Written and maintained by CASRAI Editorial Board
Last updated
Last verified against ElevenLabs’ own pricing page in August 2026. ElevenLabs changes plan names and credit allotments periodically, so treat the dollar figures below as a snapshot and double-check the live page before you commit a budget.
Tip: try code CASRAI at checkout for 15% off, if the offer is currently active for this program — codes vary by vendor and aren’t guaranteed.
ElevenLabs prices itself less like a normal SaaS tool and more like a cellphone plan: a monthly fee buys you a pool of “credits,” those credits get spent at different rates depending on what you actually do with them, and the number that matters — minutes of usable audio out the other end — is never printed on the pricing page itself. That gap is where most people misjudge their real monthly cost. This guide walks through every tier, translates the credit math into minutes, covers the separate rates that apply to the API and to the newer Conversational AI (Agents) product, and is honest about the point at which ElevenLabs stops being the economical choice.
ElevenLabs pricing plans, in full
As of August 2026, ElevenLabs runs seven tiers. Six have a fixed monthly price; Enterprise is quote-only.
- Free — $0/month. 10,000 credits/month, 2 instant voice clones, ElevenLabs watermarking on generated audio, no commercial usage rights.
- Starter — $6/month (or roughly $5/month billed annually at $60/year). 30,000 credits/month, 2 instant voice clones, commercial license included.
- Creator — $22/month (roughly $18.33/month billed annually at $220/year; frequently discounted to around $11 for a first month). 121,000 credits/month, 3 professional voice clones, higher-quality output and priority processing.
- Pro — $99/month (roughly $82.50/month annually at $990/year). 600,000 credits/month, 5 professional voice clones, higher concurrency for API use.
- Scale — $299/month (roughly $249.17/month annually at $2,991/year). 1,800,000 credits/month, up to 15 professional voice clones, 3 workspace seats.
- Business — $990/month (roughly $825/month annually at $9,900/year). 6,000,000 credits/month, up to 25 professional voice clones, 10 workspace seats, and the terms of use required for regulated/enterprise commercial deployments.
- Enterprise — custom pricing. Volume credit rates, dedicated support, custom voice-cloning and data-retention terms, SSO, and negotiated SLAs. You talk to sales; there’s no public number.
Every paid tier also lets unused credits roll over, capped at roughly two months’ worth on top of your current allotment — useful if your usage is bursty (a launch month, a big narration project) rather than steady.
What a “credit” actually buys you: converting to minutes of audio
This is the calculation ElevenLabs’ own pricing page doesn’t do for you. For the standard Multilingual v2 text-to-speech model, 1 character of input text costs 1 credit. ElevenLabs’ help documentation and the third-party trackers that monitor its rate card put the practical conversion at roughly 1,000 characters per minute of natural-paced narration — the exact figure moves with reading speed, punctuation density, and which model you use, so treat it as a planning estimate, not a guarantee.
Applied to the plans above, that gives you approximately:
- Free: ~10 minutes/month
- Starter: ~30 minutes/month
- Creator: ~121 minutes (about 2 hours)/month
- Pro: ~600 minutes (about 10 hours)/month
- Scale: ~1,800 minutes (about 30 hours)/month
- Business: ~6,000 minutes (about 100 hours)/month
Not every product ElevenLabs sells spends credits at that rate, either. Speech-to-text transcription is billed at roughly 330 credits per minute of audio processed — much cheaper per minute than generating speech, since you’re not paying for voice synthesis. Dubbing is the opposite: translating and re-voicing a video runs anywhere from roughly 2,000 to 10,000 credits per minute depending on whether you keep ElevenLabs’ watermark and whether you use the higher-fidelity Studio dubbing flow. If your use case is “convert an hour of video into 6 languages,” dubbing’s per-minute cost — not the plan price — is what actually determines your bill.
ElevenLabs API pricing and TTS API pricing for developers
There is no separate “API-only” price list — API access is bundled into every plan from Starter up (Free has limited API access), and each API call spends credits out of the same monthly pool as the web app, at the same per-character rate. The practical difference for developers is concurrency and model access rather than a different unit price: higher tiers unlock more simultaneous requests, lower-latency models (Flash/Turbo variants, priced the same in credits but optimized for real-time use), and, at Business and Enterprise, dedicated capacity and custom rate-limiting. If you’re integrating ElevenLabs’ TTS API into a product with genuinely high, predictable volume, it’s worth asking sales for negotiated per-character API pricing rather than assuming the published Scale/Business credit rate is your floor — vendors in this category routinely offer volume discounts off list that aren’t advertised publicly.
ElevenLabs Conversational AI / Agents pricing (the part that surprises people)
ElevenLabs’ Conversational AI product — real-time voice agents for phone/voice-app use cases — bills differently from the core TTS plans, and this is the single most common source of bill shock we’ve seen reported. Rather than drawing down the same per-character credit pool as narration or dubbing, agent conversations are metered by the minute of live conversation, and that minute-rate sits on top of (not instead of) your plan’s base credit allotment. If you’re also using an external LLM behind the agent rather than ElevenLabs’ bundled options, that LLM’s own usage costs are typically passed through separately again, on top of the conversation-minute charge.
