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ElevenLabs pricing: plans, credits and real cost per hour

ElevenLabs costs $0 to $990 a month (Starter $6, Creator $22). About 1,000 credits make a minute of speech, so narration runs roughly $8 to $12 an hour.

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Quick comparison

ProviderFromStarting planFree tierOur rating
ElevenLabsChecked
$5/moStarter30k credits/month; commercial license; Instant Voice Cloning; 20 Studio projects; Dubbing Studio; Image & Video10k credits/month, non-commercial useNot ratedVisit
SpeechifyChecked
$8.33/moStudio Starter86,400 Studio credits a year (voiceover uses 1 credit per second, so 24 hours); commercial rights; dubbingStudio: 600 credits, no commercial rights or MP3 downloads. Reader: 10 robotic voices up to 1.5x speedNot ratedVisit
Murf AIChecked
$19/moCreator24 hours of voice generation a year; 100 projects; commercial rights; no voice cloning10 minutes of voice generation in total, no downloads, no commercial rightsNot ratedVisit
DescriptChecked
$16/moHobbyist10 media hours/month; 400 AI credits/month; 1080p watermark-free export; 1 person1 media hour/month, 720p with watermarkNot ratedVisit

ElevenLabs has a free plan and five self-serve paid plans: Starter $6 a month, Creator $22, Pro $99, Scale $299 and Business $990, with yearly billing priced at 10 months (two months free). In the app, about 1,000 credits make one minute of speech, so a finished hour of narration costs roughly $8 to $12 of plan allowance, depending on the plan and billing term. Only paid plans include a commercial license. Prices in US dollars, excluding tax, as of October 31, 2026.

We haven’t used ElevenLabs ourselves. The figures come from ElevenLabs’ pricing page, API pricing page, documentation and help center, all read October 31, 2026. The plan prices match AskGPU’s ElevenLabs data, checked October 17, 2026. Cost-per-hour figures and the worked examples are our own arithmetic from those published numbers.

How much does ElevenLabs cost per month?

Plan Monthly billing Yearly billing (per month) Yearly total Credits per month Seats
Free $0 $0 $0 10,000 1
Starter $6 $5 $60 30,000 1
Creator $22 $18.33 $220 121,000 1
Pro $99 $82.50 $990 600,000 1
Scale $299 $249.17 $2,990 1,800,000 3
Business $990 $825 $9,900 6,000,000 10
Enterprise Custom Custom Custom Custom Custom

ElevenLabs’ FAQ states the yearly rule plainly: “annual price = monthly price × 10.” On Starter that’s $60 a year instead of $72 ($6 × 12), a saving of $12. On Creator it’s $220 instead of $264, a saving of $44. On Pro, $990 instead of $1,188, a saving of $198. The saving is always two months’ fees, about 16.7%.

Prices exclude “all taxes, levies and duties,” per the pricing page. ElevenLabs accepts credit cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay.

On October 31 the plan cards also showed a first-month discount on monthly billing: $1 for Starter (“83% off”) and $11 for Creator (“50% off”). ElevenLabs’ help center says it “sometimes” offers first-month discounts and that you can see current offers on your Subscription page, so treat these as promotions that come and go, not list prices.

ElevenReader, the listening app that ranks next to ElevenLabs in search results, has its own separate pricing. This guide covers the ElevenLabs creator and developer platform only.

What do the plans include beyond credits?

The plan comparison table on the pricing page lists these limits for text to speech in the app:

Plan Minutes of speech (approx.) Custom voice slots Professional Voice Clones Audio quality Concurrent requests
Free ~10 3 None 128 kbps, 44.1 kHz 2
Starter ~30 10 None 128 kbps, 44.1 kHz 3
Creator ~121 30 1 128 and 192 kbps 5
Pro ~600 160 1 128 and 192 kbps 10
Scale ~1,800 660 3 128 and 192 kbps 15
Business ~6,000 2,200 10 128 and 192 kbps 25

What each step up adds, according to the plan cards:

  • Starter: the commercial license, Instant Voice Cloning, 20 Studio projects (Free has 3), Dubbing Studio, commercial use of music, and image and video tools.
  • Creator: Professional Voice Cloning and the option to buy additional credits.
  • Pro: 44.1 kHz PCM audio output through the API and 192 kbps audio.
  • Scale: three workspace seats, team collaboration and three Professional Voice Clones.
  • Business: ten seats, ten Professional Voice Clones and “low-latency TTS as low as 5c/minute.”
  • Enterprise: custom terms around data processing agreements and SLAs, BAAs for HIPAA customers, custom SSO, higher concurrency and “significant discounts at scale.” No price is published.

ElevenLabs’ billing docs add that voice cloning starts at Starter, and that the free plan’s three custom voice slots can only be used with the Voice Design tool. Voices saved from the shared Voice Library don’t use a slot. If you clone voices on one plan and later downgrade, ElevenLabs says it doesn’t delete them, but you can only use as many as your new plan’s slots allow. A Professional Voice Clone stays on the account but can’t be used again until you’re back on Creator or above. For a deeper look at cloning across vendors, see our voice cloning cost guide.

How do ElevenLabs credits work?

