> ElevenLabs
ElevenLabs is a voice AI platform whose API covers text to speech, speech to text, sound effects, voice design, music and dubbing from one shared monthly credit pool. The Free plan costs $0 and includes 10,000 credits per month; paid plans start at Starter ($6/month, 30,000 credits) and rise to Creator ($22/month, 121,000 credits), Pro ($99/month, 600,000 credits), Scale ($299/month, 1,800,000 credits with 3 seats) and Business ($990/month, 6,000,000 credits with 10 seats). For V2 Multilingual models 1 text character equals 1 credit, while V2 Flash/Turbo English and V2.5 Flash/Turbo Multilingual cost 0.5 to 1 credit per character on API usage; speech to text is metered at 330 credits per minute.
// pros
- Free plan includes 10,000 credits per month that can be spent on text to speech (1 credit per character on V2 Multilingual), speech to text (330 credits per minute), sound effects (200 credits per generation), voice design, music and image, all drawn from one shared pool.
- Per-minute overage pricing falls with tier: an extra text-to-speech minute is quoted at about $0.36 on Starter, about $0.20 on Creator and about $0.17 on Pro, Scale and Business.
- Unused credits on paid plans roll over for up to two months, so a balance can reach 3x the monthly quota, and upgrading carries unused credits into the next cycle.
- The published Startup Grants Program gives 12 months free covering 33M characters for building and testing conversational agents.
- Credits are billed per generation request rather than per download, and a limited number of regenerations are free when the content and settings are unchanged.
// cons
- Instant Voice Cloning and the commercial license are not on the Free plan: both start at Starter ($6/month), and Professional Voice Cloning starts at Creator ($22/month).
- Rollover does not apply to the Free plan, and downgrading or cancelling forfeits unused paid credits at the end of the billing cycle.
- Non-speech workloads are expensive in credits: Dubbing Studio output ranges from 2,000 credits per minute with watermark up to 10,000 credits per minute without, and Voice Changer or Voice Isolator cost 1,000 credits per minute, so the 10,000-credit free allowance equals about 30 minutes of speech to text or 10,000 characters of synthesis.
- Credits are consumed per generation request rather than per accepted output, which makes retry-heavy workflows hard to budget from the pricing page alone.
Use the Free plan to measure real character and minute costs for your script and voices, then move to Starter only when you need the commercial license or instant cloning. If your workload is mostly long-form transcription, keep ElevenLabs for synthesis and route the transcribing to a per-hour speech-to-text provider, because 330 credits per minute drains a shared pool far faster than synthesis does.
written by Mike Fleming, Uprouter editorial · verified against official sources September 16, 2026
How we estimated this: the free allowance is converted to a dollar value using the provider’s own pay-as-you-go rates for the models a typical developer would reach for. When the allowance is metered in requests, tokens or minutes rather than dollars, we assume median usage of the cheapest capable model. Because assumptions are involved, the figure carries the est. flag — treat it as an order of magnitude, not a quote.
note: Free plan is published as 10,000 credits per month at $0; valued at the Starter plan rate ($6 per 30,000 credits) this is about $2.00 per month, an estimate because ElevenLabs does not price the free allowance in USD (elevenlabs.io/pricing, checked 2026-09-16).
| Plan | Type | Monthly | Input /1M | Output /1M | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | payg | — | — | — | smoke |
| Free | free | — | — | — | 10,000 credits/month (≈ 10,000 characters); personal use, attribution required |
| Pro | subscription | $99.00/mo | — | — | $99/mo; higher credit allotment and professional voice cloning |
| Scale | subscription | $299.00/mo | — | — | $299/mo for scale workloads |
| Business | subscription | $990.00/mo | — | — | $990/mo for enterprise/business teams |
| Startup Grant | free | — | — | — | 12 months free for eligible startups; 33M characters valid for 12 months |
| Starter | subscription | $6.00/mo | $20.00 | — | $6/mo, 30,000 credits/month ≈ $0.20 per 1k characters |
| Creator | subscription | $22.00/mo | $18.00 | — | $22/mo ($11 first month), 121,000 credits/month ≈ $0.18 per 1k characters |
Pricing normalized from public sources — always verify with the provider.
// model prices
| Model | Input /1M | Output /1M | Context |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eleven v2 Turbo | — | — | — |
| Eleven Multilingual v2 | — | — | — |
| Eleven v3 | — | — | 100k |
| Eleven Multilingual v2 | — | — | — |
| Eleven Turbo v2.5 | — | — | — |
| Eleven STT v2 | — | — | — |
| Scribe v1 | — | — | — |
$ Does ElevenLabs have a free tier?
Yes — ElevenLabs offers a free tier that we value at roughly $2.00 in free credits (estimate — derived from rate-limited usage at pay-as-you-go prices). Always confirm current limits on ElevenLabs's official pricing page — free tiers change without notice.
$ How much does ElevenLabs cost per 1M tokens?
ElevenLabs does not publish simple per-1M-token pricing (it may bill per request, per output, or via a subscription plan). Check their official pricing page for exact figures.
$ Is ElevenLabs safe to use?
Uprouter rates ElevenLabs as low risk. Medium risk. The Free plan carries no commercial license and no voice cloning, so anything built on it must stay internal, and cloning requires a paid tier whose terms sit outside the pricing page. One shared credit pool is the main budgeting risk: a single minute of watermark-free Dubbing Studio (10,000 credits) consumes an entire free month, and credits are charged per generation attempt rather than per delivered file. Rollover is forfeited on downgrade or cancellation, and credits do not roll over at all on the Free plan. Risk ratings are editorial, evidence-based, and never influenced by affiliate relationships.
Raw community sentiment, shown unblended. Votes never feed into objective data fields like price, risk, or status — and never into sort order.
No published reviews yet — be the first.
// more_informationprice history · live status · risk & confidence · code snippets
price_history
No recorded changes yet.
live_status
current: unknownNo probes recorded yet.
Uprouter runs its own probes; best-effort, not a guarantee. Probe results depend on our network location and cadence — for production, always use the provider’s own status page.
risk_&_confidence
Medium risk. The Free plan carries no commercial license and no voice cloning, so anything built on it must stay internal, and cloning requires a paid tier whose terms sit outside the pricing page. One shared credit pool is the main budgeting risk: a single minute of watermark-free Dubbing Studio (10,000 credits) consumes an entire free month, and credits are charged per generation attempt rather than per delivered file. Rollover is forfeited on downgrade or cancellation, and credits do not roll over at all on the Free plan.
Confidence reflects how much verifiable evidence (official docs, probe history, community reports) backs this entry. Risk is our editorial assessment of operator reliability and terms — not financial advice.
code_snippets
# ElevenLabs's own API — get a key from their dashboard
curl https://elevenlabs.io/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer THEIR_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "elevenlabs/turbo-v2",
"messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "Hello" }]
}'Direct to the provider — Uprouter receives nothing; verify their current pricing before purchasing.
Ranked by neutral similarity signals only — live status, free-tier shape and free-credit proximity. Commercial relationships never influence this list.