User blog comment:Manocster1/Quiz Time/@comment-28749203-20160618220811/@comment-29714788-20160619045500

No, they sound similar because they're all mezzo-soprano young adult female vocals and aren't voice acted like Miku or Rin are. I find that Chika sounds like a theoretical XSY between Gumi Native and Yukari Lin, but she sounds closer to Gumi than Kokone does imo. At least with Kokone, I can identify her voice unlike with Chika who I still can't distinguish separately from another vocal.

There will never be Vocaloids that cost $30, it's far too expensive to develop the vocal in the first place. You have to acknowledge that Vocaloid sales are not always guaranteed to return the amount of money that was invested into it, therefore the companies have to set a reasonable price for the product. Additionally, Vocaloids are quite cheap in comparison to most music software. If you want a cheap singing voice synthesizer then go for Cevio, if you want one for free then go for UTAU.

@Kotoritachi Actually, Zero-G is currently having a sale on all of their Vocaloids, Prima, Tonio, and Sonika are now $39.99, which isn't exactly $30 but close enough. While Sonika isn't exactly high quality, Prima and Tonio were (for V2 standards), and they come with the V2 editor like all vocals for V2. Dex and Daina regularly cost $69.99 but at the present their price is temporarily reduced to $59.99, and they are high quality. So I think it's safe to say that the price of a vocal doesn't always correlate with its quality, for example Luka V4X is $169.95 and VY1V4 is approximately $103.67 despite the latter being higher quality. (Luka V4X does have more voicebanks, but technically VY1V4 has more because half of Luka V4X's voicebanks are basically duplicates)