ElevenLabs is the voice platform everyone measures against. Fish Audio is the one people switch to when the ElevenLabs bill starts to hurt. On the headline numbers the case for switching looks overwhelming: Fish Audio's plans work out several times cheaper per minute of speech, and its API is roughly a fifth of the price.
Those headline numbers are real, but they hold only under specific conditions. They depend on which plan you are on, whether you pay annually, what language you generate in, and whether you ever have a quiet month. This comparison works through each of those so you can see which platform is actually cheaper and better for what you make.
Prices and plan details were checked against ElevenLabs' and Fish Audio's live pricing pages and developer documentation on 18–19 September 2026. We have no commercial relationship with either company.
The short answer
Choose Fish Audio if you generate a lot of English speech, can commit to annual billing on its Plus or Pro plans, and mainly need text-to-speech and voice cloning. On those terms it is dramatically cheaper — often five times or more per minute — for voice quality that competes at the top of the field.
Choose ElevenLabs if you need more than voice alone: transcription, dubbing, music, sound effects or conversational agents on one account. It is also the better choice if your usage is uneven from month to month, since its credits roll over, if you work heavily in non-Latin scripts through the API, or if you need enterprise healthcare compliance.
At a glance
| ElevenLabs | Fish Audio | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry paid plan | Starter, $6/mo | Plus, $15/mo ($5.50 annual) |
| Free plan | 10,000 credits/mo | 8,000 credits/mo |
| App cost per minute (entry plan) | about $0.20 | about $0.075, or $0.028 annual |
| API text-to-speech | $0.05–$0.10 per 1,000 characters | $15 per million UTF-8 bytes |
| Annual discount | Two months free (about 17%) | About 62% on Plus and Pro, 25% on Max |
| Unused credits | Roll over up to two months | Expire monthly |
| Beyond voice | Transcription, dubbing, music, sound effects, agents | Transcription and voice design |
| Team seats | 3 on Scale, 10 on Business | 3 on Pro, 10 on Max |
Pricing plans side by side
ElevenLabs
| Plan | Monthly | Annual (per month) | Credits | About |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | 10,000 | 10 min |
| Starter | $6 | $5 | 30,000 | 30 min |
| Creator | $22 | $18.33 | 121,000 | 121 min |
| Pro | $99 | $82.50 | 600,000 | 600 min |
| Scale | $299 | $249.17 | 1.8M | 1,800 min |
| Business | $990 | $825 | 6M | 6,000 min |
Creator's first month is half price. ElevenLabs' annual billing is simple — you pay for ten months and get twelve. Its commercial licence starts at Starter, which also adds instant voice cloning; professional voice cloning starts at Creator.
Fish Audio
| Plan | Monthly | Annual (per month) | Credits | Up to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | 8,000 | 7 min |
| Plus | $15 | $5.50 | 250,000 | 200 min |
| Pro | $100 | $37.50 | 2M | 1,620 min |
| Max | $999 | $749 | 25M | 6,250 min |
Pro includes three team seats and Max includes ten. Enterprise adds zero data retention, on-premise deployment and SOC 2 compliance. Plus adds Voice Design and a professional voice slot, and raises the per-generation limit from 500 characters on Free to 15,000.
What a minute of speech actually costs
Dividing each plan by the minutes each vendor says it buys:
| Plan | Monthly billing | Annual billing |
|---|---|---|
| ElevenLabs Starter | $0.200/min | $0.167/min |
| ElevenLabs Creator | $0.182/min | $0.152/min |
| ElevenLabs Pro | $0.165/min | $0.138/min |
| Fish Audio Plus | $0.075/min | $0.028/min |
| Fish Audio Pro | $0.062/min | $0.023/min |
| Fish Audio Max | $0.160/min | $0.120/min |
On Plus and Pro, Fish Audio is about 2.5x cheaper on monthly billing and around 6x cheaper on annual billing. That is the headline, and it is genuine.
Look at the last row, though. Fish Audio Max costs almost exactly what ElevenLabs does per minute. Its 25 million credits are twelve times Pro's allocation, but it is quoted at only about four times Pro's minutes, so the per-minute rate jumps back up to ElevenLabs territory. Max buys seats, professional voice slots and scale — not cheaper speech. For most high-volume users, several Pro seats or the pay-as-you-go API will be the better route.
