ElevenLabs Pricing: All Plans & Costs Explained (2026)

The ElevenLabs pricing page looks simple at first glance. Seven plans, a few numbers, done.

And then the questions start:

Is the free plan enough? When does Creator pay off? What will those $22 actually cost me once tax is added? And what exactly separates the cheap voice cloning from the expensive one?

I've used ElevenLabs for years for voice-overs, audio samples, and small audio experiments. For this article I put the pricing through a real stress test. I logged into my own Creator plan (workspace "ElevenCreative"), pulled up the actual billing page, and counted credits one generation at a time.

For this update I went a step further. I upgraded my own account to the Scale plan and ran every single feature, from text-to-speech to Music v2 to the voice agents, through a real balance check. Credits before, credits after, difference logged.

In this article I'll walk you through every ElevenLabs price in detail, explain the credit system, sort out the VAT question for EU buyers, and tell you clearly which plan makes sense for whom.

Curious how the voice quality, cloning, and audio tags actually hold up day to day? I cover all of that in my full ElevenLabs review.

1. ElevenLabs pricing at a glance

This is the real subscription page inside the ElevenLabs dashboard, the one you land on when you click "Subscription," showing your current plan, renewal date, and running credit usage.

ElevenLabs has seven plans in total, from a free entry point to a custom enterprise tier. Here they all are at a glance:

All prices are per month and in US dollars. With annual billing you get two months free. And yes, if you buy from the EU, VAT gets added on top of every one of these prices. More on that below.

A quick word on where these numbers come from, so you know what you are relying on.

Creator and Scale I know from my own account. I paid for both plans myself and read the credit counter straight off the dashboard. Free, Starter, Pro, Business, and Enterprise come from the official ElevenLabs pricing page (elevenlabs.io/pricing), which I went through again from top to bottom for this update. Wherever I measured a number myself, I say so in the article. And wherever I only read it off a page, I say that too.

2. How much does ElevenLabs cost per month?

ElevenLabs costs between $0 and $990 per month depending on the plan. For most content creators it is $22 for the Creator plan, or roughly $26 including 19% VAT if you buy from inside the EU. Buyers outside the EU pay the listed price plus whatever their local tax rules add. Commercial use of the generated files unlocks earlier, at $6 on the Starter plan.

You only move up when you run out of credits. Every plan can do essentially the same things. What separates them is the size of the credit allowance, the voice cloning tier, and a handful of team features. So anyone outgrowing Creator does it because of volume, not because a feature is missing.

And if a fixed monthly price does not work for you at all, there is still the Enterprise plan. It has no list price and gets negotiated case by case.

3. The plans in detail

Numbers in a table are one thing. The real question is which plan fits you. Here I go through each one and tell you exactly when it pays off.

3.1 Is ElevenLabs free? (Free plan, $0)

Yes, permanently. The Free plan costs $0 and gives you 10,000 credits per month, enough for roughly 10 minutes of generated speech. That is plenty to test the voice quality and play with audio tags like [whispers] or [laughs].

Two limits come with it, though.

First, the Free plan only covers non-commercial use and you have to credit ElevenLabs as the source. Second, voice cloning is off the table entirely, neither Instant nor Professional. So it's not enough for serious projects. For testing and small personal experiments, though, the free plan is ideal.

Best for anyone who wants to get to know ElevenLabs before spending money.

3.2 Starter ($6)

The Starter plan costs $6 per month and is the cheapest way into commercial use. From here on you can actually use the generated files in your projects without having to mention ElevenLabs.

The most important extra is Instant Voice Cloning, which Starter unlocks. It clones a voice in minutes from a short recording.

Best for beginners who need their first commercial voice-overs and want to start on a small budget.

3.3 Creator ($22, sometimes $11 for the first month)

The Creator plan costs $22 per month. ElevenLabs also runs a new-customer promotion that drops the first month to $11. That offer comes with conditions and can end anytime, so check the pricing page directly to see if it's still running. Either way, Creator is the sweet spot for most content creators.

You get a lot more credits than Starter, higher-quality audio output, and most importantly the Professional Voice Clone. It sounds noticeably closer to the original than Instant Voice Cloning, but it needs more training material.

Best for podcasters, YouTubers, and bloggers who produce audio regularly and want the most natural voice possible.

3.4 Pro ($99)

The Pro plan costs $99 per month and gives you a large credit allowance. This is no longer hobby territory.

Pro pays off when you use ElevenLabs intensively and productively, for many audiobook chapters, regular dubbing, or a whole batch of voice-overs each month. If you keep running out of credits on Creator, Pro is the next sensible step.

Best for heavy users and small studios with high but still manageable volume.

