ElevenLabs Pricing in 2026: Every Plan, Real Costs and Hidden Fees

ElevenLabs Starter is $6 a month, or $5 a month billed annually, and it is the first plan with a commercial license. Creator is $22 a month, $11 the first month, Pro is $99, Scale is $299 for 3 seats, and Business is $990 for 10. These prices were verified on ElevenLabs' pricing page in September 2026.

That ladder is a credit pool, not a seat price. Free, Starter, Creator, and Pro are one workspace each, so a second person pays for another subscription until a shared workspace starts at Scale. Speech, music, dubbing, and sound effects spend the same monthly credits, so a plan that looks large for a voiceover can be small the week you dub a video.

Toolradar data: the AI voice ranking we publish evaluated 120 tools, updated September 2026, and on its top 10 the median cheapest paid plan is $16 a month. Starter sits under that median, and the product record is on ElevenLabs' Toolradar page, the meter comparison is our text-to-speech software list, the voice comparison is AI voice generators, and a longer Dupple breakdown sits at ElevenLabs pricing.

Plan	Monthly price	Best for	Limit that changes the decision
Free	$0	A non-commercial trial	10,000 credits, about 10 minutes, attribution required
Starter	$6, or $5 on the annual plan	A short commercial voiceover	30,000 credits, about 30 minutes, instant voice clone
Creator	$22, first month $11	Cloning a real voice, plus top-ups	121,000 credits, about 121 minutes, professional clone
Pro	$99	API audio at 44.1 kHz PCM	600,000 credits, about 600 minutes
Scale	$299	A shared workspace	1.8 million credits, 3 seats, about 1,800 minutes
Business	$990	A larger team and lower latency	6 million credits, 10 seats, about 6,000 minutes
Enterprise	Custom quote	SSO, a BAA, more seats	Credits and seats are negotiated

Free is a sandbox, and the audio is not yours to sell

The free plan includes text to speech, speech to text, sound effects, voice design, music, productions, image, and 3 Studio projects. That is enough to hear the product, and not enough to ship a course or a product voice. Paid plans grant commercial rights, and free audio is non-commercial use with attribution.

The interface estimate is about 10 minutes, and nothing rolls over, so an unfinished test is gone at the reset. One credit equals one character on multilingual v2, cloning is not included, and the 3 custom voice slots are for Voice Design only.

Starter is the commercial plan most people should buy first

Starter adds the commercial license, instant voice cloning, 20 Studio projects, commercial music use, Dubbing Studio, and image and video. The compare table lists about 30 minutes, 10 custom voice slots, and 3 concurrent requests. Professional voice cloning is not on this card, so a clone of a specific person waits for the next plan.

Buy it for a short voiceover you will publish. A weekly video of a few minutes fits, while a podcast, a dubbed lesson, or a clone of a named person does not. Extra minutes are about $0.20 here and about $0.36 on free, so free overage costs more per minute than this plan. Annual billing charges 10 months, the Starter invoice is $60, and the credits still reset every month.

Creator is where a real clone and extra credits start

Creator adds one professional voice clone, additional credits, about 121 minutes, 30 custom voice slots, and 5 concurrent requests. The annual equivalent in ElevenLabs' FAQ is $18.33 a month, billed as $220 for the year. The half-off first month, $11, is a monthly checkout offer, not a second discount on the annual plan, so the two offers do not stack.

Move here when the voice has to be a specific person, or when the Starter pool runs out mid-month and an upgrade beats weekly overage. A new subscription can prepay pay-as-you-go credits that last 12 months and sit outside rollover. A legacy Starter plan cannot, and it waits for the reset or an upgrade.

Pro is a quality and volume plan, not a team plan

Pro is $99 and adds 44.1 kHz PCM through the API, about 600 minutes, 160 custom voice slots, and 10 concurrent requests. It still does not add a seat, so a cofounder needs a separate plan or a move to Scale. The extra minute on Pro, Scale, and Business is about $0.17, against about $0.18 on Creator, which is too small a gap to be the reason you upgrade.