Fish Audio's annual discount is bigger than it says
Fish Audio's pricing page runs a countdown banner advertising a limited-time 50% off yearly plans, and its FAQ says yearly billing saves 33%. The arithmetic on the plans themselves says something different:
| Plan | 12 months monthly | Annual price | Actual saving |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plus | $180 | $66 | 63% |
| Pro | $1,200 | $450 | 62% |
| Max | $11,988 | $8,988 | 25% |
On Plus and Pro the real saving is closer to two-thirds, far better than either figure the page quotes. On Max it is a quarter. Whether that reflects a promotion stacked on a standard discount or simply inconsistent copy, the practical point is the same: if you are choosing Fish Audio for price, annual billing is where nearly all of the advantage sits, and it is worth confirming the exact yearly total at checkout.
The credits-per-minute puzzle
Fish Audio's FAQ states that each minute of generation costs roughly 600 to 625 credits. Its own plan cards imply something different:
| Plan | Credits | Quoted minutes | Implied credits per minute |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 8,000 | 7 | 1,143 |
| Plus | 250,000 | 200 | 1,250 |
| Pro | 2,000,000 | 1,620 | 1,235 |
| Max | 25,000,000 | 6,250 | 4,000 |
The cards assume roughly double the FAQ rate. The most likely explanation is that the minute figures describe the most expensive model, since Fish Audio's FAQ elsewhere refers to "up to 200 minutes of highest quality" generation on its premium plan. If so, lighter models would get you considerably more. We cannot confirm it from outside, so the per-minute table above uses the quoted minutes — the conservative reading. Generate a known length of audio on the free tier and check the balance before you rely on either figure.
API pricing, and why your language matters
For developers, the gap looks even larger:
- ElevenLabs: $0.10 per 1,000 characters for v3 and v2 Multilingual, about $0.10 per minute of speech. $0.05 for Flash, Turbo and v3 Conversational.
- Fish Audio: $15 per million UTF-8 bytes on its S1 and S2 Pro models, which Fish Audio equates to about 12 hours of English speech — roughly $0.021 per minute.
In English that makes Fish Audio about 4.8x cheaper than ElevenLabs v3 and 2.4x cheaper than Flash. No subscription is required for its API, which is pure pay-as-you-go.
There is a catch hiding in the unit. Fish Audio bills UTF-8 bytes; ElevenLabs bills characters. English letters are one byte each, but Devanagari, Chinese, Japanese and most other non-Latin scripts take three bytes per character. The Hindi word "नमस्ते" is 6 characters but 18 bytes.
So for scripts like Hindi, Chinese or Japanese, Fish Audio's rate works out roughly three times higher per character than for English. As a rough guide:
| English | Hindi, Chinese, Japanese | |
|---|---|---|
| Fish Audio vs ElevenLabs v3 | 4.8x cheaper | about 1.6x cheaper |
| Fish Audio vs ElevenLabs Flash | 2.4x cheaper | about 25% more expensive |
Treat this as the shape of the effect rather than an exact rate, because languages also differ in how many characters a minute of speech contains. But the direction is clear: if you synthesise mainly non-Latin text through the API, the Fish Audio discount narrows sharply, and against ElevenLabs' fast models it can disappear.
Credits that roll over vs credits that expire
This is ElevenLabs' strongest structural advantage, and it rarely makes the comparison tables.
ElevenLabs: on paid plans, unused credits roll over for up to two months, so your balance can reach three times your monthly allowance as long as you keep an active subscription and do not downgrade. Downgrading or cancelling forfeits them.
Fish Audio: unused minutes do not roll over. Monthly quotas reset at the start of each billing cycle.
For steady, predictable production this barely matters. For creators whose output comes in bursts — a launch month, then a quiet one — it matters a lot. On ElevenLabs a quiet month becomes a bigger budget for the busy one. On Fish Audio, credits you don't use that month are lost. If your workload is lumpy, the effective price gap is smaller than the per-minute tables suggest.
Voice quality and cloning
Both platforms sit at the top of the field for natural, expressive speech, and at this level the difference between them is smaller than the difference between voices, models and settings within either one. Rather than pick a winner in the abstract, compare them on your own script.