3.5 Scale ($299)

The Scale plan costs $299 per month and targets teams and agencies with high production volume. The credit allowance jumps well above what Pro gives you. I'm actually running this exact plan myself for the deeper testing in this article. ElevenAgents on Scale includes 3,738 call minutes. On top of that you get 3 Professional Voice Clone slots out of 30 voice slots in the library, both read straight off the "Create voice" dialog in my account.

Best for agencies and teams producing audio at scale across multiple clients or projects.

3.6 Business ($990)

The Business plan costs $990 per month and is built for companies using ElevenLabs at scale. This is about very high volume and the needs of larger organizations.

Best for companies with consistently high audio demand across many projects.

3.7 Enterprise (custom)

There's no fixed price for the Enterprise plan. It's negotiated individually and aimed at large clients with special requirements around volume, contracts, or specific features. If you operate at that scale, your best bet is to talk to the ElevenLabs sales team directly.

Best for large clients who need a custom solution rather than a standard plan.

4. What are credits and how far do they go?

ElevenLabs does not bill in minutes or words but in credits. Credits are the shared currency for everything you generate, whether that is text-to-speech, voice cloning, dubbing, or music.

Every plan comes with a fixed credit allowance per month. The more expensive the plan, the more credits you get. Converted into speaking time, that looks like this:

• Free: about 10 minutes
• Starter: about 30 minutes
• Creator: about 121 minutes
• Pro: about 600 minutes
• Scale: about 1,800 minutes
• Business: about 6,000 minutes

That conversion only holds for plain narration, though. Every feature has its own credit rate, and per minute of audio those rates run from 330 credits for Scribe up to 10,000 for Dubbing Studio without a watermark. So here is the full price list in one place. The third column tells you whether I measured the number in my own account or only read it off a page.

Everything marked green I checked myself with a balance before and a balance after. The rows marked amber are figures ElevenLabs publishes and I took over. For Scribe I have no measurement of my own, my dubbing upload never validated during testing, and the per-stem music prices I read off the download menu instead of triggering them.

Now to the individual features.

4.1 How much does text-to-speech cost?

But what is a credit actually worth? I didn't estimate this, I measured it directly in my account. Eleven v3, the current flagship text-to-speech model, costs almost exactly 1 credit per character, down to the credit and not just roughly.

And because one test alone isn't proof, I repeated the calculation three more times on the upgraded Scale account. Three separate generations of 184, 148, and 182 characters cost me exactly 184, 148, and 182 credits, down to the credit every time. One more thing stood out. Eleven v3 automatically gives you two finished voice variants per generation, but you're only billed once. For the credit price of one version, you effectively get two.

One more detail helps when you do the math. I had the same German text read out once with Eleven v3 and once with the older Eleven Multilingual v2, both times using the German voice Otto. Both cost exactly 184 credits. For Eleven v3 that was the fourth confirmation of the 1-credit rule, for Multilingual v2 the first. So the older model saves you nothing at all, and it hands you one generation instead of two. The same rate applies in Studio, the long-form editor for audiobooks and long texts, where roughly 280 characters cost me exactly 281 credits.

4.2 How much does ElevenLabs Music v2 cost?

ElevenLabs Music v2 works completely differently. A generated song costs 900 credits per minute and per variant, and since the tool produces two variants by default, one finished minute of music lands at around 1,800 credits. Set the length to "Auto" and ElevenLabs happily generates a full 3-minute song, and suddenly you are looking at around 5,400 credits for a single generation.

That's exactly what happened to me while testing, only more so. On the upgraded Scale account, a single auto-generation with the two default variants (2:00 and 2:30 minutes) cost me exactly 4,115 credits, my balance dropped from 1,840,607 to 1,836,492. That lines up almost exactly with the 900-credits rule. 4.5 minutes of combined length times 900 credits works out to roughly 4,050, the rest is rounding overhead from the two odd-length songs.

Two more things show up after that, and neither one appears in any plan table.

The first hides in the download menu. The complete song as a single file is free, but the moment you want the stems separated, you pay. Splitting it into vocals and instrumental costs 900 credits, and the full set of stems (vocals, bass, drums, guitar, piano and other) costs 1,800 credits. Both numbers sit in the download menu of my own track. I read them off the screen rather than spending the credits.

The second one is good news for once. If only part of the song bothers you, you don't have to rebuild the whole thing. In the song editor I selected the outro of my lo-fi track and rewrote it into a synthwave finale with a plain text instruction. Two variants of that single section cost 1,350 credits, taking my balance from 1,835,263 down to 1,833,913. A brand-new track would have cost 4,115. Fixing one section is roughly three times cheaper than starting over.

