ElevenLabs Pricing 2026: Plans, Credits and API Costs

Last Updated: November 1, 2026

ElevenLabs pricing starts at $0 for the Free plan and runs $6, $22, $99, $299 and $990 a month for Starter, Creator, Pro, Scale and Business, with custom Enterprise contracts above that. Those plans include 10,000 to 6 million credits a month, and one credit buys roughly one character of speech, so 1,000 credits is about a minute of audio. Paying yearly gives you two months free.

This guide covers every plan, what a credit buys across text to speech, voice cloning, agents, dubbing, transcription and music, how rollover works, what an audiobook, a voice agent and a weekly podcast cost in real dollars, and how ElevenLabs compares with OpenAI, Google Gemini and Cartesia. All prices are in US dollars, before tax, checked against ElevenLabs' own pages on November 1, 2026.

ElevenLabs costs $0 (Free), $6 (Starter), $22 (Creator), $99 (Pro), $299 (Scale) or $990 (Business) a month on monthly billing. Annual billing drops those to $5, $18.33, $82.50, $249.17 and $825 a month, paid upfront.

The table below uses the plan cards on ElevenLabs' pricing page. The page shows about one minute of standard speech per 1,000 credits, which is where the minutes column comes from. Annual prices follow ElevenLabs' billing documentation, which says yearly plans include two free months.

The first-month discounts ($1 for Starter, $11 for Creator) were live on the pricing page when we checked. ElevenLabs runs these offers often and ends them on short notice, so treat the regular price as your real budget.

For context on how fast the company behind these plans is growing, see our ElevenLabs statistics roundup.

Yes. The Free plan gives you 10,000 credits a month, about 10 minutes of speech, at no cost. You cannot use that audio commercially, and you must credit ElevenLabs when you publish it.

ElevenLabs' help center is blunt about it: "The free plan does not include a commercial license and cannot be used for any commercial purpose." Free content needs "elevenlabs.io" or "11.ai" in the title. Voice cloning is also locked: the billing docs say "Cloning is only available on the Starter tier and above." For anything you plan to monetize, Starter at $6 is the real entry point.

In the ElevenLabs app, one character of text costs one credit on its main voice models, so a 1,000-character script uses about 1,000 credits. Other products, like transcription and dubbing, burn credits at their own rates per minute.

ElevenLabs used to call credits "characters," and its help center says the value has not changed. The model guide lists Eleven v4, Multilingual v2 and Flash v2.5 at 1 credit per character for app generations, "excluding credit multipliers." The API is cheaper, and that is where the per-model differences show up.

On the ElevenLabs API pricing page, rates are the same on every plan:

Those rates are recent. ElevenLabs cut API text to speech prices by 20% when it launched Eleven v4 in early October 2026, from $0.10 to $0.08 for its quality models and from $0.05 to $0.04 for its fast ones, according to UsagePricing's capture of the pricing page. Any guide quoting $0.10 is out of date.

Instant Voice Cloning, which builds a voice from a short sample, starts on Starter. Professional Voice Cloning, the higher-fidelity option, starts on Creator with one clone, and Scale and Business raise that to 3 and 10. ElevenLabs' docs say "All paid plans include a commercial license," with Beta services excluded. Audio you make while subscribed stays licensed for commercial use after you cancel.

ElevenLabs agents cost $0.08 per minute beyond the minutes included in your plan. Burst calls above your concurrency limit cost $0.16 a minute.

ElevenLabs cut the agent rate from $0.10 to $0.08 a minute in May 2026, per its pricing announcement. The API pricing page lists these included minutes and concurrent calls for its Speech Engine:

The voice is only part of the bill. ElevenLabs' newer Realtime v1 engines add token charges on top of the $0.08 per connected minute: $0.20 input and $6.00 output per million tokens on Mini, and $1.80 and $9.00 on Max. On the standard Speech Engine, eesel's pricing breakdown notes that the language model is billed separately and that ElevenLabs adds no telephony fee, so your phone carrier bills you on its own.

Yes, on paid plans. Unused subscription credits roll over for up to two months, so your balance can reach three times your monthly quota. Free plan credits do not roll over.

The rollover help article uses Starter as its example: 30,000 credits times three gives a 90,000-credit ceiling. Three catches matter:

If you run out mid-month, the pricing page puts the cost of an extra minute at about $0.36 on Free, $0.20 on Starter, $0.18 on Creator and $0.17 on Pro and above. Old usage-based overage billing is now a legacy feature for new self-serve accounts.

A 10-hour audiobook costs $99 on the Pro plan or about $48 at API rates. A 5,000-minute voice agent runs about $400 a month before language model costs. A weekly 30-minute podcast fits on Creator at $22 a month.

All three examples use ElevenLabs' own conversion of about 1,000 characters (and credits) per minute of speech. Real scripts vary with pacing and language, so leave a buffer.