Buy Pro for the pool or for the PCM file, not for a teammate. The annual equivalent is $82.50 a month, charged as 10 times the monthly price, and the credits still refill each month.

Scale and Business are the only self-serve seat plans

Scale is the first shared workspace: 3 seats, team collaboration, 3 professional voice clones, and 1.8 million credits, which is the buy when projects have to live in one account. Business is $990 and adds 10 seats, 10 professional voice clones, low-latency speech as low as 5 cents a minute, and 6 million credits. No card below Scale publishes a price for one extra seat, so another person is a second subscription or a quote.

Fill the seats, or the workspace is an expensive logo. Business matches the Pro monthly price per seat only when every included seat is used. Three separate Starter plans cost $18 a month and do not share projects, so a loose group stays cheaper on separate plans until they need one timeline.

Annual equivalents are $249.17 a month for Scale and $825 a month for Business, invoiced up front at $2,990 and $9,900. Enterprise is the quote for more seats, custom SSO, a BAA, a DPA, or higher concurrency, and the seat fee is not the whole contract if usage is large.

One credit is one character, until the product is not speech

The pricing FAQ lists one shared pool. Text to speech is 1 credit per character, and speech to text is 330 credits a minute. Music is 900 a minute, a sound effect is 200, and voice changer or voice isolator is 1,000 a minute. Automatic dubbing is 2,000 credits per minute with a watermark and 3,000 without, and Dubbing Studio is 5,000 with a watermark and 10,000 without.

Dubbing is how a small plan vanishes: Starter's pool is about 15 minutes of watermarked automatic dubbing, or 3 minutes of Dubbing Studio with the watermark off, against about 30 minutes of speech. Music at that 900-credit rate is about 33 minutes on the same pool, so price a dubbed course on the dubbing meter, then compare AI dubbing tools and AI music generators.

Flash and Turbo on the API cost 0.5 to 1 credit per character, which can stretch speech and does not stretch a dubbing minute. Paid credits roll for up to two months, up to twice the monthly quota, so the balance can reach 3 times one month. A downgrade or cancellation forfeits the remainder at the end of the cycle. Pay-as-you-go credits sit outside that cap, and you pay per generation rather than per download.

Agents are a minute meter on the same plan names

Included call minutes run 15, 75, 275, 1,238, 3,738, and 12,375 from free through Business, with 4, 6, 10, 20, 30, and 40 concurrent calls. ElevenLabs bills these minutes separately from the creative credit pool, on the same plan names as the table above, so a free account can only demo a short call.

The speech minute is not the whole call, because extra minutes are $0.08. Burst pricing above the concurrency cap is $0.16 a minute and can triple concurrency, and text messages are $0.003 each. The language model is deducted from credits, and ElevenLabs adds no telephony fee, so Twilio or a SIP trunk bills the carrier side.

For a phone agent rather than a file, read what agentic AI is. You can create as many agents as you want, and the caps that bind are concurrency and the monthly credit limit.

The API publishes dollar rates, and they do not match the credit quota

The API pricing page lists text to speech at $0.10 per 1,000 characters for v3 and multilingual v2, and at half that rate for Flash, Turbo, and v3 Conversational, so a product on the faster models pays less per character. Speech to text is $0.22 an hour on Scribe v2, including the medical model, and $0.39 an hour in realtime. A live caption costs more per hour than a file you can wait on. Entity detection adds $0.07 an hour and keyterm prompting adds $0.05 an hour.

Music is $0.15 a minute, and voice changer, voice isolator, and sound effects are $0.12 a minute. Dubbing v1 is $0.33 a minute with a watermark and $0.50 without, while Dubbing v2 is $2.20 a minute, which will break a budget you priced like speech. Budget studio work from the credit table and a product from this rate card.

On Starter the API tab lists 60,000 included v3 characters, and the Creative tab lists 30,000 credits. They are not one quota, so confirm checkout before you forecast a launch on the larger figure. v3 caps a request at 5,000 characters, multilingual v2 at 10,000, and Flash and Turbo at 40,000, and every tab excludes taxes. A startup grant of 12 months and 33 million characters is an application for a new agent product, not a coupon on Starter.