These three features are what justify the credit price:

• Mid-track genre switching: you can assign a single section a different genre without touching the rest. In my test, the intro and groove stayed at 68 BPM lo-fi at the tag level while the outro was rewritten to 140 BPM synthwave. What you actually hear, though, stayed noticeably closer to the original than those tags suggest. I go into the details in my Music guide.
• Inpainting per section: only the selected passage gets regenerated, and the transitions into the neighboring sections survive. That is exactly why the 1,350 credits above are possible at all.
• Commercial license from Starter: even on the $6 plan you can put the finished tracks into YouTube videos, podcasts, or client work.

For the full workflow, genre switching, and inpainting, see my dedicated ElevenLabs Music v2 guide.

4.3 How much does the Voice Changer cost?

The Voice Changer, which turns an existing recording into a different voice, has its own credit price too. It actually runs on the older Eleven Multilingual v2 instead of v3. ElevenLabs lists 1,000 credits per minute on the pricing page, and my own measurement lands almost exactly there. I converted a 12-second test recording of my own TTS voice into a different voice, and that cost 197 credits, which works out to about 985 credits per minute.

4.4 How much does Scribe v2 (speech-to-text) cost?

I have to say up front that this rate is not one of my own measurements. On the official ElevenLabs pricing page (elevenlabs.io/pricing), speech-to-text is listed at 330 credits per audio minute. Ten minutes of audio therefore work out to 3,300 credits, which is about 2.7% of a Creator plan's monthly allowance. A one-hour interview would land just shy of 20,000 credits, twice what the Free plan gives you in an entire month and two thirds of the Starter allowance.

Two things I do know from my own test. Scribe v2 covers 92 languages and identified my German test audio correctly without me preselecting the language. And the batch upload is not the fast path, whatever the marketing says. It took over two minutes to process a 12-second clip. The speed lives in the realtime path, not in uploading finished files.

How accurately Scribe actually transcribes is something I tested elsewhere against five competitors, in my comparison of the best AI transcription software.

4.5 How much do ElevenAgents cost?

ElevenAgents, the voice agent feature for support and sales bots, is a real exception. ElevenLabs doesn't bill it in credits at all. It bills directly in dollars, $0.08 per call minute for phone conversations and $0.0030 per text message in chat widgets. I ran a test conversation with a finished support agent myself (text widget). That cost 18 credits in conversation fees, plus LLM costs of $0.0829 per minute of compute time. At a connection length of just 2 seconds, the total came to $0.00276, practically unmeasurable fractions of a cent.

5. Voice cloning: which plan do you need?

The short version is that Instant Voice Cloning comes with Starter at $6, the Professional Voice Clone with Creator at $22, and the Free plan gets neither.

The slot counts do not live on the pricing page but in the ElevenLabs documentation (professional voice cloning guide). Creator and Pro get one slot each, Scale gets three, and Business gets ten. I can confirm the three on Scale, because that is exactly what the "Create voice" dialog shows in my own account, out of 30 voice slots in the library overall. You earn extra slots if a finished clone is rated "Studio Quality" in the manual review.

ElevenLabs offers voice cloning in two tiers that differ in quality, effort, and price. Neither one is available on the Free plan. Cloning only opens up once you pay for a plan.

Instant Voice Cloning (IVC) is included from the Starter plan ($6). You upload a short recording and have a clonable voice within minutes. The quality is already genuinely good for many purposes, but it does not quite match the original.

The Professional Voice Clone (PVC) is available from the Creator plan ($22). It needs more and longer training material but sounds noticeably closer to the original. If your own voice is the face of your brand, the step up to the Professional Voice Clone is worth it.

6. VAT and annual billing: what you really pay

Here is a point many people miss:

ElevenLabs lists all prices in US dollars. If you buy from the EU, you pay an extra 19% VAT on every plan, so the $22 Creator plan comes to roughly $26 including tax.

What ends up on your statement in your local currency also depends on the current exchange rate and your bank's fees. So plan for a small buffer rather than converting the USD prices one to one.

If you use ElevenLabs regularly, you can save with annual billing. Paying yearly gives you two months free (you pay for ten months instead of twelve), which makes a real difference depending on your plan.

7. Which plan is right for you?

Enough theory. Here is my clear recommendation, depending on where you are right now:

For the vast majority of content creators, Creator is the right plan. It is the first one to include the Professional Voice Clone, and its 121,000 credits leave room for roughly two hours of speech a month. You move up from there only when the allowance keeps running out, not because a feature is missing.

I deliberately left Enterprise out of the table. It has no list price and gets negotiated individually, so putting it side by side with the rest would be pure guesswork.

If you are still unsure whether ElevenLabs is the right tool for you, take a look at my comparison of the best AI voice generators, where I place ElevenLabs against the full field of competitors. And in my overview of the best text-to-speech tools you will find more alternatives for different use cases.

If price specifically is the dealbreaker, my comparison of ElevenLabs alternatives covers eight tools that are sometimes cheaper or built for a narrower use case.

Convinced and ready to get started? Then you can try ElevenLabs for free and work through the plans at your own pace.