ElevenLabs Pricing (2026): Plans, Credits, Real Cost

You pick the $22 Creator plan because the page says 121,000 credits. Two weeks later the balance is gone, and you made four videos.

Nothing went wrong. ElevenLabs pricing is simple on the surface: six plans from $0 to $990 a month, one pool of credits shared by every product. What a credit buys is the interesting part. The same plan buys very different amounts of voice by product, and by app versus API.

On Creator, that difference is more than double. We'll get to why, and to the music rule that catches people who publish to Spotify.

Prices and terms checked against ElevenLabs' pricing pages, help centre, Terms of Service and Music Terms on 1 November 2026. We read the pages; we didn't buy a plan or generate audio for this post.

ElevenLabs pricing plans in 2026

Here's the whole ladder. The minutes are ElevenLabs' own estimate for text to speech in the app, at about 1,000 characters per minute.

Yearly billing is ten months' price for twelve, so Creator drops from $264 to about $220 a year. Prices exclude tax, and the live offers are on ElevenLabs' pricing page.

You're probably looking at that $1 Starter offer. It's real, but the card says "Until Nov 8" and it covers the first month only.

ElevenLabs' billing FAQ adds that you won't get a first-month discount again if you've had one before. Creator's first month is $11. After that, the table applies.

The credits column is the part to read twice. Those minutes assume everything goes to speech in the app.

What one credit actually buys

In the app, ElevenLabs charges 1 credit per character on its highest-quality voice models, and puts a minute of audio at roughly 1,000 characters. So a 10-minute YouTube voiceover costs about 10,000 credits.

That's the Free plan's whole month. Starter covers three of those videos. Creator covers about twelve.

Every other product draws from the same pool at its own rate. These are the approximate costs from the pricing page FAQ:

Spend credits on music and you have fewer voice minutes left.

Say you're the Creator subscriber from the opening. Four 10-minute voiceovers take 40,000 credits. A 3-minute backing track for each adds 10,800. Dubbing two of those videos into one language adds 60,000. That's 110,800 credits, and the month is nearly over before it started.

Two smaller things eat credits quietly. You pay per generation, not per download, so every re-roll of a line costs the same as the first take. Studio does give up to two free regenerations if you don't change the text, voice or settings.

And some shared voices in the Voice Library carry a credit multiplier. ElevenLabs shows it as a tag before you generate.

All of that is the app. Send the same text through the API and the numbers change.

The same plan buys twice the speech through the API

The API pricing page doesn't talk in credits. It prices text to speech per 1,000 characters: $0.08 for v4, v3 and v2 Multilingual, $0.04 for v4 Turbo and Flash. Your plan's price becomes an allowance at those rates.

Put the two pages side by side and the gap is hard to miss:

In the app, Creator speech costs about 18 cents a minute. Through the API it's 8 cents on v4 and 4 cents on Turbo. That's two hours of narration versus four and a half, for the same $22.

ElevenLabs admits it in its Pay As You Go docs: "API usage has lower rates than UI usage." It just never puts the two numbers on one page.

Is there a catch? You lose the editor. The API is for code, automations and tools that call ElevenLabs for you, and v3 caps each request at 5,000 characters.

The docs also disagree on the unit. The API pricing FAQ says API usage "is billed in US dollars, not credits". A help article says an API request "will deduct credits from your account". The per-minute price is the same either way, but expect your dashboard to show credits.

If you already script your voiceovers, or use a tool that plugs in an ElevenLabs key, this is the cheapest way to buy ElevenLabs speech. Our AI voiceover guide covers the workflow side.

What happens when you run out of credits?

On a new self-serve plan, you top up. ElevenLabs calls it Pay As You Go (PAYG): you prepay at least $5, your plan's credits are used first, and the top-up kicks in after. Top-ups last 12 months and don't count against the rollover cap.

The old overage model, usage-based billing, is legacy now. ElevenLabs' docs say it "is not available on new self-serve subscriptions", even though the Creator card still lists "Additional Credits".

So what does an extra minute cost? The comparison table puts it at about $0.20 on Starter, $0.18 on Creator and $0.17 from Pro up. That's roughly what your plan's own credits cost, so topping up isn't a penalty.

Except on Free. There an extra minute is about $0.36, 1.8 times the Starter rate. If you're topping up a Free account more than once, Starter is cheaper and comes with a commercial licence.

Three PAYG details worth knowing before you rely on it:

• When the balance hits $0 and Auto Top Up is off or fails, generation stops immediately. ElevenLabs calls this "by design": there are no overage charges.
• Without two-factor authentication, top-ups are capped at $100 a calendar month on Free, Starter and Creator ($200 on Pro).
• Your balance is stored in dollars and converted to credits at your plan's rate, so a downgrade can shrink the credit number even though the dollar value stays put.