ElevenLabs offers instant voice cloning from Starter and professional voice cloning from Creator, with custom voice slots scaling from 10 on Starter to 2,200 on Business. Its v3 model is built for emotionally rich, multi-speaker dialogue across 70-plus languages, while Flash targets real-time use at around 75 milliseconds of latency.
Fish Audio includes enhanced voice cloning even on its free plan, with unlimited public voice slots and 10 private slots on Plus, unlimited slots on Pro, and professional voice slots on paid plans. It also offers Voice Design, which generates a new voice from a description, at $0.01 per successful API request.
Both have large community voice libraries. The quickest honest test is to paste the same paragraph from your real script into both free tiers, using the voice closest to what you need, and listen.
Beyond text-to-speech
Here the two are not really the same kind of product.
ElevenLabs is a broad audio suite. One credit pool covers text-to-speech, speech-to-text, voice changing, voice isolation, sound effects, music generation, automatic dubbing, a dubbing studio, long-form Studio projects and conversational voice agents. If you need several of those, ElevenLabs replaces multiple subscriptions.
Fish Audio is focused. It covers text-to-speech, voice cloning, voice design and transcription, done well and priced aggressively. It does not offer music, sound effects or dubbing.
On the one overlapping extra, transcription, the price advantage reverses: ElevenLabs Scribe v2 costs $0.22 per audio hour through the API, against $0.36 for Fish Audio's transcription models — ElevenLabs is about 39% cheaper.
Commercial use
ElevenLabs: the free plan is non-commercial, and a commercial licence starts at Starter ($6). Music commercial use also starts at Starter.
Fish Audio: its pricing page is internally inconsistent here. The free plan's feature list includes "Commercial use", but its FAQ says free users "can only use generated content for personal, non-commercial projects", and that premium subscribers can use verified voices they own commercially. Treat the free plan as non-commercial, and read the current terms of service before publishing anything.
On both platforms, commercial rights cover output, not the right to clone someone else's voice. Only clone voices you own or have explicit permission to use.
Enterprise and compliance
ElevenLabs Enterprise adds custom DPAs and SLAs, custom SSO, elevated concurrency and BAAs for HIPAA customers, plus a HIPAA-eligible medical transcription model with zero retention mode.
Fish Audio Enterprise offers zero data retention, on-premise deployment and SOC 2 compliance, with custom SSO listed as coming soon.
On-premise deployment is a genuine differentiator for organisations that cannot send audio or text to a third-party cloud. HIPAA coverage is the equivalent differentiator on the ElevenLabs side for healthcare.
Which should you choose?
Choose Fish Audio if
- Your output is mostly English speech, where its per-minute advantage is largest.
- You can commit to annual billing on Plus or Pro, which is where the steepest savings are.
- Your usage is steady enough that monthly expiry does not waste credits.
- You want a cheap, subscription-free API for English synthesis.
- You need on-premise deployment.
Choose ElevenLabs if
- You need transcription, dubbing, music, sound effects or voice agents alongside speech.
- Your usage is lumpy, where rolling credits protect you from waste.
- You synthesise mainly non-Latin scripts through the API, especially at low latency.
- You want month-to-month flexibility, where the gap is smaller than on annual.
- You need HIPAA coverage or its broader enterprise terms.
How to decide in fifteen minutes
- Take a real paragraph from your actual script, in your actual language.
- Generate it on both free tiers with the closest voice each offers, and note the credits each generation used.
- Listen blind if you can — have someone else play them to you unlabelled.
- Convert each platform's credit cost into dollars on the plan and billing term you would actually buy.
- If your usage varies month to month, factor in that only ElevenLabs carries unused credits forward.
If quality is a tie for your voice, choose on the cost you measured. If one sounds clearly better, that usually settles it at any price difference. For a wider look at the market, including music and sound-effects tools, see our guide to the best AI audio generation tools.
A note on these figures
Both companies change prices, credit allocations and promotions frequently. Everything above reflects each vendor's live pricing pages and developer documentation as of 18–19 September 2026. Per-minute figures divide plan prices by each vendor's own minute estimates, which rest on different assumptions and are not measured like-for-like. The byte-versus-character comparison is an approximation, since languages vary in how much text a minute of speech contains. Confirm current pricing and commercial terms before you buy.
