Pricing verified: July 2026. Compiled from the ElevenLabs official pricing page, documentation, API reference and Help Center. We do not hold paid seats on this product and have not run these plans ourselves — every figure below is a published vendor number with its source named inline, and where the vendor’s own sources disagree we say so rather than pick one silently.
Compiled and fact-checked by the AI Tools Worth editorial team. Corrections: contact page.
First: ElevenLabs has two meters, not one
Most confusion about this product’s cost starts here: the same six self-serve plans are published two ways. UI usage is measured in credits, one monthly pool feeding speech, dubbing, music, transcription and sound effects. API usage is measured in dollars: “API usage is billed in US dollars, not credits”, per the official API pricing FAQ.
The rates differ sharply. Creator at $22/month gives 121,000 UI credits — 121,000 characters on Multilingual v2, labelled “~121 min” by the vendor — but 220,000 Multilingual characters via API, or 440,000 Flash/Turbo. That allowance is the plan price at API rates: $22 ÷ $0.10 per 1,000 = 220,000, and it holds on every tier ($99, $299 and $990 give 990,000, 2,990,000 and 9,900,000). Caveat: the vendor never reconciles the two meters; check your usage dashboard in cycle one if you use both.
ElevenLabs pricing: all tiers compared
Annual billing is “pay for 10 months” — the vendor states the annual price equals the monthly price × 10.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual (per mo) | Annual total | Credits/mo | TTS min (UI) | Effective $/min | PVC slots | Voice slots | Seats |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | — | — | 10,000 | ~10 | — | 0 | 3 | Not published |
| Starter | $6 | $5 | $60 | 30,000 | ~30 | $0.200 | 0 | 10 | Not published |
| Creator | $22 | $18.33 | $220 | 121,000 | ~121 | $0.182 | 1 | 30 | Not published |
| Pro | $99 | $82.50 | $990 | 600,000 | ~600 | $0.165 | 1 | 160 | Not published |
| Scale | $299 | $249.17 | $2,990 | 1,800,000 | ~1,800 | $0.166 | 3 | 660 | 3 |
| Business | $990 | $825 | $9,900 | 6,000,000 | ~6,000 | $0.165 | 10 | 660 | 10 |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom | Custom | — | — | Custom | Custom | Custom |
Prices and credits from the pricing page, voice and PVC slots from the Help Center. Seat counts are published only for Scale (3) and Business (10) — the other tiers are sold as single-user, but “1 seat” would be our reading, not a vendor figure, so those cells say so.
The pricing page currently shows Creator as $11, with “First month 50% off” in fine print. The recurring price is $22/month; the $11 is an undated promotion, and $22 is confirmed by the annual price of $220 = $22 × 10.
Audio quality: the vendor contradicts itself. The pricing page lists “128 kbps, 44.1kHz” for Free, Starter and Creator and “128 & 192 kbps (via Studio & API), 44.1kHz” for Pro, Scale and Business. The API reference gates it differently: 192 kbps MP3 “requires you to be subscribed to Creator tier or above”, while 44.1 kHz PCM/WAV requires “Pro tier or above”. The Help Center puts Pro and above at 16-bit 44.1 kHz WAV or 192 kbps MP3. Sample rate is not the divider — 44.1 kHz MP3 exists well below Pro — and lossless 44.1 kHz PCM/WAV starts at Pro. Whether 192 kbps MP3 begins at Creator or Pro is contested; we assert neither.
Beware stale figures elsewhere. Widely-cited round-ups still list Starter $5, Creator 100,000 credits, Pro 500,000, Scale $330 for 2,000,000 and Business $1,320 for 11,000,000 — two sources we cross-checked in July 2026 still carried those, which predate a May 2026 restructure. Where sources disagree, the table above holds the vendor’s figures.
Characters to minutes: the conversion and its assumption
Speech is billed per character, so every “minutes included” claim rests on an assumed speech rate. The working conversion is 1,000 characters to 1 minute — the vendor’s own implied ratio, pairing 10,000 credits with “~10 min” and 6,000,000 with “~6,000 min”. At 6.5 characters per English word that is ~154 words — a natural 150 wpm pace.