What the same job costs at Cartesia, WellSaid, and Murf

These tools meter different things, and the prices below were checked on each vendor's pricing page in September 2026. Cartesia sells credits with unlimited seats, WellSaid sells download minutes, and Murf sells a one-user studio plus a separate API, so the sticker prices are not the same kind of bill.

Buyer	ElevenLabs	Cartesia	WellSaid	Murf
Commercial audio, light use	Starter, about 30 speech minutes	Pro is $5 a month, about 133 minutes of Sonic-3.6, commercial license	Starter is $19 a month for 20 download minutes, or $10 a month billed annually	Creator is $29 a month, or $228 for the year
A shared team	Scale, the shared workspace	Seats are unlimited, including on Pro	Business is $160 per user per month, billed annually	Self-serve studio plans are one user until Enterprise
A live voice agent	Extra call minutes at $0.08	Calls are $0.06 a minute, plus $0.014 on a Cartesia number	A download studio, not this job	Falcon is $0.01 per 1,000 characters on the API
Training narration you will export	Credits spent at generation	Credits spent at generation	Paid plans generate without limit and bill the download	Free is 10 minutes, with no downloads

Cartesia's pricing page puts commercial use and instant cloning on Pro, pro cloning on Startup at $49 a month, and a free plan at 20,000 credits, about 27 minutes of Sonic-3.6, and the record is Cartesia on Toolradar.

WellSaid's pricing page gives the trial 3 download minutes and no commercial rights, so the trial cannot ship a client spot. Annual Starter is $120 for 240 download minutes, and Annual Pro is $33 a month, $396 for the year, for 2,160 download minutes. Unused download minutes reset each cycle and do not roll over, the opposite of ElevenLabs' paid credit rollover, and the record is WellSaid on Toolradar.

Murf lists commercial rights on Creator and a business license on the annual business plan at $66 a month, $792 for the year. The free studio trial is 10 minutes, with no downloads and no commercial rights. The API trial is $10 of credit a month, and studio-quality speech is $0.03 per 1,000 characters. Murf on Toolradar sits next to the text-to-speech guide. If the person has to be on camera, use HeyGen or another avatar generator and keep the voice on the cheaper speech plan. Speechify's reading app is a different bill: its API starts with 500,000 free characters a month, and its Starter plan matches the monthly rate on WellSaid's annual Starter.

Fees that never appear on the plan card

The plan price is the floor. Taxes are extra, the credit pool is shared across speech, music, and dubbing, and an agent call adds the language model plus any carrier invoice you bring. The approved price is not always the final invoice. Annual billing saves two months and does not hand you a year of credits on a self-serve plan.

Rollover is lost when you downgrade or cancel: the plan stays active until the cycle ends, then the account becomes free and unused paid credits expire. You cannot pause, so a quiet month is still a paid month. Upgrades keep unused credits, and payment is card, Apple Pay, or Google Pay. On Enterprise, and on legacy Creator, Pro, Scale, and Business, usage-based billing can charge immediately once those fees pass twice the monthly subscription.

AIpresso is the short daily brief on which AI prices moved. Get it here.

Which plan is worth paying for

For one person publishing audio, start on Starter, annual if you will still be generating next quarter. Move to Creator when you need a professional clone or you already burn the Starter pool. Pro is for volume and for PCM from the API, and it still will not seat a teammate.

For a team, buy Scale when three people must share projects and the credit pool is actually going to be used, or you are paying for empty seats. If you need SSO or a BAA, the public cards stop and Enterprise is the conversation.

For a product that speaks on its own, price the API tab and the agent minutes, not the speech-minute column, and Flash or Turbo is the cheaper character rate. A wider stack choice sits in AI tools for business.

How we checked these prices

Louis Corneloup, founder of Dupple and Toolradar, prepared this price breakdown for people choosing an ElevenLabs plan. We checked ElevenLabs' pricing page, the Agents tab, the API tab, and the billing docs on September 23, 2026. Cartesia, WellSaid, and Murf figures come from each vendor's pricing page the same day, and the Speechify API ladder comes from speechify.ai's pricing page. The 120 tool count and the $16 median are from Toolradar's live AI voice ranking that month, and no vendor paid for placement. Publishing rules for this site sit on the AIpresso about page.