Credits are one shared monthly pool for every product. ElevenLabs’ FAQ says that for its V2 Multilingual models, one text character equals one credit, and that Flash and Turbo models cost “between 0.5 and 1 credit per character” for API usage. The pricing page lists these approximate costs for everything else:

What you make Credits used
Text to speech 1 per character
Speech to text 330 per minute
Eleven Music 900 per minute
Sound effects 200 per generation
Voice changer or voice isolator 1,000 per minute
Automatic dubbing, with watermark 2,000 per minute
Automatic dubbing, without watermark 3,000 per minute
Dubbing Studio, with watermark 5,000 per minute
Dubbing Studio, without watermark 10,000 per minute

The plan table’s minute estimates line up with roughly 1,000 characters (1,000 credits) per minute of speech: 30,000 credits on Starter is listed as about 30 minutes, and 600,000 on Pro as about 600 minutes. The real figure depends on your script and voice speed.

Four rules decide how far the credits go:

  • Rollover. Unused credits roll over for up to two months, so your balance can reach three times your monthly quota. On Starter the ceiling is 30,000 × 3 = 90,000 credits, an example ElevenLabs’ help center uses. Rollover doesn’t apply to the Free plan.
  • Downgrades and cancellations. These take effect at the end of the billing cycle, and unused subscription credits are then lost.
  • Regenerations. Credits are charged per generation, not per download. ElevenLabs says “a limited number of free regenerations may be available” if the text and settings don’t change, and shows whether a regeneration is free before you run it.
  • Upgrades. Unused credits from the old plan carry into the next billing cycle.

What does an hour of narration cost on each plan?

Using ElevenLabs’ own minute estimates (about 1,000 credits a minute), here’s what 60 minutes of finished speech costs out of each plan’s allowance:

Plan Price per 1,000 credits (monthly billing) Cost per hour, monthly billing Cost per hour, yearly billing
Starter $0.20 $12.00 $10.00
Creator $0.18 $10.91 $9.09
Pro $0.165 $9.90 $8.25
Scale $0.166 $9.97 $8.31
Business $0.165 $9.90 $8.25

How these are worked out, using Creator on monthly billing: $22 ÷ 121 minutes = $0.1818 a minute, × 60 = $10.91 an hour. On yearly billing: $18.33 ÷ 121 × 60 = $9.09.

The pricing page’s comparison table lists a matching “Extra minute” price: about $0.20 on Starter, $0.18 on Creator and $0.17 on Pro, Scale and Business. It shows about $0.36 for the Free plan.

Two things push the real cost up. First, these figures assume every credit turns into audio you keep. Retakes that aren’t free regenerations use credits too. Second, you only get the per-hour rate if you use the allowance. A Pro subscriber who uses 200 of their 600 minutes pays $99 ÷ 200 × 60 = $29.70 an hour, though rollover softens this for up to two months.

What does the ElevenLabs API cost?

Developers pay differently. ElevenLabs’ API pricing page says: “API usage is billed in US dollars, not credits.” Each plan’s monthly fee buys API usage at the listed rates, and the rates are the same on every plan, from Free and Pay As You Go up to Business:

API product Price
Text to speech, Eleven v4, v3 or v2 Multilingual $0.08 per 1,000 characters
Text to speech, v4 Turbo, v3 Conversational or Flash/Turbo $0.04 per 1,000 characters
Speech to text, Scribe v2 (and v2 Medical) $0.22 per hour
Speech to text, Scribe v2 Realtime $0.39 per hour
Keyterm prompting / transcript editing (Scribe v2) $0.05 / $0.07 per hour
Speech Engine (agents) $0.08 per minute
Music $0.15 per minute
Voice isolator, voice changer, sound effects $0.12 per minute
Dubbing v1 $0.33 per minute with watermark, $0.50 without
Dubbing v2 $2.20 per minute

The page converts each plan into included API usage. For Eleven v4 text to speech, that’s 10,000 characters on Free, 75,000 on Starter, 275,000 on Creator, 1,238,000 on Pro, 3,738,000 on Scale and 12,375,000 on Business. The math checks out against the monthly fee: $6 ÷ $0.08 × 1,000 = 75,000 characters on Starter, and $22 ÷ $0.08 × 1,000 = 275,000 on Creator. On v4 Turbo or Flash the same fee buys twice as many characters.

At $0.08 per 1,000 characters and roughly 1,000 characters a minute, API speech costs about $4.80 an hour on the v4 model and about $2.40 an hour on v4 Turbo or Flash. That’s about half the app cost per hour on the same plans.

ElevenLabs’ docs list character limits per request for some models: 5,000 characters on v3, 10,000 on v2 Multilingual and 40,000 on Flash/Turbo.

What happens when you run out of credits?

