ElevenLabs pricing has two layers, and they rarely appear side by side. You pay a monthly plan fee. That fee buys credits, and the rate at which credits turn into audio depends on which product and which model you use. Most surprises on an ElevenLabs bill come from the second layer.
Here is the short version, read from ElevenLabs’ pricing pages on October 2, 2026. Plans run from $0 to $990 a month. Text to speech costs about one credit per character, roughly 1,000 characters per minute of audio. The API lists $0.04 to $0.08 per 1,000 characters depending on the model. Voice agents cost $0.08 per call minute, plus the language model and telephony. ElevenLabs runs a lot of promotions (several were live while we wrote this), so treat every number below as a snapshot and check the source before you budget.
We build Cartesia, which competes with ElevenLabs on real-time speech. That means we have an interest here. The ElevenLabs figures come from ElevenLabs’ own pages, and we put our prices next to theirs at the end so you can check both.
ElevenLabs plans and what each includes
| Plan | Monthly price | Credits per month | What it adds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 10,000 | Text to speech, speech to text, sound effects, voice design |
| Starter | $6 | 30,000 | Commercial license, instant voice cloning |
| Creator | $22 | 121,000 | Professional voice cloning, extra credits |
| Pro | $99 | 600,000 | 44.1kHz PCM output via API, 192kbps audio |
| Scale | $299 | 1,800,000 | Three workspace seats, three professional voice clones |
| Business | $990 | 6,000,000 | Ten seats, ten professional clones, low-latency TTS from 5¢ a minute |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | DPAs, SLAs, BAAs for HIPAA, SSO, higher concurrency |
Annual billing works out to two months free: you pay ten times the monthly price. When we checked, Starter’s first month was $1 (until October 18) and Creator’s was $11. Those discounts are for new subscribers only, so do not use them to compute a year’s budget.
Two plan details matter more than the headline price:
- The free plan has no commercial license. If your output goes into a product, an ad, or anything you sell, the real entry price is Starter at $6.
- Concurrency rises with the plan. In ElevenLabs’ comparison table, simultaneous text-to-speech requests rise from 2 on Free to 25 on Business. For a live application, concurrency often forces an upgrade before credits do.
How credits turn into minutes
Credits are a currency that only ElevenLabs issues, so the useful question is what a credit buys. Per ElevenLabs’ pricing FAQ:
| Product | Approximate credit cost |
|---|---|
| Text to speech | 1 credit per character |
| Text to speech, Flash/Turbo (API) | 0.5 to 1 credit per character |
| Speech to text | 330 credits per minute |
| Voice changer and voice isolator | 1,000 credits per minute |
| Music | 900 credits per minute |
| Sound effects | 200 credits per generation |
| Dubbing | 2,000 to 10,000 credits per minute |
All products share one monthly pool. A Creator plan’s 121,000 credits buy about two hours of text to speech, or about two hours of voice changer audio, but not both. Dubbing burns credits fastest: at 10,000 credits per minute (Dubbing Studio without a watermark), the same plan covers about 12 minutes of video.
Unused credits on paid plans roll over for up to two months, capping your balance at three times the monthly quota. Downgrading or canceling forfeits them at the end of the cycle. Pay-as-you-go top-ups sit outside that cap.
ElevenLabs API pricing by model
The API pricing page quotes the same subscriptions in characters instead of credits. These are the list rates per 1,000 characters on October 2, 2026:
| Model | Price per 1,000 characters | ElevenLabs’ positioning |
|---|---|---|
| Eleven v4 | $0.08 ($0.022 until Oct 12) | Most expressive, 90+ languages |
| Eleven v4 Turbo | $0.04 ($0.011 until Oct 12) | Real-time and agents, ~100ms latency |
| Eleven v3 | $0.08 | Dramatic delivery, 5,000-character cap |
| Eleven v3 Conversational | $0.04 | Low-latency v3, ~280ms |
| Multilingual v2 | $0.08 | Long-form stability, 29 languages |
| Flash / Turbo | $0.04 | Fastest legacy option, ~75ms |
ElevenLabs equates 1,000 characters with about a minute of speech, so $0.08 per 1,000 characters is roughly $0.08 per minute of audio. Latency figures in that table are ElevenLabs’ own. Independent measurements at the 90th percentile tell a different story; see the latency section of our ElevenLabs comparison.
Speech to text bills by the hour of audio: $0.22 for Scribe v2 (batch) and $0.39 for Scribe v2 Realtime (streaming). Entity detection and keyterm prompting add $0.07 and $0.05 per hour.
The v4 discount is large and temporary. If you benchmark costs this week, rerun the numbers after October 12, when v4 returns to the same $0.08 as v3.
