ElevenLabs pricing runs from a free plan with 10,000 credits a month to $990 a month for Business, and every plan in between is really a bucket of credits that speech, music, transcription and dubbing all draw from. This ElevenLabs review explains what each of the ElevenLabs pricing plans for 2026 buys you in minutes, which features unlock at which tier, what the credit fine print says, and when a cheaper alternative makes more sense.
⚡ TL;DR: The Bottom Line
What It Is: An AI audio platform: text to speech and voice cloning (ElevenCreative), voice agents for calls and chat (ElevenAgents), and developer APIs including Scribe transcription (ElevenAPI).
Price: Free ($0, about 10 minutes of speech a month), Starter $6, Creator $22, Pro $99, Scale $299, Business $990. On annual billing you pay for 10 months, not 12.
Best For: Creators who publish voiceovers every week and need commercial rights and a cloned voice of their own.
Our Take: Creator at $22 is the plan most solo creators should look at: about 121 minutes of speech a month and Professional Voice Cloning. The free plan is for listening, not publishing.
⚠️ The Catch: One credit pool pays for everything. Music costs 900 credits a minute, so Creator’s 121k credits buy about 121 minutes of speech or about 134 minutes of music, not both.
📑 Quick Navigation
🎤 What ElevenLabs Is in 2026 (and What You’re Paying For)
ElevenLabs started as a text to speech company: you paste a script, pick a voice, and get an audio file back. Its pricing page now splits the business into three products. ElevenCreative covers text to speech, voice cloning, music, sound effects and dubbing. ElevenAgents builds voice agents that answer calls and chats. ElevenAPI sells the same models to developers, including the Scribe speech to text model.
Think of a subscription as a prepaid phone card. Every plan gives you a monthly number of credits, and “all products draw from one shared monthly credit pool”, says the ElevenLabs pricing page. A character of text costs one credit on the Multilingual v2 model, a minute of transcription costs 330 and a minute of music costs 900. That one fact explains most of the complaints you will read about ElevenLabs: people budget for voiceovers, then spend the same credits on music or dubbing.
Is ElevenLabs a stable company to pay for?
The signs are good. On January 6, 2026, New York’s governor announced that ElevenLabs would invest $33 million in research and development and create 230 jobs in New York City, backed by up to $4.4 million in state Excelsior tax credits. That matters if you are cloning your voice into its system or building a product on its API: a vendor that is hiring is less likely to disappear with your voice library.
💵 ElevenLabs Pricing Plans 2026: Every Plan Explained
These are the current plans from the ElevenLabs pricing page, read on October 11, 2026, at the regular monthly price. The minutes column is the page’s own estimate of text to speech audio per month if you spend all your credits on speech.
| Plan | Monthly price | Credits per month | Speech minutes | What it adds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 10k | ~10 | Text to speech, speech to text, sound effects, voice design, music, 3 Studio projects |
| Starter | $6 | 30k | ~30 | Commercial license, Instant Voice Cloning, music commercial use, Dubbing Studio, 20 Studio projects |
| Creator | $22 | 121k | ~121 | Professional Voice Cloning (1 voice), option to buy additional credits |
| Pro | $99 | 600k | ~600 | 192kbps audio, 44.1kHz PCM output via the API |
| Scale | $299 | 1.8M | ~1,800 | 3 workspace seats, 3 Professional Voice Clones |
| Business | $990 | 6M | ~6,000 | 10 seats, 10 Professional Voice Clones, low-latency speech from 5 cents a minute |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom | HIPAA agreements (BAAs), custom SSO, contract terms |
Our January version listed Starter at $5, Scale at $330 and Business at $1,320, with 100k credits on Creator. So the entry plan got a dollar dearer, Creator got 21% more credits for the same $22, and the two business plans got cheaper. If you run out, extra speech costs about $0.20 a minute on Starter, $0.18 on Creator and $0.17 on Pro and above, according to the compare-plans table.
🔍 REALITY CHECK
Marketing Claims: “$22 First month 50% off”, next to an $11 price on the Creator card. Starter’s 83% off first month ($1) ran until October 18, and the page no longer shows it.
What It Really Means: The Creator discount covers the first month only: from month two you pay the regular $22 until you cancel. Starter is the regular $6 from the first month.
Verdict: A cheap way to try a plan for a month. Budget for the full price.