Unused credits roll over, until you downgrade

Paid plans keep unused credits for up to two months. Your balance can reach three times your monthly quota: 90,000 credits on Starter, 363,000 on Creator.

That makes ElevenLabs forgiving for creators who work in bursts. A quiet month isn't money thrown away. That's one place it beats Fish Audio, whose credits expire monthly (we compared the two in ElevenLabs vs Fish Audio).

The trap is the downgrade. Drop to a cheaper plan or cancel, and every unused subscription credit is gone at the end of the cycle. Spend down the rollover first, then downgrade.

Refunds are narrow too: within 14 days of payment, and only if you used no credits in that period.

Commercial rights: the free plan's catch

The Free plan is for trying voices, not for publishing work that earns money. ElevenLabs' help centre is blunt: the free plan "cannot be used for any commercial purpose". If you share free-plan audio at all, you must put "elevenlabs.io" or "11.ai" in the title.

Upgrading later doesn't fix it. The same article says content created outside a paid subscription, "before or after", can't be used commercially.

So a voiceover you made on Free in March stays non-commercial after you buy Starter in April. Make anything you might monetise on a paid plan.

The Terms of Service add one more line people miss: if you use ElevenLabs non-commercially, you must sign up with a personal email address.

Paid plans are the opposite. Audio you generate while subscribed keeps its commercial licence after you cancel. The one exception is anything made with features ElevenLabs labels as Beta.

Music has its own rulebook

Eleven Music sits under separate Music Terms, last updated 9 October 2026, and they're stricter than the plan cards suggest.

Starter's music is "Commercial, no streaming". The Music Terms define streaming as putting tracks on a music streaming platform. So releasing a song to Spotify or Apple Music needs Creator or above. Film, TV, radio and commercial "Studio Games" need an enterprise music plan on every tier.

Two more rules in the terms change who can buy which plan:

• Free through Pro are "For Individual Use Only" for music. Scale requires fewer than 10 employees, Business fewer than 50.
• The terms set monthly generation limits of 17 minutes on Starter, 62 on Creator and 304 on Pro, while the pricing page lists 33, 134 and 667 minutes. ElevenLabs doesn't explain the gap, so plan on the lower number until it does.

If your agency has a dozen people making ads with Eleven Music on a Pro plan, read those terms before the next invoice. For background tracks in your own videos, our guide to AI music for YouTube without copyright claims goes through the licensing questions.

Dubbing and voice agents cost more than they look

Dubbing is charged per minute of source video, for each language. Dub a 10-minute video into three languages with automatic dubbing and no watermark, and that's 30 dubbing minutes, or 90,000 credits. About three quarters of Creator's month, gone on one video.

Starter can dub, but with a watermark. The comparison table shows no watermark-free automatic v1 or Dubbing Studio minutes until Creator. ElevenLabs' newer Dubbing v2 is far pricier: about $2.45 per extra minute on Creator, against $0.55 for v1 without a watermark.

Voice agents run on a separate meter. ElevenAgents plans include call minutes instead of drawing on your credit pool: 15 on Free, 75 on Starter, 275 on Creator and 1,238 on Pro. Extra minutes are $0.08.

Then come the add-ons. The LLM that does the thinking comes out of your credits. ElevenLabs' calculator puts 270 minutes on Gemini 2.5 Flash at about $0.78 a month. Text messages are $0.003 each, calls above your concurrency limit cost double ($0.16 a minute), and Twilio or your SIP provider bills you separately.

Which ElevenLabs plan should you pick?

Start from what you'll publish, not from the credits.

• Just testing voices: Free, and publish nothing you might monetise.
• A few voiceovers a month for YouTube or a course: Starter at $6 covers about three 10-minute videos and includes the commercial licence and instant voice cloning.
• Weekly content, a cloned voice of your own, or music you'll release: Creator. It's the first plan with professional voice cloning, watermark-free dubbing and Spotify release rights.
• You or your tools can call the API: generate there, where the same money buys 2 to 2.5 times the minutes. The API rate is the same on every plan ($0.08 per 1,000 characters on v4, from Free to Business), so a bigger plan buys concurrency, seats and voice slots, not cheaper speech. Starter plus top-ups is often enough.
• A team: Scale for 3 seats or Business for 10, and check the music eligibility rules against your headcount.

Pay yearly once you know your volume; it saves two months. Still too expensive? Fish Audio and others are cheaper per minute for plain narration. Our roundups of ElevenLabs alternatives and the best AI audio generation tools compare them.

If ElevenLabs fits, start on ElevenLabs with the smallest plan that includes commercial rights. Watch your balance for one month, then size up from real usage.