Multilingual v2 costs 1 credit per character per the pricing FAQ; Flash and Turbo cost 0.5 to 1, the discount applying to API generations. The same pool pays for speech to text at 330 credits/min, Eleven Music 900/min, sound effects 200 per generation, Voice Changer and Voice Isolator 1,000/min, and dubbing at 2,000–10,000/min depending on watermarking and Dubbing Studio use.
That top dubbing rate is the biggest budgeting trap. Creator’s 121,000 credits is ~121 minutes of narration but only ~12 minutes of clean Dubbing Studio. UI transcription is worse: at 330 credits/min Creator covers ~6.1 hours, while the same $22 includes 100 hours of Scribe v2 via API.
ElevenLabs API pricing (billed in dollars)
Unit rates are flat across all self-serve tiers: your tier sets how much is included, not the price.
| Product | Rate |
|---|---|
| Text to speech — Flash / Turbo | $0.05 per 1,000 characters |
| Text to speech — Multilingual v2 / v3 | $0.10 per 1,000 characters |
| Speech to text — Scribe v2 | $0.22 per hour |
| Scribe v2 — entity detection add-on | $0.070 per hour |
| Scribe v2 — keyterm prompting add-on | $0.050 per hour |
| Speech to text — Scribe v2 Realtime | $0.39 per hour |
| Speech Engine (agents) | $0.080/min included; $0.160/min additional and burst |
| Eleven Music | $0.150 per minute; $1.50 per finetune |
| Voice Isolator / Voice Changer / Sound Effects | $0.120 per minute each |
| Dubbing v1 | $0.33/min watermarked; $0.50/min without watermark |
Included API characters (Multilingual / Flash): Starter 60,000 / 120,000; Creator 220,000 / 440,000; Pro 990,000 / 1,980,000; Scale 2,990,000 / 5,980,000; Business 9,900,000 / 19,800,000. ElevenAgents is priced separately, by call minute: Free 15, Starter 75, Creator 275, Pro 1,238, Scale 3,738, Business 12,375. The LLM and telephony provider bill separately, at cost, on top.
The real unit economics
Our own arithmetic on published rates, at 6.5 characters per word:
| Job | Characters | Creator UI credits ($0.182/1k) | API Multilingual ($0.10/1k) | API Flash ($0.05/1k) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 60-sec short (150 words) | 975 | $0.18 | $0.10 | $0.05 |
| Per 1,000 words | 6,500 | $1.18 | $0.65 | $0.33 |
| 10-min script (1,500 words) | 9,750 | $1.77 | $0.98 | $0.49 |
| 30-min podcast | 30,000 | $5.45 | $3.00 | $1.50 |
| 60,000-word audiobook | 390,000 | $70.91 | $39.00 | $19.50 |
There is no volume discount above Creator
Effective cost per 1,000 credits: Starter $0.200, Creator $0.182, Pro $0.165, Scale $0.166, Business $0.165. Scale is fractionally more expensive per credit than Pro, and Business matches Pro exactly. Above Creator you buy headroom, seats, slots and concurrency — never cheaper audio.
How the cost compares with other TTS providers
“Is $0.10 per 1,000 characters expensive?” is the question the vendor’s page never answers. Against providers publishing a flat per-character rate, checked July 2026:
| Provider and model | Per 1,000 characters | Vs ElevenLabs Multilingual API |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Polly — Standard | $0.004 | 1/25th |
| Deepgram Aura-1 (PAYG) | $0.0150 | 1/7th |
| Amazon Polly — Neural | $0.016 | 1/6th |
| Deepgram Aura-2 (PAYG) | $0.030 | Under 1/3 |
| Amazon Polly — Generative | $0.030 | Under 1/3 |
| ElevenLabs Flash / Turbo (API) | $0.050 | Half |
| Amazon Polly — Long-Form | $0.100 | Identical |
| ElevenLabs Multilingual v2/v3 (API) | $0.100 | Baseline |
| ElevenLabs Creator plan, UI credits | $0.182 | 1.8× |
Sources: the Amazon Polly pricing page ($4.00, $16.00, $30.00 and $100.00 per million characters) and the Deepgram pricing page. Google Cloud, Azure and OpenAI are deliberately absent: none published a readable per-character figure when we checked, and third-party sources quoting them disagreed by a factor of three.