New self-serve subscriptions use Pay As You Go (PAYG), which ElevenLabs’ docs describe as a prepaid balance with “no overage charges.” The rules:

  • PAYG is available on every self-serve plan, including Free. Your subscription credits are used first, then the PAYG balance.
  • The minimum top-up is $5. You can turn on Auto Top Up, which by default adds $20 when your balance falls below $10.
  • PAYG credits last 12 months from purchase and aren’t subject to the monthly rollover cap.
  • If your balance reaches $0 and Auto Top Up is off or fails, “your service will pause immediately.”
  • Without two-factor authentication, PAYG purchases are capped per calendar month: $100 on Free, Starter and Creator; $200 on Pro; $600 on Scale; and $2,000 on Business. Turning on 2FA removes the cap.
  • ElevenLabs says PAYG rates are lower for API use than for use in the app, and points to the pricing page for the figures.

The older “usage based billing,” a fixed price per extra 1,000 credits, is now a legacy feature. ElevenLabs says it’s only available on Enterprise and legacy Creator, Pro, Scale and Business subscriptions, not on new self-serve plans.

Is ElevenLabs free, and can you use it commercially?

Yes, there’s a free plan with 10,000 credits a month (about 10 minutes of speech), 3 Studio projects and 3 custom voice slots for Voice Design. But ElevenLabs’ help center is direct about its limits: “The free plan does not include a commercial license and cannot be used for any commercial purpose.” If you publish free-plan content, you must credit ElevenLabs by putting “elevenlabs.io” or “11.ai” in the title.

The paid-plan rules, from the same help article:

  • All paid plans include a commercial license, as long as you aren’t using beta features.
  • Content made during a paid subscription can be used commercially “indefinitely,” even after you cancel.
  • Content made outside a paid subscription, before or after, can’t be used commercially and always needs attribution when shared.
  • Content made with beta services can’t be used for any commercial purpose.

So the cheapest way to publish ElevenLabs audio in a monetized video or product is Starter: $6 for one month, or $60 a year.

ElevenLabs also runs a Startup Grants program, listed on the pricing page as 12 months free with 33 million characters, and an Impact Program for nonprofits, education institutions and people with permanent speech loss. Both require an application.

Worked examples: what three kinds of users would pay

A YouTuber narrating four 10-minute videos a month. That’s about 40 minutes, or roughly 40,000 credits. Starter’s 30,000 credits isn’t enough, so the fit is Creator: 121,000 credits leaves room for retakes. Cost: $22 × 12 = $264 a year on monthly billing, or $220 on yearly billing.

An author narrating an 8-hour audiobook once. 8 × 60 = 480 minutes, or roughly 480,000 credits. One month of Pro (600,000 credits) costs $99. Alternatively, four months of Creator gives 4 × 121,000 = 484,000 credits for 4 × $22 = $88, if you can spread the work over four months. Rollover lets unused Creator credits carry forward, up to two months’ worth. Either way, cancel when done: the commercial license for audio made while subscribed doesn’t expire. Check the audiobook store’s own rules on AI narration before you publish; this guide doesn’t cover them.

A developer generating 2 million characters a month through the API on Eleven v4. At $0.08 per 1,000 characters, that’s 2,000 × $0.08 = $160 a month. A Pro plan ($99) covers 1,238,000 characters; the other 762,000 characters at $0.08 per 1,000 cost about $60.96 from a PAYG balance, so the total is about $159.96. Because the API rate is the same on every plan, the plan choice for API use comes down to features like concurrency (10 requests on Pro against 3 on Starter), voice slots and audio quality. On v4 Turbo the same 2 million characters would cost about $80.

What to watch for

  • Credits expire on cancellation. Downgrading or cancelling forfeits unused subscription credits at the end of the cycle. Use them first.
  • Annual plans renew automatically. ElevenLabs says annual plans “renew automatically unless cancelled.” Cancel at least before the renewal date.
  • Refunds are narrow. You can get a refund only if you ask within 14 days of payment and haven’t used any credits from that period.
  • Promotions aren’t list prices. The $1 and $11 first-month prices apply to the first month only on monthly billing.
  • Dubbing uses credits fast. Dubbing Studio without a watermark costs 10,000 credits a minute, so Creator’s 121,000 credits cover about 12 minutes.
  • Beta features have no commercial rights. Check whether a model or tool is labeled beta before using its output in paid work.
  • PAYG pauses at $0. Apps that rely on the API should keep a buffer or use Auto Top Up, which ElevenLabs warns can be delayed or fail.

Which ElevenLabs plan should you choose?

  • Trying it out, or personal non-commercial projects: Free. Expect about 10 minutes of speech a month and credit ElevenLabs when you share.
  • Publishing occasional voiceovers or short videos: Starter at $6 a month ($60 a year). It’s the cheapest plan with a commercial license and voice cloning.
  • Weekly YouTube or podcast narration: Creator at $22 ($220 a year). About two hours of speech a month and a Professional Voice Clone.
  • Audiobooks and heavy narration: Pro for a month or two, at the lowest per-hour cost ($8.25 to $9.90).
  • Small teams: Scale for three seats or Business for ten. The seats are included in the plan price, and the credits are shared.
  • Developers: start on Free with PAYG, then pick a plan for concurrency and voice slots. The API rate per character doesn’t change by plan.

If you’re comparing tools, see the ElevenLabs alternatives roundup, Speechify’s Studio pricing, our ElevenLabs tool page and the AI voice hub. For phone agents built on voice models, see what an AI receptionist costs.

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