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What does ElevenLabs cost, and what do the credits actually buy?

Published 2026-10-15 · Researched and price-checked on official sources

ElevenLabs pricing in 2026 starts at $6 per month for 30,000 credits and reaches $990 per month for Business at 6,000,000 credits, checked on the official pricing page on October 15, 2026. Because one text character costs one credit and every product draws from that same pool, what each tier actually buys is the number that matters.

Key facts

What matters

Monthly list prices: Free $0 (10,000 credits), Starter $6 (30,000), Creator $22 (121,000), Pro $99 (600,000), Scale $299 (1,800,000 credits and 3 seats), Business $990 (6,000,000 credits and 10 seats).
Annual billing is 10 months of the monthly price for 12 months of service: $5 per month equivalent on Starter, $18.33 on Creator, $82.50 on Pro, $249.17 on Scale, $825 on Business.
Every product spends the same credits: text to speech costs 1 credit per character, speech to text 330 credits per minute, music 900 per minute, voice changing and isolation 1,000 per minute, dubbing 2,000 to 10,000 per minute.
Unused credits roll over for up to two months, so a balance can reach three times the monthly quota, but the buffer is lost when you downgrade or cancel and does not exist on the free tier.
First-month offers end October 18, 2026: Starter $1 instead of $6, Creator $11 instead of $22. Both renew at list price.

ElevenLabs plans and prices, verified October 15, 2026

ElevenLabs is a voice AI platform that charges subscriptions in credits rather than in minutes, words or seats, and its self-serve ladder is short: six published tiers plus Enterprise. The page was opened for this article on October 15, 2026, so treat these as the current list prices and re-check before you buy.

Starter at $6 per month carries 30,000 credits and is where the commercial license appears. Creator at $22 per month carries 121,000 credits and adds professional voice cloning, which is the feature that turns the subscription into a production tool rather than a demo. Pro at $99 per month carries 600,000 credits and unlocks 44.1 kHz PCM audio output over the API alongside 192 kbps downloads, the two specifications API builders ask about first.

The upper tiers are as much about seats as about credits. Scale costs $299 per month for 1,800,000 credits and 3 workspace seats; Business costs $990 per month for 6,000,000 credits, 10 workspace seats, 10 professional voice clones and low-latency text to speech advertised from 5 cents per minute. Enterprise is custom priced with DPAs, SLAs, a HIPAA business associate agreement, custom SSO and raised concurrency.

One detail to catch before subscribing: the Starter and Creator cards carry first-month promotions that expire on October 18, 2026. Starter is $1 instead of $6 and Creator is $11 instead of $22 for the first month only, after which both renew at list price.

What one credit buys across the ElevenLabs products

Credits are the reason ElevenLabs pricing resists a per-minute comparison with rivals. One text character generated on the site consumes one credit on the V2 Multilingual models; the V2 Flash and Turbo models cost between 0.5 and 1 credit per character on API usage. The pool is shared across every product, which is where budgets go wrong.

Text to speech: 1 credit per character.
Speech to text: 330 credits per minute.
Eleven Music: 900 credits per minute.
Sound effects: 200 credits per generation.
Voice changer and voice isolator: 1,000 credits per minute.
Dubbing: 2,000 credits per minute automatic with watermark, 3,000 automatic without watermark, 5,000 in Dubbing Studio with watermark, 10,000 in Dubbing Studio without watermark.

Run the Pro allowance through those numbers and the plan stops looking uniform. 600,000 credits is roughly 600 minutes of text to speech, about 1,818 minutes of speech to text, 667 minutes of music, 3,000 sound effects, 600 minutes of voice isolation, 120 minutes of Dubbing Studio with a watermark, or just 60 minutes of watermark-free Dubbing Studio output.

ElevenLabs reaches the same conversion from the other side. Its own plan comparison lists about 10 minutes included on Free, 30 on Starter, 121 on Creator, 600 on Pro, 1,800 on Scale and 6,000 on Business, which is each plan's credit allowance divided by 1,000. Reading a plan as "600,000 credits equals ten hours of voiceover" works until the first dub, when ten hours becomes one.

The credit rules that decide your real bill

Three rules on the pricing page change the effective cost of a plan, and none of them show up in the headline number.

Rollover caps at three times your quota. Unused credits carry over for up to two months, so the largest balance you can hold is this month's allowance plus two months of spillover. On Starter that ceiling is 90,000 credits, on Pro it is 1,800,000, and holding it requires staying on the same paid tier without cancelling.
Downgrading or cancelling forfeits the buffer. The plan change takes effect at the end of the current billing cycle and the unused credits expire with it. Top-up credits bought separately sit outside the rollover cap, which makes a one-off top-up a better answer to a heavy month than dropping a tier.
The free tier never rolls over. Free is 10,000 credits per month with no carry-over, so it works as a test bench rather than a production budget.

Two smaller rules matter if you generate through the API. Credits are charged per generation request rather than per download, so re-rendering the same line costs credits again, although the page notes that a limited number of free regenerations can be available while the text and settings stay unchanged. Plan cards also list the commercial license as a Starter feature, which puts free-tier audio in the testing column rather than the billable one.