ElevenAgents pricing for voice agents
ElevenAgents does not draw from the credit pool. It bills by call minute:
| Plan | Call minutes included | Concurrent calls |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 15 | 4 |
| Starter | 75 | 6 |
| Creator | 275 | 10 |
| Pro | 1,238 | 20 |
| Scale | 3,738 | 30 |
| Business | 12,375 | 40 |
Extra minutes cost $0.08. When traffic exceeds your concurrency limit, burst pricing lets calls through at $0.16 per minute, up to three times the limit. Two costs sit outside these numbers. The language model behind the agent is billed separately at the model’s rate. Your telephony provider (Twilio or a SIP trunk) bills you directly for the carrier side of each call. ElevenLabs adds no telephony fee of its own.
A rough budget for an agent therefore has three lines: $0.08 per minute to ElevenLabs, your LLM’s per-token cost for each turn, and your carrier’s per-minute rate. The first line is the only one on the ElevenLabs pricing page.
What a real workload costs
Two worked examples, using list prices and no promotions.
A text-to-speech API workload: 5 million characters a month (about 83 hours of audio).
- ElevenLabs Flash/Turbo or v3 Conversational: 5,000 × $0.04 = $200.
- ElevenLabs v3 or Multilingual v2: 5,000 × $0.08 = $400.
- Cartesia Startup plan: $49 covers 1.25 million credits. The remaining 3.75 million bill at the Startup overage rate of $45 per million, which totals about $218. Cartesia’s Scale plan ($299) covers all 5 million with room to spare.
A voice agent: 10,000 call minutes a month.
- ElevenLabs Scale: $299 includes 3,738 minutes; the other 6,262 at $0.08 add $501, for about $800, plus LLM and carrier charges.
- Cartesia Managed Agents on Scale: calls cost $0.06 per minute, so $600, with the plan’s $299 counting toward that as prepaid agent usage. A Cartesia-provided phone number adds $0.014 per minute ($140). For a limited time, LLM usage is included for agents built in the Cartesia playground.
Plug your own volumes in. The ranking can change with the model you pick and with whichever promotion is running that month.
When ElevenLabs is worth the price
ElevenLabs is a broad creative suite. One subscription covers music generation, sound effects, dubbing with a studio editor, voice isolation, and long-form narration. If you produce audiobooks, YouTube voiceovers, podcasts, or dubbed video, the bundle is good value, and Cartesia does not sell most of those tools. Pick the ElevenLabs plan with the right number of professional voice clones and the right commercial terms, and you are done.
The calculation changes when the audio is generated live, inside a product, for each customer. Then three things decide cost and quality:
- Rate per character or per minute at volume. Plan credits stop mattering once usage outgrows the plan; overage and API rates are what you pay.
- Latency on slow calls. In Coval’s August 2026 measurements, Sonic 3.5 reached first audio in 351ms at P90, while every ElevenLabs model it tested took more than a second. Agents that pause for a second get talked over.
- Voice quality at real-time speeds. Sonic 3.6 ranks first of 94 models on the Artificial Analysis Provider Voice Arena, 105 Elo points ahead of Eleven v3 (as of August 2026). Leaderboards move, so check the current standings.
Cartesia pricing, for comparison
Cartesia’s plans use one credit per character for text to speech, like ElevenLabs, at a lower price per credit:
| Plan | Monthly price | Credits per month | Prepaid agent usage | Overage per 1M credits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 20,000 | $1 | Not available |
| Pro | $5 | 100,000 | $5 | $65 |
| Startup | $49 | 1,250,000 | $49 | $45 |
| Scale | $299 | 8,000,000 | $299 | $38 |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Volume pricing | Custom |
Pro includes a commercial license and instant voice cloning; Startup adds professional voice cloning. Speech to text with Ink-2 costs 3 credits per second of audio. Voice agents cost $0.06 per minute. Unused credits roll over up to twice the monthly amount. Startups can apply for 12 months of credits; ElevenLabs runs a similar 12-month grant.
If you are leaving ElevenLabs for a real-time product, our ElevenLabs alternatives guide covers migration: voice IDs, cloning, and which features map across. Or try Sonic in the playground and compare the voices yourself before you commit to either bill.
Sources
- ElevenLabs pricing: plans, credits, rollover, and credit costs per product (read October 2, 2026)
- ElevenLabs API pricing: per-model text-to-speech and speech-to-text rates
- ElevenAgents pricing: call minutes, burst pricing, LLM and telephony billing
- Cartesia pricing: plans, credit rates, overages, and agent rates
- Cartesia vs ElevenLabs: latency and quality benchmarks with sources