ElevenLabs Pricing 2026: Plans, Credits & Real Cost Per Minute

ElevenLabs pricing runs from $0 to $990 a month across six public plans, with custom pricing above that for enterprise. That part takes ten seconds to read on the pricing page. The credit system underneath is what catches people out. A credit is not a minute, a minute is not a fixed price, and the plan you are reading about may not be the plan you need.

This guide costs the whole thing out properly. Every plan and price below comes from the ElevenLabs pricing page and its own documentation, checked on 19 September 2026. Then we do the sum almost nobody publishes: what one minute of finished audio costs on each tier. We also cover why pressing Generate twice quietly doubles it, and why the $99 plan buys two different things depending on which ElevenLabs product you open.

The Key Takeaways

• Six plans: Free $0, Starter $6, Creator $22, Pro $99, Scale $299, Business $990 a month, plus custom Enterprise.
• Annual billing is ten months, not twelve, which drops Creator to $18.33 a month and Pro to $82.50.
• One credit is one character for text to speech, and ElevenLabs own model docs put 10,000 characters at about 10 minutes of speech.
• Real cost per minute lands around $0.20 on Starter and $0.17 on Pro, before you regenerate anything.
• Voice agents are a separate ladder billed in call minutes, not credits. The same $99 Pro plan is 600,000 credits in one product and 1,238 call minutes in the other.
• The free plan is non-commercial with attribution, has no voice cloning and no rollover.

ElevenLabs Pricing at a Glance

Here is every public plan, with the annual equivalent worked out. ElevenLabs bills annual plans at ten times the monthly price, so an annual subscription is effectively two months free on every tier.

Creator is the plan most individual makers land on, and the first month is half price at $11. Worth knowing before you commit: that discount applies once, and the renewal is $22.

What an ElevenLabs Credit Actually Is

Credits are the unit everything is priced in, and they used to be called something clearer. ElevenLabs documentation states plainly that credits were previously referred to as characters, and that the terminology changed while the value did not. That single sentence explains most of the confusion in older guides, which still talk about character allowances.

One credit per character

For text to speech on the standard multilingual models, the rate is one credit per character. Spaces and punctuation count, because they are characters. Flash and Turbo models are cheaper through the API at between 0.5 and 1 credit per character. The model documentation describes Flash as offering a 50% lower price per character for API generations. If you are generating at volume through the API, the model you pick changes your bill as much as the plan you pick.

Every product drains the same pool

This is the part that surprises people mid month. The ElevenLabs pricing page is explicit that all creative products draw from one shared monthly credit pool, so spending on one leaves fewer for the others. Voice agents are the exception, and we come back to those below. The rates are wildly different:

Dubbing is the one to watch, and it is also where the pricing page contradicts itself. Its FAQ still quotes the old v1 rates of 2,000 and 3,000 credits a minute. The live cost calculator on the same page prices current automatic dubbing at 13,500 credits a minute on paid plans and 22,000 on Free. Take the calculator as current, because the FAQ describes a previous model version.

That gap matters. Five minutes of automatic dubbing is about 67,500 credits, which is more than half a Creator month and over twice a whole Starter allowance. If music is your main use, our roundup of the best AI music generators puts Eleven Music next to the alternatives.

What a Minute of Audio Really Costs

Every competing guide calls this a rule of thumb. It is not one. ElevenLabs states the conversion itself, in a tooltip on its own pricing table: on the highest quality models one character costs one credit, and one minute of audio costs approximately 1,000 characters. The same table publishes a minutes included row of roughly 10, 30, 121, 600, 1,800 and 6,000 against the six plans, which is the credit allowance divided by 1,000.

The ElevenLabs model documentation backs it up from the other direction, listing each model's character limit next to the duration it produces.

How we worked it out

Every row above is 1,000 characters per minute. Since text to speech is one credit per character, 1,000 credits is roughly one minute of speech. Divide the monthly credits by 1,000 for approximate minutes, then divide the price by those minutes. The figures below are ours, derived that way, not numbers ElevenLabs publishes.

The curve flattens fast. Moving from Starter to Creator saves about two cents a minute, and everything above Pro is the same rate. Past Creator you are buying capacity and seats, not a better unit price, which matters if you were about to upgrade purely to save money.

So the honest summary is that ElevenLabs costs roughly twenty cents a minute, whatever you pay.

What that means for real jobs

A 20 minute podcast episode is roughly 20,000 credits, so two thirds of a Starter month or a sixth of Creator. A 90 second YouTube voiceover is about 1,500 credits, which means Creator covers roughly 80 of them a month. A 30 minute audiobook chapter is about 30,000 credits, a whole Starter allowance for one chapter. If podcasting is the goal, our guide to building an AI podcast generator workflow covers the production side that sits around these numbers.

The Second ElevenLabs Pricing Ladder Nobody Mentions

Every number above assumes you are using ElevenLabs to turn text into audio files. Open a different part of the product and the meter changes completely.

This is the single most useful thing to understand before you subscribe, and most guides skate over it because it is inconvenient. ElevenLabs sells voice agents on plans with the same names and the same prices as the creative plans, but they are not the same product and they are not billed the same way. The agents pricing page states that plans there are billed by call minutes, not by the shared credit pool.