ElevenLabs sits at the top of this market, not the middle — its cheapest API model costs about three times Amazon Polly Neural, Multilingual about six times. The one exact match is instructive: Polly Long-Form is identical at $0.100.
When the premium is not worth it. For functional audio — IVR, notifications, alerts, transactional voice — the arithmetic is brutal: that 390,000-character audiobook costs $6.24 on Polly Neural and $11.70 on Deepgram Aura-2, against $39.00 on ElevenLabs Multilingual via API or $70.91 out of Creator credits. The premium buys voice cloning, expressive delivery and the Voice Library. If you need a cloned or branded voice, no cheap substitute exists; if not, you are paying six to eleven times the commodity rate.
Concurrency limits by plan
From the official models documentation — decisive for apps and agents, irrelevant for a solo creator.
| Plan | Multilingual v2 | Flash | Speech to text | Realtime STT | Music |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 2 | 4 | 8 | 6 | 0 |
| Starter | 3 | 6 | 12 | 9 | 2 |
| Creator | 5 | 10 | 20 | 15 | 2 |
| Pro | 10 | 20 | 40 | 30 | 2 |
| Scale | 15 | 30 | 60 | 45 | 5 |
| Business | 15 | 30 | 60 | 45 | 5 |
| Enterprise | Elevated | Elevated | Elevated | Elevated | Highest |
Scale and Business have identical concurrency. If concurrency is your constraint, $990 Business does not fix it — only Enterprise does. Free has zero music concurrency: no music generation at all.
Credit rules, cloning limits and licensing
Cloning: Creator is the first tier with Professional Voice Cloning — “A Creator plan or above is required to create Professional Voice Clones”, per the docs. Downgrade below Creator and an existing clone stays in your library but is unusable until you upgrade. Monthly voice operations cap at Free 55, Starter 65, Creator 95, Pro 290, Scale and Business 1,040 each.
Rollover: unused credits roll over up to two months, capped at 2× monthly quota, so the balance tops out at 3× — on an active paid subscription only.
Pay As You Go: prepaid PAYG has replaced postpaid overage. Per the vendor’s comparison table, extra UI speech minutes run ~$0.36 on Free, ~$0.20 Starter, ~$0.18 Creator and ~$0.17 above that. Two traps: PAYG credits expire 12 months after purchase, and the balance is held as a dollar value converted at your plan’s rate, so downgrading shrinks it.
Annual vs monthly: the break-even
Annual costs 10 months for 12 — a 16.7% saving, so the break-even is 10 months. It saves $12/year on Starter, $44 on Creator, $198 on Pro, $598 on Scale and $1,980 on Business. Creator’s discounted first month makes year one on monthly billing $253; annual at $220 still wins by $33.
On tier choice: Starter ($6) is the cheapest legal option, Creator ($22) the default for a solo creator, and Pro ($99) the audiobook tier — one cycle absorbs a full book, and it adds lossless 44.1 kHz PCM/WAV per the API reference.
Other gotchas
- Default voices expire on 31 December 2026 per the voices documentation — and are only available to accounts created before March 2026, so later signups never had them.
- Credits are charged per generation request, not per download.
- Per-request character limits (models docs): Eleven v3 5,000, Multilingual v2 10,000, Flash v2.5 40,000. The vendor’s API pricing card contradicts this, listing “40,000 character limit” against Multilingual v2/v3; the models docs are more specific.