ElevenLabs pricing on the free plan: what $0 gets you
The free plan gives you 10,000 credits a month, which the pricing page puts at about 10 minutes of speech. You get text to speech, speech to text, sound effects, voice design, music and three Studio projects, and Eleven v4 is included. What you don’t get is a commercial license, which starts on Starter, and free credits do not roll over. Use it to hear the voices and compare models; don’t plan a YouTube channel on it.
How credits really work (the part that surprises people)
Each plan’s minutes assume you spend everything on speech. The other products draw from the same pool at very different rates, according to the pricing FAQ:
- Speech to text: 330 credits a minute.
- Music: 900 credits a minute.
- Sound effects: 200 credits per generation.
- Voice changer and voice isolator: 1,000 credits a minute.
- Dubbing: 2,000 to 10,000 credits a minute, depending on the mode and whether you keep the watermark.
In practice, Creator’s 121,000 credits would cover about 134 minutes of music or about six hours of transcription if you spent them on nothing else (our arithmetic from the FAQ rates). Unused credits on paid plans roll over for up to two months, so your balance can never exceed three times your monthly quota, and the help center says you lose them if you cancel or downgrade. Pay-as-you-go credits are separate and expire 12 months after purchase.
📊 What One Included Minute of Speech Costs on Each Plan (USD)
ElevenLabs annual billing: two months free
The pricing FAQ says annual billing “works out to two months free”: you pay ten times the monthly price. That is $60 a year for Starter, $220 for Creator (about $18.33 a month), $990 for Pro, $2,990 for Scale and $9,900 for Business. Credits still arrive monthly with the same rollover cap, so switch to annual only once you know how much you actually use.
🎙️ ElevenLabs Voice Cloning and Eleven v4: What Each Plan Unlocks
Voice cloning is the reason many people pay. It comes in two tiers. Instant Voice Cloning arrives on Starter at $6. Professional Voice Cloning, the higher tier, needs Creator at $22, and the compare-plans table lists one Professional Voice Clone on Creator and Pro, three on Scale and ten on Business. Creator also gives you 30 custom voice slots, against 10 on Starter and 3 on Free.
The model news is Eleven v4, launched September 28, 2026. ElevenLabs calls it “our most emotive text-to-speech model yet”, it covers more than 90 languages, and the v4 page says it is “available on every plan including the free tier” at the same credit price as the other speech models. The Turbo version is built for live conversations, with a median time to first speech of about 150 milliseconds. For the launch, the pricing page advertised “3x credits included on Creator+” for Eleven v4 until October 12. The detail on the same page was narrower: during the offer, up to twice your monthly text to speech credits spent on v4, in the web and mobile apps, did not count against your balance. It was free v4 speech, not extra credits for music or dubbing.
🔍 REALITY CHECK
Marketing Claims: “Professional Voice Cloning” is listed as the headline feature of the Creator plan.
What It Really Means: Creator and Pro each include one Professional Voice Clone. A second professional-quality voice, say for a co-host, means moving to Scale at $299 a month, which includes three.
Verdict: Perfect for one narrator. Two-host shows should price Scale, or use Instant Voice Cloning for the second voice.
🎵 Eleven Music: Commercial Use From $6
Eleven Music turns a text prompt into a full track. The pricing page lists music on the free plan and “Music commercial use” from Starter, and the API pricing page says “commercial use licensing on Starter+ plans”. So a $6 subscription is the cheapest way to use the tracks in monetised videos. Read ElevenLabs’ terms before using them in broadcast or advertising work.
The cost is in credits: 900 a minute. Starter’s 30,000 credits would cover about 33 minutes of music and nothing else, by our arithmetic. Developers pay $0.15 a minute on the API. For a side-by-side with Suno and the other music tools, see our best AI music generators guide.
🤖 ElevenAgents: Conversational AI Pricing Per Minute
ElevenAgents builds voice agents that answer phone calls or website chats, and it is priced by the minute of conversation. According to the agents pricing page, each plan includes minutes: 15 on Free, 75 on Starter, 275 on Creator, 1,238 on Pro, 3,738 on Scale and 12,375 on Business. After that, extra call minutes cost $0.08 each on every plan, and calls above your concurrency limit are charged double, at $0.16 a minute.
Two costs sit on top. The agent’s language model “is billed separately on top, based on the model you choose”, and if you connect your own phone provider such as Twilio, that provider bills you directly. ElevenLabs itself does not charge extra for telephony. A small business trying out a receptionist agent can start on Creator; a call centre is an Enterprise conversation.
