---|---|---|---|
| Suno | Yes, about 10 songs a day | None | No |
| AIVA | Yes | 3 a month | No, copyright stays with AIVA |
| Soundraw | Trial only | Not on the free trial | No |
Three tools, three ways of saying the same thing. The generation is free and the file is not.
That is a different shape from the neighbouring categories. In images, free tiers mostly cap how many pictures you get and then let you keep them, which is why free AI image generators is still a genuinely useful list. In video, free tiers cap seconds, and free AI video generators works out what those seconds come to. Music has converged on gating the download instead, and that distinction is invisible if you only compare generation limits.
What the output actually sounds like
Worth setting expectations, because the demos are chosen carefully and your first attempt will not sound like them.
The instrumental side is genuinely good now. Backing tracks, ambient beds, simple loops for a video or a podcast intro are the case these tools handle well, and at that job the output is frequently indistinguishable from cheap stock music. If that is what you need, the technology is there.
Vocals are where it gets uneven. Suno produces full songs with sung lyrics, and the good outputs are startling. The bad ones are still obviously synthetic, with pronunciation that slides and phrasing that lands slightly wrong. You do not get to choose which one you get, so plan on generating several and keeping one, which is exactly the workflow the download limits punish.
Length is the other constraint people run into. These tools are built around song-length output rather than a two second sting or a forty minute set, and stretching them in either direction produces worse results than staying in the middle.
The practical upshot: budget for generating far more than you keep. That is normal and it is fine on a free tier where generation is unlimited, and it is expensive on a paid tier where downloads are capped at twenty.
The licence question is different in music
In images, using a free generation on a client project is mostly a terms of service question. In music it can also become a distribution question, and that is why the copyright lines on these pricing pages deserve more attention than they usually get.
If you put a track behind a monetised video, that video is scanned by automated content matching on the platform. If you release a track to streaming, the distributor asks who owns it. Both of those are moments where you need an answer better than a free tier and a hopeful assumption.
This is why AIVA labelling its free tier copyright owned by AIVA is more useful than it first looks. It is a clear answer to a question you would otherwise have to guess at, and the answer is no.
Suno is equally clear in the other direction: no commercial use on free, commercial use rights for new songs made on paid. Note the wording on the paid line. Rights attach to songs made while subscribed, which is a detail worth reading twice if you are planning to subscribe for one month and generate a library.
I am not giving you legal advice and I have not read any of these terms of service in full. What I am saying is narrower: the pricing pages themselves tell you whether a track is yours, and on the free tiers the answer is consistently no.
Why the download is the thing they gate
Not a conspiracy, just economics.
Generating a track costs the vendor compute once. Letting you generate freely is cheap marketing: you hear what the tool can do, you tell people about it, and most of what you make is throwaway anyway.
The file is different. A downloadable track with clear licensing is the actual product, and it is what anyone with a commercial use will pay for. So the free tier is built to demonstrate rather than to supply.
Once you see it that way, the generous daily allowance stops being confusing. It is not a mistake in their pricing. It is the pricing.
Which one for which job
Shorter than the usual verdict section, because the answer divides cleanly.
You want to hear what this technology can do. Suno free. Ten songs a day is the most generous demonstration in the category and it costs nothing. Accept that you are auditioning, not collecting.
You need one track for something personal. AIVA free gives you three downloads a month in MP3 and MIDI. The copyright staying with AIVA does not matter much for a birthday video or a hobby project, and MIDI is genuinely useful if you want to take the idea into a DAW and rebuild it yourself.
You are making videos and need background music regularly. Soundraw Creator at $5.99 with unlimited downloads and commercial use is the cheapest verified answer here, and unlimited downloads is the specification that matters when you are producing weekly.
You want the best output and can work within a cap. Suno Pro at $10. The model is ahead of the others on vocals and full song structure, and twenty downloads a month is fine if you are producing a few finished tracks rather than scoring a channel.
You are releasing music as an artist. None of these free tiers, and read the licence before you pick a paid one. AIVA's Pro tier at 33 euros is the only plan on this page that says in plain words that the copyright is yours.
What I could not check
Being specific matters more here than usual, because a licence you cannot read is a licence you should not rely on.
Udio, Stable Audio, Mubert and Boomy all render their pricing in JavaScript, so the static pages give me nothing reliable. I have not quoted figures for any of them, and I would not trust a figure quoted elsewhere without checking it yourself.
Beatoven is stranger. Their homepage loads normally, and I could not find a pricing page at any standard address. Pricing, plans, price and pricing-plans all return a not found error. That is what the site does today, and I am not drawing a conclusion about the company from it.
That is five tools in a ten tool category where I have no verified numbers, which is worth knowing before you treat this page as complete. My AI tool status tracker explains the checking method and which vendors block it.
What I would actually do
If you want to hear what AI music sounds like, use Suno free. Ten songs a day is the best demonstration available and it costs nothing.
If you need one track for a personal project, AIVA free gives you three downloads a month, and the copyright question does not matter much for something nobody is paying for.
If you are putting music into anything monetised, a video, a podcast, a client project, then buy before you generate. Soundraw Creator at $5.99 was the cheapest verified path to a track with commercial rights. Suno Pro at $10 is the better tool and gives you twenty downloads a month, which is either plenty or nothing depending on your output.
And test the download first. Generate one track you would genuinely use, then immediately try to save it. That single step tells you more than any comparison table, including this one. If you are building a video workflow around this, AI YouTube automation covers where music fits into the wider stack and what it costs.
Sourcing
Read directly from vendor pricing pages on September 8, 2026. Suno's free plan lines for no monthly song downloads and no commercial use, its fifty daily credits described as ten songs, and its Pro and Premier tiers at 2,500 and 10,000 credits with twenty and sixty monthly downloads. Suno's monthly prices of $10 and $30 come from the pricing page's own underlying data, which lists 10 and 96 for Pro and 30 and 288 for Premier, the second figure in each pair being the annual total. Those reconcile exactly with the $24 and $72 yearly savings printed on the page. AIVA's three tiers with their download counts and their copyright ownership wording. Soundraw's Creator, Artist Starter, Artist Pro and Artist Unlimited tiers.
Not verified, and deliberately not quoted: Udio, Stable Audio, Mubert and Boomy, which render pricing in JavaScript, and Beatoven, whose pricing page I could not locate. For the wider record of what AI pricing did this year, what AI pricing did in 2026 is dated and sourced.