Monthly, annual, and what the discount actually saves

Annual billing is not a percentage discount with a separate rate card: the page states that an annual plan equals the monthly price multiplied by ten, so you pay for 10 months and receive 12. The equivalent monthly rates are $5 for Starter, $18.33 for Creator, $82.50 for Pro, $249.17 for Scale and $825 for Business.

The bulk discount inside the monthly prices is easier to see per unit of credit. Divide each price by its allowance and Starter works out to $0.20 per 1,000 credits, Creator to $0.18, Pro to $0.165, Scale to $0.166 and Business to $0.165. That matches the extra-minute rates the pricing page publishes for those same tiers, $0.20 on Starter, $0.18 on Creator and $0.17 on Pro, Scale and Business, which is a useful sanity check: the effective rate you pay drops as soon as you leave the cheapest tier.

Against that, the first-month offers ending October 18, 2026 are a sharper short-term saving than the annual plan, $5 off on Starter and $11 off on Creator. If you are still deciding whether a workflow sticks, the discounted first month plus a cancellation before renewal costs less than committing to a year.

Which ElevenLabs tier fits which buyer

The plans map to credit volume first and team size second, which makes the choice narrower than the six-tier ladder suggests.

Testing a voice or a language: Free, 10,000 credits per month, remembering that nothing rolls over and the commercial license starts a tier up.
Solo narration, podcast or YouTube work: Starter at $6 covers roughly 30 minutes of finished speech per month. Creator at $22 is the upgrade when you need professional voice cloning or more headroom, and its 121,000 credits are about two hours of speech.
Shipping audio through an API: Pro at $99 for 44.1 kHz PCM output and 600,000 credits, which is about ten hours of speech or five hours of dubbing at the automatic without-watermark rate.
A team of three: Scale at $299, roughly $100 per seat, with 1,800,000 credits. It only pays off if the same three people are also spending those credits.
Dubbing or agent workloads in production: Business at $990 for 6,000,000 credits, 10 seats and low-latency speech from 5 cents per minute. Per seat this is the cheapest tier on the page, at about $99, but only at a credit volume most small studios will not reach.

The honest catch on the upper tiers: seats and credits are sold together. Paying $299 for three seats is bad value for one person generating, and the lower tiers do not restrict collaboration, so buy Scale or Business for volume rather than for the seat count.

Where the cost bites, and what to price alongside it

Dubbing is the credit sink. At 10,000 credits per minute for watermark-free Dubbing Studio output, a Pro plan covers one hour of finished dub per month, and a 45-minute episode is most of a Scale plan at 1,800,000 credits. Anyone pricing a dubbing series should build the credit math per episode before choosing a tier, because the audio you publish is not the audio you generate once.

Speech to text is the opposite case. At 330 credits per minute it is the cheapest product in the pool, so a plan bought for transcription can carry a lot of text to speech, music and sound effects in the same month without the allowance moving much.

If the per-character model is the blocker rather than the credit balance, the alternative is to move the spend to compute: open-weight speech models remove the per-character fee and hand you a GPU bill instead. Our Qwen3-TTS versus ElevenLabs breakdown covers that trade directly, and the ElevenLabs alternatives guide runs through the hosted competitors.

The recommendation that follows from the numbers: buy Starter or Creator to prove the workflow, take the first-month offer if you subscribe before October 18, 2026, and step up to Pro or above only when your monthly credit burn is already past 300,000. Buying a large allowance you do not spend is the expensive mistake here, because the surplus eventually expires.

At a glance

Plan	Monthly price	Credits per month	What the tier adds
Free	$0	10,000	Text to speech, speech to text, sound effects, voice design, music, Image, 3 projects in Studio
Starter	$6, or $1 for the first month to Oct 18, 2026	30,000	Commercial license, instant voice cloning, 20 Studio projects, music commercial use, Dubbing Studio
Creator	$22, or $11 for the first month	121,000	Professional voice cloning, additional credits
Pro	$99	600,000	44.1 kHz PCM audio output via API, 192 kbps quality audio
Scale	$299	1,800,000	3 workspace seats, team collaboration, 3 professional voice clones
Business	$990	6,000,000	10 workspace seats, 10 professional voice clones, low-latency text to speech from 5 cents per minute
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	DPA and SLA terms, HIPAA business associate agreement, custom SSO, elevated concurrency limits

ElevenLabs plan prices and credit allowances, verified on the official pricing page on October 15, 2026.

FAQ

Is there a free ElevenLabs plan?

Yes. Free costs $0 and includes 10,000 credits per month with text to speech, speech to text, sound effects, voice design, music and Image. It never rolls over, so unused credits expire each cycle, and the commercial license is listed as a Starter feature rather than a free one.

How many minutes of audio does each ElevenLabs plan include?

Roughly 1,000 credits per minute of text to speech, which is how the pricing page's own comparison reads: about 10 minutes on Free, 30 on Starter, 121 on Creator, 600 on Pro, 1,800 on Scale and 6,000 on Business. Other products spend the same credits faster, from 330 credits per minute for speech to text up to 10,000 per minute for watermark-free Dubbing Studio output.

Do unused ElevenLabs credits roll over?

Up to two months' worth, so your balance can reach three times the usual monthly quota while you stay on the same paid plan. Downgrading or cancelling forfeits the remaining credits at the end of the billing cycle, the free tier gets no rollover, and separately purchased top-up credits are not subject to the rollover cap.