ElevenLabs Pricing 2026: Every Plan, Compared
ElevenLabs runs from a free 10,000-character tier up to $330/month Scale, with the two plans most people land on being Starter at $5 and Creator at $22. Everything is metered in characters, so the real question is what an hour of finished audio costs you.
How much does ElevenLabs cost?
ElevenLabs Starter is $5/month for 30,000 characters (roughly 30 minutes of speech) and is the cheapest plan that includes a commercial-use licence plus instant voice cloning. Creator at $22/month gives 100,000 characters (~2 hours) and professional voice cloning. Pro is $99/month for 500,000 characters. The free tier is 10,000 characters/month with attribution required and no commercial rights.
ElevenLabs plans and prices (2026)
10,000 credits/mo
30,000 credits/mo
100,000 credits/mo
500,000 credits/mo
2,000,000 credits/mo
Free — $0
- ✓10,000 characters/month (~10 min audio)
- ✓Full library of premade voices
- ✓Text to Speech and Speech to Speech
- ✓Attribution required
- ✓No commercial-use licence
Starter — $5/mo
- ✓30,000 characters/month (~30 min audio)
- ✓Commercial-use licence included
- ✓Instant Voice Cloning
- ✓No attribution requirement
- ✓Dubbing tools access
Creator — $22/mo
- ✓100,000 characters/month (~2 hrs audio)
- ✓Professional Voice Cloning
- ✓Higher-quality 192 kbps audio
- ✓Usage-based billing past the allowance
- ✓Everything in Starter
Pro — $99/mo
- ✓500,000 characters/month (~10 hrs audio)
- ✓44.1 kHz PCM audio output
- ✓Higher concurrency limits
- ✓Analytics and usage reporting
- ✓Everything in Creator
Scale — $330/mo
- ✓2,000,000 characters/month (~40 hrs audio)
- ✓Multi-seat workspace
- ✓Highest concurrency tier
- ✓Priority support
- ✓Everything in Pro
Is there a free ElevenLabs plan?
Yes, and it is more useful than most free AI tiers — 10,000 characters per month, roughly 10 minutes of generated speech, across the full high-quality voice library. Two real limits: you must credit ElevenLabs when you publish, and you have no commercial licence, so it cannot legally back a monetised YouTube channel or a client deliverable. Instant voice cloning is also gated behind the paid tiers, so the free plan is library voices only.
What ElevenLabs credits mean in minutes and dollars
Every plan is denominated in characters, not minutes, which makes the tiers hard to compare against video length. The working conversion is about 1,000 characters per minute of natural speech — so 100,000 credits is roughly 100 minutes of finished audio, before you account for the takes you throw away.
Is annual ElevenLabs billing worth it?
Annual billing is roughly two months free across the ladder — Creator drops from $264 to $220 a year, Pro from $1,188 to $990. Because voice quality is the thing that locks you in, and because a cloned voice you have already trained is genuinely costly to reproduce elsewhere, annual is a safer commitment here than in most AI categories. The caveat: if your monthly character usage is still swinging by more than 2x month to month, stay monthly until it settles, since unused credits only roll over to a limited degree.
Costs the ElevenLabs pricing page doesn't lead with
The free tier has no commercial licence
Monetised video, client work, ads and podcasts with sponsors all require a paid plan. The $5 Starter tier exists largely to solve this — it is the cheapest legal path to commercial voice output.
Professional Voice Cloning starts at Creator
Instant cloning (a few minutes of reference audio) is on Starter. The higher-fidelity Professional Voice Clone that most people actually want requires Creator at $22/month and takes hours to train.
Credits do not fully roll over
Unused characters largely expire at the end of the billing cycle. A month where you shipped nothing is a month you paid for nothing, which argues for sizing the plan to your floor, not your peak.
Usage-based overflow is opt-in and uncapped by default
Turning on usage-based billing prevents mid-project hard-stops but also removes your spend ceiling. Set an explicit limit in the workspace settings when you enable it.
Which ElevenLabs plan should you buy?
Cheaper alternatives to ElevenLabs
If the ElevenLabs tier ladder is more than your workload justifies, these cost less for the same core job.
Murf
Free · from $19/moPriced by minutes rather than characters, which is far easier to budget against a video timeline. Voice realism is a step below ElevenLabs, but the built-in studio (timing, background music, sync to video) removes the need for a separate editor.
Speechify
Free · from $11.58/mo annualBuilt for listening to documents rather than producing published audio, so it is much cheaper per hour if your use case is consumption. Weaker for cloning and studio-grade output.
Hume AI
Free tier · pay-as-you-goPure pay-as-you-go with no monthly floor, so a month where you generate nothing costs nothing. Its emotional-prosody control is genuinely differentiated for conversational agents.
Cartesia
Free tier · usage-basedAimed at low-latency realtime voice rather than pre-rendered narration, and cheaper per character at volume. The right pick if you are building a voice agent, not producing a podcast.
ElevenLabs pricing — frequently asked questions
How much does ElevenLabs cost per month?
Free is $0 for 10,000 characters. Starter is $5 for 30,000, Creator is $22 for 100,000, Pro is $99 for 500,000 and Scale is $330 for 2,000,000 characters per month. Annual billing is roughly two months free on each tier.
How many minutes of audio do ElevenLabs credits buy?
About one minute of speech per 1,000 characters. So Starter's 30,000 credits is roughly 30 minutes, Creator's 100,000 is roughly 100 minutes, and Pro's 500,000 is about eight to ten hours. Budget 30–50% extra for re-generated takes.
Can I use ElevenLabs voices commercially on the free plan?
No. The free tier requires attribution and grants no commercial-use licence. Any monetised video, sponsored podcast, ad or client deliverable needs at least the $5 Starter plan, which is specifically the cheapest tier that includes commercial rights.
What is the cheapest ElevenLabs plan with voice cloning?
Starter at $5/month includes Instant Voice Cloning. Professional Voice Cloning — the higher-fidelity version trained on a longer sample — starts at Creator, $22/month.
Do unused ElevenLabs credits roll over?
Largely no; the allowance resets each billing cycle with only limited rollover. Size your plan to your typical month rather than your busiest one, and enable usage-based billing on Creator or above to overflow on the rare heavy month.
Is ElevenLabs cheaper via the API?
The API draws from the same character allowance as the web app, so there is no separate cheaper API rate at the subscription tiers — you are buying credits either way. Volume beyond Scale moves to negotiated enterprise pricing.
Learn more
⚖️ ElevenLabs alternatives
The strongest AI voice tools, ranked
📋 ElevenLabs review
Voice quality, cloning and limits assessed
🔊 AI voice generators
Browse every text-to-speech tool
💵 All AI tool pricing
Compare costs across the whole catalog
🚪 How to cancel ElevenLabs
Cancellation steps and credit forfeiture
💻 Cursor pricing
Another usage-metered tier ladder explained
Ready to pick a ElevenLabs plan?
Prices change often. Check the current tiers on ElevenLabs directly, or compare the whole category before you commit.
People ask AI what ElevenLabs costs. Does it name your tool as the cheaper option?
Half the people pricing ElevenLabs end this page asking an assistant "what's a cheaper alternative?" ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity answer from pages like this one — and they only name tools they can actually read. If you build one, check whether you show up in that answer at all.
📬 Get the best new AI tools delivered weekly
One concise email with fresh launches, trending picks, and featured standouts.