Suno vs ACE-Step vs YuE2: a blind music test and what each track really costs

A developer ran a blind, loudness-matched comparison of Suno Pro against the open-source music models ACE-Step 1.5 XL and YuE2, generating the same instrumental and sung tracks on each and renting an RTX 5090 on Vast.ai to run the free models. ACE-Step finished a background track in 46 seconds versus 5 minutes 32 seconds for YuE2, and the entire rented session cost $0.558 at $0.67 an hour, making the card roughly ten times cheaper per kept track than Suno's $10-a-month, 20-download plan. The developer is staying on Suno anyway because the free background winner hummed when no vocals were requested and YuE2's song cut off early, meaning every free-model take must be checked by ear.

I make my channel's music on Suno, at $10 a month. ACE-Step 1.5 XL and YuE2 are free to download, but they need a big NVIDIA card. So I rented one by the hour and ran all three through the same two jobs, ranked by ear before I knew which was which. Every model got the same brief in both rounds. Round one was background music: quiet late-night jazz, instrumental, no vocals, the kind of track that sits under narration. Round two was a sung song, "Ten of You", with the same lyrics for all three. The clips were loudness matched, lettered A, B and C, and played unedited. ACE-Step and YuE2 ran in ComfyUI on a rented RTX 5090. ACE-Step finished its background track in 46 seconds; YuE2 took 5 minutes 32 seconds. The whole session, including nine minutes of setup and 25.1 GB of model downloads, cost $0.558 on Vast.ai's bill at $0.67 an hour. Counting only the time each model ran, ACE-Step's track cost under a cent and YuE2's four to six cents. Suno Pro is $10 a month, but it allows 20 song downloads a month, so every Suno track you keep costs at least 50 cents. Per kept track, the rented card is about ten times cheaper. I'm keeping Suno for now. Money is not the problem: the free background winner hummed when I asked for none, and YuE2's song stopped before its end. With the free models, every take has to be checked by ear. If I didn't pay for Suno, I'd try YuE2 for background music and listen to every second for humming. ACE-Step is fine for rough sketches, since it finishes before your coffee does. Anything sung stays on Suno. For ten dollars, I'm paying for the take I don't have to check. The film is a code-rendered animation built from generated artwork, with an authorized synthetic narration voice and generated sound effects.