📝 Scribe v2 and Scribe v2 Medical: ElevenLabs Scribe API Pricing
Scribe is ElevenLabs’ speech to text model. In the apps it uses your credits, at 330 a minute. On the API, the API pricing page lists $0.22 per hour of audio for Scribe v2 and $0.39 per hour for Scribe v2 Realtime, the live version with about 150 milliseconds of latency and 90+ languages. Here is the ElevenLabs text to speech API and transcription pricing in one place:
| API product | Price |
|---|---|
| Text to speech, Flash / Turbo | $0.04 per 1K characters |
| Text to speech, Multilingual v2, v3 and v4 | $0.08 per 1K characters (v4 had a $0.022 launch price until October 12) |
| Scribe v2 and Scribe v2 Medical | $0.22 per hour of audio |
| Scribe v2 Realtime | $0.39 per hour of audio |
| Music | $0.15 per minute |
| ElevenAgents, extra minutes | $0.08 per minute |
ElevenLabs for medical transcription: Scribe v2 Medical
For medical transcription, ElevenLabs offers Scribe v2 Medical, generally available since September 22, 2026, at the same $0.22 per hour. ElevenLabs’ own benchmark puts its word error rate on clinical dictation at 4.9%, against 7.6% for base Scribe v2. The fine print matters more than the benchmark: it is HIPAA-eligible only for enterprise customers with a Business Associate Agreement and Zero Retention Mode switched on. A self-serve subscription does not meet that bar, so patient audio belongs on an Enterprise contract.
⚔️ ElevenLabs Alternatives: Fish Audio, Google Gemini TTS and Qwen3-TTS
The closest ElevenLabs competitor for creators is Fish Audio, and the cheapest route for developers is Google’s Gemini speech models. Here is how they compare on the plan most people would actually buy:
| ElevenLabs Creator | Fish Audio Plus | Google Gemini TTS (API) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $22 a month ($220 a year) | $15 a month ($11 a month billed annually) | Free tier, then pay per token |
| Speech included | ~121 minutes | Up to 200 minutes | Pay as you go |
| Per included minute | About $0.18 | About $0.075 | Not comparable |
| Voices | 1 Professional Voice Clone, 30 voice slots | 1 professional voice slot, 10 private voice slots | Built-in voices |
| Also includes | Music, transcription, dubbing, voice agents | Voice Design | Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS: $0.50 per 1M input tokens, $9 per 1M audio tokens until December 31, 2026 |
📊 Included Speech Minutes Per Month: ElevenLabs vs Fish Audio
Choose ElevenLabs if you want one subscription for voice, cloning, music, transcription and agents. Choose Fish Audio if speech is all you need and minutes per dollar matter most: Plus works out to about $0.075 a minute against roughly $0.18 on Creator (our arithmetic). Our Fish Audio review covers its quality and limits. Choose Google’s Gemini TTS if you are a developer happy to pay per token, with a free tier to start; our Google AI Studio text to speech review walks through it. Choose Qwen3-TTS if you can run an open-source model yourself, the option we cover in our Qwen3-TTS review.
📬 Enjoying this breakdown?
Get honest AI tool analysis delivered weekly. No hype, no spam.
👤 Which ElevenLabs Plan Should You Pay For (and Who Shouldn’t)?
Choose Starter ($6) if: you need commercial rights for a few short voiceovers or for music in monetised videos, and about 30 minutes of speech a month is enough.
Choose Creator ($22) if: you publish narration every week in your own cloned voice. About 121 minutes a month covers roughly four 30-minute scripts, with credits left to roll over in a quiet month.
Choose Pro ($99) if: you produce audiobooks or long courses, around 600 minutes a month, or your app needs 44.1kHz PCM audio from the API.
Skip ElevenLabs if: you only need a few minutes a month (the free plan, or Gemini’s free tier, will do), you want the most speech per dollar (Fish Audio), you need an AI presenter on screen rather than a voice (see our HeyGen review), or you need HIPAA coverage without an enterprise contract. Our roundup of free AI tools lists what the no-cost plans really include.
💬 What Subscribers Are Saying
Reviews split hard. On Trustpilot, ElevenLabs scored 3.1 out of 5 from 1,180 reviews on October 11, 2026, with 48% five-star and 38% one-star ratings. Three camps stand out:
- The quality camp: five-star reviewers praise how easy the platform is to use and the quality of its audio tools.