Ten hours is 600 minutes, or roughly 600,000 credits on Eleven v4 in the app.

ElevenLabs lets you regenerate the same content up to twice for free, but edits and retakes on changed text cost new credits. Budget 10% to 20% extra for revisions.

At $0.08 a minute, 5,000 minutes works out to $400. The plan you pick barely changes that, because included minutes are priced at the same $0.08 rate:

So pick by concurrency, not price. If your busiest hour needs more than 20 simultaneous calls, Scale avoids paying the $0.16 burst rate. Add your language model and phone carrier costs on top.

Four 30-minute episodes is 120 minutes, or about 120,000 credits a month. That fits inside Creator's 121,000 credits for $22 a month, or $18.33 on annual billing, with Professional Voice Cloning included so the show can use a clone of the host's voice.

A month with five episodes needs about 29 extra minutes, roughly 29 x $0.18 = $5.22 more. If the show runs 60 minutes, you need about 240,000 credits: Creator plus 119 extra minutes comes to about $22 + $21.42 = $43.42, still well under Pro's $99.

Most solo creators should start on Creator at $22 a month. Pick Starter only for short commercial clips, Pro for long-form narration, and Scale or Business when you need team seats or high agent concurrency.

If your usage is steady, annual billing saves two months of fees. If it is spiky, stay monthly and let rollover absorb the slow months. For a wider look at the category, our guide to the best AI voice generators compares ElevenLabs with its main rivals.

ElevenLabs is not the cheapest option per minute. Google's Gemini TTS models cost about $0.009 to $0.0135 per minute of audio through December 31, 2026, against $0.04 to $0.08 for ElevenLabs' API. For agents, Cartesia and OpenAI also list lower base rates.

The Gemini per-minute figures are our arithmetic. Google's Gemini API pricing page says audio output equals 25 tokens per second, or 1,500 tokens a minute, and 1,500 x $9 per million = $0.0135. Google has already posted that its TTS prices double on January 1, 2027.

On the OpenAI side, the OpenAI API pricing page lists GPT-Live 1 at $0.05 a minute with backend model use charged separately, and gpt-realtime-2.1-mini at $10 input and $20 output per million audio tokens. Its standalone TTS model, gpt-4o-mini-tts, is marked deprecated on OpenAI's models page. Cartesia's docs put agent calling at $0.03 a minute, excluding LLM tokens.

What ElevenLabs charges extra for is the product around the voice: a large voice library, Professional Voice Cloning, Studio for long-form editing, dubbing and an agent platform in one account. If you only need raw speech at volume, Gemini is several times cheaper. For more on how fast these rates are falling, see our report on AI token prices hitting record lows.

ElevenLabs costs $0, $6, $22, $99, $299 or $990 a month for its Free, Starter, Creator, Pro, Scale and Business plans. Enterprise pricing is custom, and annual billing gives two months free.

No. The Free plan does not include a commercial license and requires attribution to ElevenLabs. Every paid plan, starting with Starter at $6 a month, includes commercial rights.

Creator includes 121,000 credits a month, which ElevenLabs estimates at about 121 minutes of text to speech. Unused credits roll over for up to two months while you stay subscribed.

The API charges $0.08 per 1,000 characters for Eleven v4, v3 and Multilingual v2, and $0.04 per 1,000 characters for v4 Turbo and Flash. Those rates are the same on every plan.

Instant Voice Cloning starts on Starter at $6 a month. Professional Voice Cloning starts on Creator at $22 a month with one clone, rising to 3 on Scale and 10 on Business.

Agents cost $0.08 per minute beyond the minutes included in your plan, from 15 minutes on Free to 12,375 on Business. Burst calls over your concurrency limit cost $0.16 a minute, and LLM and phone costs are extra.

Subscription credits roll over for up to two months, capped at three times your monthly quota, but you lose them if you cancel or downgrade. Pay-as-you-go top-ups expire 12 months after purchase.

ElevenLabs pricing runs from free to $990 a month, and the credit math is simple: about 1,000 credits per minute of speech in the app, or $0.04 to $0.08 per minute on the API. Creator at $22 is the best value for most creators, Pro at $99 handles audiobooks, and voice agents cost about $0.08 a minute whichever plan you choose. If raw per-minute cost is all that matters, Google's Gemini TTS is cheaper, but ElevenLabs still offers the most complete voice toolkit in one subscription.

By AI Business Weekly Editorial

Written by the AI Business Weekly team with AI assistance, then reviewed, fact-checked against cited sources and edited by Sameer Khan.

About the editor: Sameer Khan is the founder of AI Business Weekly. He has nearly a decade of B2B sales experience across SaaS, research and advisory, and AI, working with HR leaders and executives on research and AI adoption. He holds an MBA from the Ted Rogers School of Management.