ElevenLabs pricing explained: what each tier really buys
Starter's $6 buys about 33 minutes of narration a month, Creator's $22 about 2¼ hours, and the free plan cannot publish on an earning channel at all.
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The ElevenLabselevenlabs.io · affiliate pricing page lists seven plans, priced in credits, with a first-month discount on one of them and an annual price under each. None of that is the question a faceless channel is asking. The question is two questions: can I publish this on a channel that earns, and how many minutes of narration does the money buy. This page answers both, tier by tier, in the site’s usual unit of one minute of finished narration.
Every figure below is read from ElevenLabs’ own pricing page and its help centre on 2026-09-08. The conversion is the one used across this site: ordinary narration runs about 900 characters a minute (roughly 150 words at six characters a word, spaces included), and ElevenLabs’ page states that on its Multilingual v2 model “1 text character equals 1 credit”.
The tiers, converted
| Plan | Monthly | Billed yearly (per month) | Credits/month | Narration at 900 chars/min | Per minute (monthly price) | Commercial licence | Voice cloning |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | — | 10,000 | ~11 minutes | — | No | None |
| Starter | $6 | $5 | 30,000 | ~33 minutes | ~18¢ | Yes | Instant, 2 custom voices |
| Creator | $22 ($11 first month) | $18.33 | 121,000 | ~2¼ hours | ~16¢ | Yes | Professional, 3 custom voices |
| Pro | $99 | $82.50 | 600,000 | ~11 hours | ~15¢ | Yes | Professional, 5 custom voices |
| Scale | $299 | $249.17 | 1,800,000 | ~33 hours | ~15¢ | Yes | Professional, 15 custom voices, 3 seats |
| Business | $990 | $825 | 6,000,000 | ~111 hours | ~15¢ | Yes | Professional, 25 custom voices, 10 seats |
| Enterprise | custom | custom | custom | — | — | Yes | custom |
Two things stand out once the credits are turned into minutes. The per-minute price barely moves above Creator: Pro, Scale and Business all land at about 15 cents. You are not buying a cheaper minute up there, you are buying volume, seats and voice slots. And the whole table sits in a narrow band of 15 to 18 cents, which is roughly fifty times what the same minute costs through a raw API. That gap is the price of an editor and a voice library, and whether it is worth paying is the real decision on this page.
What the free plan actually is
The free plan is a trial with a specific and easy-to-miss condition on it. ElevenLabs’ help centre states it in one sentence: “The free plan does not include a commercial license and cannot be used for any commercial purpose.” A monetized channel is a commercial purpose, and so is a channel you intend to monetize once it qualifies.
If you publish free-plan output anyway, on a channel that is not earning, there is a second rule. You “must attribute it to ElevenLabs by including ‘elevenlabs.io’ or ‘11.ai’ in the title.” The title, not the description or the credits. For a channel that lives or dies on click-through, that is a real cost, and it is the reason the free plan is a worse deal than it looks even before monetization.
So the free plan buys about eleven minutes a month of deciding whether you like the voices. That is a fair use of it. It is not a way to run a channel.
Starter: the floor for an earning channel
Starter at $6 a month is the cheapest ElevenLabs plan with a commercial licence, which makes it the floor for anyone publishing on a channel that earns or plans to. The help centre’s line is “All paid plans include a commercial license, provided you’re not using Beta Services.”
What $6 buys is 30,000 credits, about 33 minutes of narration. An 8-minute video is roughly 7,200 characters, so Starter is four videos a month if every take is the final take. Nobody’s first take is the final take. At an average of one and a half renders per script, which is conservative, Starter is closer to three videos. Retakes are what actually drain the allowance, and per-character billing charges the second pass at the same rate as the first.
Starter also includes instant voice cloning and two custom voice slots. Instant cloning works from a short sample; the consent rule that goes with it is the same on every tier and is covered in whose voice you are allowed to clone.