- The credits camp: a frequent complaint is credits running out faster than expected, which fits the shared pool described above. One October 10 review says simply “NOT ENOUGH CREDITS”.
- The support camp: reviews are mixed. Some praise fast, friendly help, while others say the automated bot is hard to get past to reach a human. A few also report weaker cloning results for non-American accents.
💡 Key Takeaway: Budget credits for everything you plan to make, not only speech. Add up your monthly minutes of voiceover, music and transcription at the FAQ rates before you pick a plan, and remember that cancelling forfeits whatever is left.
❓ FAQs: Your Questions Answered
Q: How much does ElevenLabs cost per month?
A: From $0 to $990. Free is $0, Starter $6, Creator $22, Pro $99, Scale $299 and Business $990 a month, and Enterprise is custom. Annual billing charges 10 months for a year.
Q: Is there an ElevenLabs free plan?
A: Yes. It includes 10,000 credits a month, about 10 minutes of speech, and Eleven v4. It has no commercial license and free credits do not roll over.
Q: Does the ElevenLabs Starter plan include a commercial license?
A: Yes. Starter, at $6 a month, is the first plan with a commercial license. It also adds Instant Voice Cloning and commercial use of Eleven Music.
Q: What is the ElevenLabs Scribe API pricing?
A: Scribe v2 and Scribe v2 Medical cost $0.22 per hour of audio on the API, and Scribe v2 Realtime costs $0.39 per hour. In the apps, transcription uses 330 credits a minute.
Q: How much does ElevenLabs conversational AI cost per minute?
A: Extra ElevenAgents minutes cost $0.08 each on every plan once the included minutes run out (275 a month on Creator). Calls above your concurrency limit cost $0.16 a minute, and the language model is billed on top.
Q: Can ElevenLabs be used for medical transcription?
A: Yes, with Scribe v2 Medical at $0.22 per hour of audio. It is HIPAA-eligible only for enterprise customers with a Business Associate Agreement and Zero Retention Mode turned on.
Q: Do ElevenLabs credits roll over?
A: Yes, on paid plans. Unused credits roll over for up to two months, and your balance is capped at three times your monthly quota. You lose them if you cancel or downgrade, and the free plan has no rollover.
Q: Is ElevenLabs worth it in 2026?
A: Yes, if you publish voiceovers every week and want a cloned voice: Creator at $22 gives about 121 minutes of speech. If you only need plain speech at the lowest price, Fish Audio Plus includes more minutes for $15.
🏆 Final Verdict: Is ElevenLabs Worth It in 2026?
For creators who publish voiceovers every week, yes. ElevenLabs covers more of the audio job in one subscription than Fish Audio or Gemini TTS: speech in 90+ languages with Eleven v4, voice cloning, music you can use commercially, transcription and voice agents. Creator at $22 is the sweet spot, and this year’s repricing made it better value, with 121k credits instead of 100k.
The catch is the credit pool. It makes ElevenLabs easy to start and easy to overspend, and Trustpilot reviewers say so loudly. If all you need is speech, Fish Audio gives you more minutes for less, and developers can start free with Gemini’s speech models. Check the current offers on the ElevenLabs pricing page before you subscribe, because first-month discounts change often.
Founder of AI Tool Analysis. Reads every pricing page, help article and footnote so you don’t have to. Covering AI tools since 2025. See how we research →
Related Reading
- Fish Audio Review 2026
- Google AI Studio Text to Speech Review
- Qwen3-TTS Review 2026
- Best AI Music Generators 2026
- HeyGen Review
- Synthesia Review 2026
- Google AI Studio Review
- Free AI Tools 2026
- NotebookLM Review
Stay Updated on AI Audio Tools
AI voice and audio prices move every few months. New models launch, credits get reshuffled and plans change. Don’t miss the next change that affects your bill.
- ✅ Honest Breakdowns: We read the pricing pages and docs, not press releases
- ✅ Price Tracking: Know when tools get cheaper or go free
- ✅ Comparison Updates: As the market shifts, we update our verdicts
- ✅ Feature Launches: Major updates covered within days
- ✅ No Hype: Just the AI news that actually matters for your work
Free, unsubscribe anytime.
Last Updated: October 19, 2026
Prices Checked: ElevenLabs pricing, API pricing and agents pricing pages, October 11, 2026
Next Review Update: November 18, 2026
Have a tool you want us to cover? Suggest it here | Questions? Contact us