We could not independently re-confirm ElevenLabs’ current exact per-minute agent rate via a live fetch at time of writing — this is a newer, still-evolving product line and the number has moved before. If you’re pricing out a voice-agent deployment, treat any specific per-minute figure you see quoted elsewhere (including in older reviews) as needing a fresh check against the “Conversational AI” pricing tab on ElevenLabs’ own site before you build a budget around it. The structural point that won’t change is this: agent minutes and narration credits are two different meters, and a plan sized around your TTS volume alone can still leave you unexpectedly exposed on the agents side.
ElevenLabs Enterprise pricing: what actually changes
Enterprise isn’t just “Business, but more credits.” What you’re really buying at that tier is: negotiated per-credit rates at volumes the published Business tier doesn’t reach, a signed data-processing/retention agreement (relevant if you’re generating audio containing anyone’s likeness or regulated content), SSO and centralized seat management, dedicated infrastructure for latency-sensitive use, and a named account contact instead of ticket-queue support. If your actual driver is “we need more than 25 voice clones or 10 seats,” Enterprise is the only path — Business is a hard ceiling on both.
Where ElevenLabs pricing gets expensive
ElevenLabs charges a real premium for the thing it does best — voice-cloning quality that’s genuinely a step above most competitors — and the credit system is structured in a way that quietly punishes high-volume, long-form use. Two patterns to watch for specifically:
- Audiobook and long-form narration. A single unabridged novel can run 100,000-150,000 words, i.e. 600,000-900,000+ characters. At roughly 1,000 characters/minute, that’s easily 10-15 hours of audio, which blows past even the Pro plan’s monthly quota (600,000 credits) in one project. You’d need Scale or Business just to clear one full-length audiobook without an overage purchase.
- Dubbing at volume. Because dubbing runs at up to 10x the credit cost of straight TTS per minute, translating a back catalog of video content into multiple languages can consume a plan’s entire monthly allotment on a handful of source videos.
Neither of these is a hidden fee — the credit math is public — but it’s easy to size a plan off the sticker price rather than off your actual character volume, and the plans are not linear discounts against each other at every tier, so doubling your usage doesn’t always mean the next tier up is proportionately cheaper.
Who should not buy ElevenLabs
If what you need is the best-sounding voice clone available and you’re producing a moderate, bounded volume of content — narration for a product, a handful of video voiceovers, a conversational agent prototype — ElevenLabs’ quality is a legitimate reason to pay its premium. But if your actual requirement is flat-rate reading-aloud at real scale — audiobook production, long-form dubbing, or any workflow measured in tens of hours of output per month rather than minutes — the credit system’s per-character cost curve works against you, and cheaper flat-rate alternatives exist. Speechify and Murf both structure their plans around flatter per-hour-of-output pricing rather than a character-credit meter, and for high-volume narration specifically, that structure tends to come out cheaper per finished hour than pushing ElevenLabs past its mid tiers. If voice-clone fidelity is not the deciding factor for your project, it’s worth pricing both before you commit to ElevenLabs’ higher tiers.
ElevenLabs pricing calculator: how to estimate your own cost
ElevenLabs doesn’t publish an official interactive pricing calculator, but the math above gets you 90% of the way there without one:
- Estimate your monthly character volume (word count × ~5.5, plus SSML/pause markup if you use it).
- Divide by roughly 1,000 to get estimated minutes of output.
- Multiply your character count by the appropriate per-minute credit rate if you’re dubbing (2,000-10,000/minute) rather than doing straight narration (1,000 credits/minute-equivalent).
- Match the resulting credit total to the cheapest plan whose monthly allotment covers it, then add headroom — bursty months are common, and the two-month credit rollover only helps if you’re not already running near your cap every month.
- If you’re also running Conversational AI agents, budget that separately by expected conversation minutes — it does not come out of the same pool.
Frequently asked questions
What is ElevenLabs’ text-to-speech pricing per character?
On the standard Multilingual v2 model, 1 character costs 1 credit, and plan prices range from $6/month for 30,000 credits (Starter) to $990/month for 6,000,000 credits (Business), with Free offering 10,000 credits at no cost.
Does ElevenLabs io pricing differ from what’s on elevenlabs.io/pricing?
No — “ElevenLabs io pricing” and “ElevenLabs pricing” refer to the same live page (elevenlabs.io/pricing); there’s no separate rate card hiding elsewhere on the site. Third-party summaries sometimes lag a plan change, so the vendor’s own page is the source of truth.
How much do ElevenLabs agents (Conversational AI) cost?
Agent conversations are billed by the minute, separately from your text-to-speech credit pool, and can also incur pass-through LLM costs if you use an external model. Check the “Conversational AI” pricing tab directly before budgeting — this is a newer product line and its rate has changed before.
Is there a free ElevenLabs plan?
Yes — Free includes 10,000 credits/month (roughly 10 minutes of narration), 2 instant voice clones, and ElevenLabs’ watermark on generated audio, with no commercial usage rights.
What’s the cheapest way to get commercial usage rights?
Starter, at $6/month (or about $5/month billed annually), is the lowest tier that removes the watermark restriction and grants a commercial license.
Do unused ElevenLabs credits roll over?
Yes, on paid plans — unused credits carry forward for roughly two additional monthly cycles, so a light-usage month builds a buffer for a heavier one.