Extra call minutes are $0.08 each. Go over your concurrency limit and burst pricing kicks in at $0.16 a minute, which the page describes as double the standard rate. So if you subscribe to Pro expecting 600,000 credits and then build a phone agent, you are spending from a 1,238 minute allowance instead. Read the ElevenLabs agents pricing page before assuming one subscription covers both.

The Regeneration Trap

Every cost in this article assumes you generate each line once. Nobody does that.

You try a line, dislike the emphasis, tweak two words and try again. ElevenLabs is clear about what that costs: credits are charged per generation request, not per download. The documentation spells out that pressing Generate deducts credits because the audio has to be produced for you to hear it, and that this includes changing the text and regenerating.

The two free regenerations, and their four conditions

There is relief, but it is narrow. You get two free regenerations in the text to speech playground, but only if four things all hold. You must be generating on the website. The prompt, voice and model must be unchanged. The first generation must be less than two hours old. And you must not have refreshed or left the page. Change a single word and the free regeneration is gone, because the text no longer matches.

The condition that catches developers is the last one in the docs: free regenerations are not available through the API. If you are scripting generation, every single call bills. The v3 model behaves differently again, and in your favour. ElevenLabs documentation states that each time you click Generate you get two alternative outputs but are only charged for one, so v3 effectively gives you two takes for the price of one.

Budget for it

A realistic working assumption is two to three generations per finished line while you are finding a voice, settling to near one once the settings are right. That turns the $0.18 a minute on Creator into something closer to $0.40 during a first project. It is not a hidden fee, it is just arithmetic that the plan comparison table cannot show you.

What the Free Plan Really Gives You

The free tier is 10,000 credits a month, which is about ten minutes of speech. That is enough to audition a voice properly before paying. Three limits decide whether it is usable beyond that.

First, the licence. ElevenLabs documentation is direct: on paid plans you get commercial rights to the content you generate, while on the free plan you can use the content non commercially with attribution. A monetised YouTube video is commercial use, so the free tier does not cover it. Second, voice cloning is not included. The docs state that cloning is only available on the Starter tier and above, and that the free plan offers three custom voice slots for the Voice Design tool instead. Third, rollover does not apply to free accounts, so unused credits simply vanish each month.

At $6, Starter removes all three limits at once. That is an unusually cheap step up, and for most people who have outgrown testing it is the obvious move rather than jumping to Creator. If you are collecting free tiers across tools, our guide to AI free trials worth using covers which ones are worth the signup.

Rollover, Expiry and Going Over

Unused credits on a paid plan roll over for up to two months, so your balance can reach at most three times your monthly quota. ElevenLabs uses Starter as the worked example: 30,000 multiplied by three is 90,000 credits as the ceiling. Rollover only continues while you keep an active paid subscription, and the documentation is blunt that downgrading or cancelling forfeits unused credits at the end of the cycle.

Pay as you go and overage

Credits you buy as a top up play by different rules, and one of them can cost you money.

Pay as you go credits sit outside the rollover system and expire twelve months after purchase. The catch arrives if you switch plans, because those credits are stored as a dollar value and reconverted at your current plan's rate, so changing plan changes your balance. On enterprise and legacy Creator, Pro, Scale and Business plans you can enable usage based billing to keep working past your allowance. The trigger to watch is in the docs: if your usage based charges exceed twice your monthly subscription fee, ElevenLabs charges you immediately rather than waiting for the cycle to end.

Which ElevenLabs Plan Should You Pick

Match the plan to the job rather than the headline price. Free is for auditioning voices and nothing else, because of the attribution requirement. Starter at $6 is the real entry point and the best value on the ladder, since it unlocks commercial rights and cloning for the price of a coffee. Creator at $22 is the working creator's plan, giving about two hours of audio a month plus professional cloning. Pro at $99 only makes sense past roughly ten hours a month or if you need 44.1kHz PCM output. Scale and Business are seat and capacity purchases, not better rates.

If you are weighing ElevenLabs against the music focused tools, our Suno, ElevenLabs and Udio comparison covers where each one wins, and our AI pricing comparison puts these numbers next to the other major subscriptions.

Watch the total, not the line item

ElevenLabs at $22 looks small until you notice it is sitting alongside three or four other AI subscriptions. That is the pattern our AI subscription audit keeps finding, and audio is usually the fourth or fifth line on the list rather than the first.

It is worth separating the tools that need their own subscription from the ones you are paying for twice. ElevenLabs earns its place if voice is your output. The general chat and research work around it rarely needs three separate bills. That is the case for Fello AI, a native Mac and iPhone app putting GPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok and DeepSeek behind one $9.99 a month subscription. Keep the specialist audio tool, consolidate the rest.

The Verdict on ElevenLabs Pricing

ElevenLabs is fairly priced and badly explained. The unit economics are consistent, around $0.17 to $0.20 a minute of speech across the whole ladder, and the cheapest meaningful plan costs $6. The problem is that the pricing page tells you about credits while your actual question is about minutes, and it never mentions that voice agents run on a different meter entirely.

For most people the answer is Starter at $6 for commercial rights and cloning, moving to Creator at $22 once you are producing more than half an hour of audio a month. Skip Pro unless you have counted your minutes and passed ten hours. And whatever you pick, budget for regenerating, because the price of the finished audio is never the price of the first take. Full current plan details are on the official ElevenLabs pricing page, and the credit mechanics are documented in the ElevenLabs billing documentation.

Frequently Asked Questions