- Payment: card, Apple Pay and Google Pay only; prices exclude taxes. Startup Grants: 12 months free with 33,000,000 characters.
FAQ
How many minutes of audio do ElevenLabs credits actually give you?
About one minute per 1,000 credits: on Multilingual v2, 1 credit is 1 character, and 1,000 characters runs about a minute at 150 wpm. That gives ~10 minutes on Free, ~30 Starter, ~121 Creator, ~600 Pro, ~1,800 Scale and ~6,000 Business — matching the vendor’s table.
Is ElevenLabs cheaper through the API than through the app?
Yes, materially. The API bills $0.10 per 1,000 characters for Multilingual v2/v3 and $0.05 for Flash/Turbo; UI credits work out at $0.182 per 1,000 on Creator and $0.165 on Pro, Scale and Business. The gap is widest for transcription: Creator’s pool covers ~6.1 hours, but the plan includes 100 hours of Scribe v2 via API.
Is ElevenLabs expensive compared with other text-to-speech services?
Yes, per character. At $0.10 per 1,000 characters via API it is about six times Amazon Polly Neural ($0.016) and three times Deepgram Aura-2 ($0.030); Creator UI credits at $0.182 double that again. It matches Amazon Polly Long-Form ($0.100) exactly.
Do unused ElevenLabs credits roll over?
On paid plans only, for up to two months and capped at 2× monthly quota, so the balance reaches at most 3×. Downgrading or cancelling forfeits unused credits at cycle end; free plans get none. PAYG top-ups are separate, escape the 3× cap, and expire 12 months after purchase.
Which plan do you need for voice cloning?
Instant Voice Cloning starts on Starter at $6/month; Professional Voice Cloning requires Creator at $22/month or above, per the documentation. PVC slots run 1 on Creator and Pro, 3 on Scale, 10 on Business, none on Free or Starter. A PVC needs at least 30 minutes of clean audio.
Can you use ElevenLabs audio commercially on the free plan?
No. The free plan carries no commercial license; output must credit ElevenLabs by including “elevenlabs.io” or “11.ai” in the title. Every paid plan from Starter ($6/month) up includes one, excluding Beta Services; it is permanent for work already made, even after you cancel.
Which plan gives the highest concurrency, and is Business worth it?
Among self-serve plans Scale and Business tie at the top: 15 concurrent Multilingual v2 requests, 30 Flash, 60 speech-to-text, 45 realtime STT. Paying $990 for Business over $299 for Scale buys seats, PVC slots and volume — not concurrency. Anything higher requires Enterprise.
What we could not verify
Gaps we could not close, listed so you find them here rather than after paying.
- Whether 192 kbps MP3 starts at Creator or Pro — the API reference and pricing page contradict each other. Both agree lossless 44.1 kHz PCM/WAV starts at Pro.
- Seat counts for Free, Starter, Creator and Pro — published only for Scale and Business.
- The maximum credits per generation request — the FAQ confirms a cap exists and differs between Free and paid tiers, without stating it.
- How the credit pool and the API dollar allowance interact — both are published, the reconciliation is not.
- Whether annual-plan credits are granted monthly or annually — credits are described as “per month”, but reset mechanics are not spelled out.
- Studio Projects limits above Starter — 3 for Free and 20 for Starter are published, nothing above.
- The number of free regenerations — described as “a limited number”, with no count.
- Standalone PAYG per-credit rates — the docs point to the pricing page, which publishes none. We use the vendor’s extra-minute figures instead.
- Google Cloud, Azure and OpenAI per-character rates — no readable published figure when we checked, so they are absent rather than filled in from conflicting third-party sources.
Sources and method
Compiled July 2026 from the ElevenLabs official pricing page (Creative, Agents and API tabs), official documentation (models, voices, Pay As You Go), the API reference and the Help Center. Competitor rates from the Amazon Polly and Deepgram pricing pages. Where the vendor conflicts with itself, both versions are named. Unit economics are our own arithmetic on published rates. Plans change — verify before purchase.
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