ElevenLabs runs from $0 to $990 a month across six plans — and the number most people quote, the "$11" Creator price, is a first-month teaser, not the real bill. We verified every tier at the live checkout on August 6, 2026, and did the math that matters: what a minute of finished audio actually costs.

The plans, verified

Monthly billing, checked August 6, 2026. Every plan meters usage in credits; the minute figures below are ElevenLabs' own text-to-speech estimates.

  • Free — $0. 10k credits (≈10 minutes of TTS), 3 Studio projects. No commercial license — anything you publish commercially needs a paid tier.
  • Starter — $6/mo. 30k credits (≈30 min), the commercial license, and instant voice cloning.
  • Creator — $22/mo. Advertised as $11, but that's 50% off the first month only. 121k credits (≈121 min) and professional voice cloning.
  • Pro — $99/mo. 600k credits (≈600 min), plus 192kbps audio and PCM output via the API.
  • Scale — $299/mo. 1.8M credits (≈1,800 min) and 3 workspace seats.
  • Business — $990/mo. 6M credits (≈6,000 min), 10 seats, and low-latency TTS priced as low as 5¢/min.

Yearly billing gives two months free on every paid tier — Starter works out to $5/mo, Creator $18.33, Pro $82.50, Scale $249.17, Business $825. Enterprise is custom. All prices exclude tax.

The per-minute math

Spread each subscription over its included minutes and the plans converge fast: Starter lands around $0.20 per minute, Creator at $0.18, and Pro through Business at roughly $0.17. Overage runs $0.36/min on Free down to about $0.17 on the top tiers. In other words: past Starter, you're not buying a better rate — you're buying volume, seats, and cloning features. Pick the plan whose included minutes match your real monthly output and ignore the rest.

Where the free tier actually ends

The free plan is genuinely useful for testing voices — ten minutes a month covers a lot of experimenting. The wall is the commercial license, which only starts at Starter ($6/mo): publish a monetized video, podcast, or product with free-tier audio and you're outside the terms. One more wrinkle: credits are shared across every ElevenLabs product — speech-to-text, sound effects, music — so the "minutes" estimates only hold if you spend them all on TTS.

Cheaper alternatives with a free tier

ElevenLabs is the quality benchmark, but it's not the budget option. From the 47 text-to-speech tools in our index:

  • Play.ht — freemium, with paid plans from $19/mo (checkout-verified). The closest feature match at a lower entry.
  • NarrationBox — free trial, then from $15/mo. Voiceover-focused, lighter on cloning.

The honest caveat: voice quality is the reason ElevenLabs is the default. Test alternatives with your own script before switching — the per-minute savings are real, but so is the gap on hard material like names, numbers, and emotion.

Frequently asked questions

Is ElevenLabs free?

There's a real free tier — about 10 minutes of TTS a month — but it carries no commercial license. Commercial use starts at Starter, $6/mo.

How much does ElevenLabs cost per month?

$6 (Starter), $22 (Creator), $99 (Pro), $299 (Scale), or $990 (Business), billed monthly — verified August 2026. Yearly billing discounts each by two months.

Is the $11 Creator plan real?

It's 50% off your first month. From month two you pay $22/mo — budget on that number.

What does a minute of ElevenLabs audio cost?

Between $0.17 and $0.20 on the paid tiers, converging toward $0.17 as you scale. Overage is $0.36/min on Free and drops to roughly $0.17 at the top.

Prices verified at the live checkout on August 6, 2026. We track changes on the Eleven Labs listing — and every price in the directory gets the same treatment.