FAQ

How much does ElevenLabs cost in 2026?

Free is a non-commercial trial with 10,000 credits. Starter is $6 a month, or $5 a month when you pay for 10 months up front ($60 for the year), with 30,000 credits and a commercial license. Creator is $22 a month, $11 the first month, or $220 for the year, with 121,000 credits. Pro is $99 a month, Scale is $299 a month for a shared workspace and 1.8 million credits, and Business is $990 a month for 10 seats and 6 million credits, while Enterprise is a custom quote. The API and agent overages sit on top of those plans, so the plan price is the floor of the bill.

Is ElevenLabs free?

Yes, with 10,000 credits, about 10 minutes of text to speech, and no commercial license, so it is a listening test rather than audio you can sell. Free audio can be used non-commercially if you attribute ElevenLabs, and cloning, rollover, and a commercial publish all require a paid plan. Starter is the first plan with the commercial license.

How much is ElevenLabs per seat?

Starter, Creator, and Pro do not publish a per-seat price, because each one is a single workspace and a colleague needs a separate subscription. Scale includes 3 seats at its published monthly price, and Business includes its larger seat bundle at its own monthly price. Business matches the Pro monthly price per seat only when every included seat is filled, so an empty seat costs more per person than Pro. Extra seats, SSO, and a BAA sit on Enterprise, which is quoted. Annual billing on Scale and Business is $249.17 and $825 a month equivalent, still with a monthly credit reset.

What is an ElevenLabs credit worth?

On multilingual v2, 1 credit is 1 character of text to speech. The same credit pool charges 330 credits per minute of speech to text, 900 per minute of music, 1,000 per minute of voice changer or voice isolator, and 2,000 to 10,000 per minute of dubbing depending on watermark and studio. Flash and Turbo on the API cost 0.5 to 1 credit per character. Starter's monthly pool is about 30 minutes of speech, about 15 minutes of watermarked automatic dubbing, or about 3 minutes of Dubbing Studio without a watermark.

Does the ElevenLabs API cost extra on top of a subscription?

The API tab prices usage in dollars, separate from the creative credit pool, so a subscription does not make API usage free. Text to speech is $0.10 per 1,000 characters on v3 and multilingual v2, and half that on Flash, Turbo, and v3 Conversational. A subscription still includes an amount on that tab, and on Starter the included v3 amount is 60,000 characters, which is not the Creative credit total, so forecasting on the larger figure overstates the plan. Speech to text starts at $0.22 an hour, agent extra minutes are $0.08, and the language model is deducted from credits, so one call can spend both meters.

Is ElevenLabs cheaper than Murf, Cartesia, or WellSaid?

For a short commercial voiceover, Cartesia Pro is $5 a month, under the monthly Starter price, with about 133 minutes of Sonic-3.6 and unlimited seats, so a small team that only needs speech may pay less there. Murf Creator is $29 a month or $228 a year, and WellSaid Starter is $19 a month, or $120 a year for 240 download minutes. ElevenLabs is the lower entry price against Murf and against WellSaid's monthly Starter, and it is the higher entry price against Cartesia Pro. Scale is the wrong comparison for a solo creator, because the other tools do not make you buy a multi-seat plan to collaborate.

Do unused ElevenLabs credits roll over?

On a paid plan, unused credits roll for up to two months, and the balance can reach 3 times the monthly quota, if you do not downgrade or cancel, and free credits do not roll. Cancelling or downgrading keeps the plan until the end of the cycle, then drops you to free and expires unused paid credits. Pay-as-you-go credits last 12 months and are not under the rollover cap. Self-serve annual plans still reset the included credits every month, so annual billing changes the invoice and not the meter.

Cite this: AIpresso, "ElevenLabs Pricing in 2026: Every Plan, Real Costs and Hidden Fees", September 2026.