Creator: where the arithmetic changes
Creator is $22 a month, with the first month at $11, for 121,000 credits, about 2¼ hours of narration. That is roughly seventeen 8-minute videos a month before retakes, or eleven at the one-and-a-half-takes assumption. For a channel posting two or three times a week, this is the tier the numbers point at; Starter runs out in the second week.
Creator is also the first tier with professional voice cloning, which trains on a longer sample, and three custom voice slots. If a cloned voice is part of the channel’s identity, this is the tier where that starts, and it is the main thing Creator buys over Starter besides volume.
The per-minute price drops from about 18 cents to about 16, and the first-month discount takes it to about 8 cents for one month only. Paid yearly, Creator is $18.33 a month, or a little under 14 cents a minute.
Pro and above: volume, not a cheaper minute
Pro is $99 for 600,000 credits, about 11 hours a month. Scale is $299 for 1.8 million, about 33 hours, with three seats. Business is $990 for 6 million, about 111 hours, with ten seats. Each works out to about 15 cents a minute, so the tiers above Creator are for channels that have outgrown 2¼ hours a month or teams that need seats, not for anyone hunting a lower rate. The one lower rate the page lists, “Low-latency TTS as low as 5c/minute” on Business, is the Flash model through the API, which belongs to the next section.
Three credit rules that move the numbers
The credit conversion is not a single number, and the page says so if you read past the plan cards.
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Model matters. “For V2 Multilingual models, 1 text character equals 1 credit. For V2 Flash/Turbo English and V2.5 Flash/Turbo Multilingual models, discounted pricing applies for API usage, costing between 0.5 and 1 credit per character.” If you generate through the API with a Flash model, a 30,000-credit Starter allowance can stretch toward 66 minutes, and the per-minute price roughly halves. The table above uses the 1-credit rate because that is what the editor bills.
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Credits roll over. “Unused credits roll over for up to two months — up to 2× your monthly quota — so your balance can reach at most 3× your monthly quota” on an active paid subscription. A slow month is not wasted, which matters for anyone whose output is uneven. It does not raise the ceiling on a busy month beyond what you have banked.
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Yearly billing is ten months for twelve. The annual prices on the page are the monthly price times ten, spread across the year: $5 for Starter, $18.33 for Creator, $82.50 for Pro. This is also the answer to a number that circulates in third-party roundups. Starter “for $5” is the yearly rate quoted as a monthly figure; the monthly rate is $6. Both are on the vendor’s page. Neither is wrong, but they are not the same commitment.
Where the cheaper option wins
If you can run a few lines of code, or use a tool that calls an API for you, the same minute of narration costs about a third of a cent through Google’s standard voices and free for about 74 hours a month under its allowance, and about 1½ cents through OpenAI. The full table is here. Against that, every ElevenLabs tier is expensive per minute, and no tier changes that.
What ElevenLabs sells at 15 to 18 cents a minute is an editor, a voice library, cloning, and a voice quality many channels choose deliberately. If you need those, Starter or Creator is a reasonable purchase. If you do not, the API is the honest answer and the $6 starter setup becomes a cents-a-month one.
Which tier, in one line each
- Testing voices, channel not earning, willing to put elevenlabs.io in every title: Free.
- Earning channel, up to about three or four videos a month: Starter, $6.
- Two or three videos a week, or a cloned voice as the channel’s identity: Creator, $22, and take the first month at $11.
- More than 2¼ hours of finished narration a month: Pro, and expect the same 15-cent minute, not a cheaper one.
- Comfortable with an API and not attached to a specific voice: none of them.
Prices and credit rules read from the pages below on 2026-09-08. Vendors revise credit accounting more often than headline prices, so check your first month’s usage against these estimates before budgeting a year on them.
Sources
- ElevenLabs pricing — plan prices, credits, annual rates, rollover rule, per-model credit rates, cloning and seat counts
- Can I publish the content I generate on the platform? — ElevenLabs Documentation — free-plan commercial restriction and title attribution rule; commercial licence on paid plans