ElevenLabs is a leading AI audio platform known for its lifelike voice generation, real-time cloning, and multilingual dubbing. Whether you're a solo creator or an enterprise team, it offers the infrastructure to generate and scale voice-based content.
In this guide, we will break down the full pricing model: plan comparisons, overage logic, voice model differences, and how to choose the right tier (or replicate this pricing system for your own SaaS).
What is ElevenLabs?
ElevenLabs is an AI audio platform offering hyper-realistic text-to-speech (TTS), voice cloning, dubbing, and transcription. It caters to creators, developers, and enterprises looking to generate or manipulate voice content at scale.
Key capabilities include:
High-fidelity TTS across 29+ languages
Instant and professional-grade voice cloning
Multilingual dubbing and conversational AI
Developer-friendly APIs and usage-based pricing
Audio enhancement tools like Voice Isolator and Voice Changer
Who is ElevenLabs Built For?
ElevenLabs supports a wide range of users across creative and technical workflows:
Creators: Narrators, YouTubers, podcasters, and indie game devs
Developers: API-first teams building apps with voice integration
Agencies: Managing dubbing, client content, and production at scale
Enterprises: Building multilingual content and support flows
Platforms: Embedding voice features into SaaS or marketplaces
Each of these groups benefits from ElevenLabs’ flexible plans and real-time performance.
ElevenLabs Pricing Plans (Monthly Overview)
Plan | Price | Characters (TTS) | Overages | Voice Cloning | Audio Quality | Seats | Concurrency |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Free | $0 | 10k (Multilingual) / 20k (Flash) | N/A | ❌ | 128 kbps | 1 | 2 |
Starter | $5 | 30k / 60k | N/A | Instant Clone | 128 kbps | 1 | 3 |
Creator | $11 (50% off month 1) | 100k / 200k | $0.30 / 1k chars | 1 Pro Clone | 192 kbps | 1 | 5 |
Pro | $99 | 500k / 1M | $0.24 / 1k chars | 1 Pro Clone | 192 kbps | 1 | 10 |
Scale | $330 | 2M / 4M | $0.18 / 1k chars | 1 Pro Clone | 192 kbps | 3 | 15 |
Business | $1,320 | 11M / 22M | $0.12 / 1k chars | 3 PVCs | 192 kbps, SLAs | 15+ | 15 |
Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Negotiated | Custom | Custom | Custom | Custom |
Is ElevenLabs free?
Feature | Free Plan |
|---|---|
Characters | 10k (Multilingual) or 20k (Flash) |
Voice Cloning | Not available |
Commercial Use | Forbidden (attribution required) |
Audio Quality | 128 kbps |
STT Access | 2.5 hours (API), 12 mins (UI) |
Projects | 3 |
Custom Voices | 3 |
Concurrency | 2 requests max |
How ElevenLabs Prices Across Models and Features
ElevenLabs doesn’t just charge by output—it charges by model type and feature usage. Each product category—like Text-to-Speech or Dubbing—has its own pricing logic based on characters, minutes, or hours. And within each, there are two pricing levers:
→ Included quota (per plan)
→ Overage cost (per unit after quota)
Here’s how pricing breaks down by model and feature:
1. Text-to-Speech (TTS)
Models: Multilingual v2 and Flash
Billing unit: Characters and minutes
2. Speech-to-Text (STT)
Interfaces:
API – used for large-scale, automated transcriptions
UI – manual uploads with waveform preview and editing
Metered by: Hours
Available on: All plans
Other details:
Quotas tracked separately for API and UI
UI access comes with significantly lower included volume
Optimized for dev vs creator workflows respectively
3. Conversational AI
Use case: Interactive text+voice agents
Metered by: Minutes
Additional meter: Text messages sent
Other details:
Includes concurrency limits (up to 30)
Designed for real-time voice agent applications
Available across all plans, scaling with usage
4. Voice Changer & Voice Isolator
Metered by: Minutes
Available on: All plans
Other details:
Both tools accessible via Studio & API
Intended for enhancing, isolating, or transforming audio post-generation
Concurrency limits increase with plan
5. Sound Effects
Metered by: Number of generations
Available on: All plans
Other details:
Sound FX feature is generation-based (not duration-based)
Useful for creative workflows and post-processing
Scales with concurrency and generation limits
6. Voice Cloning
Types of cloning:
Instant Clones – lightweight, accessible to all paid plans
Professional Voice Clones (PVCs) – gated to Creator+ plans
Other details:
Access includes voice design slots and custom voice limits
Plan tiers increase allowed PVCs and total voice slots
Custom voices can be stored, designed, and reused across projects
7. Dubbing
Automatic Dubbing – real-time multilingual audio generation
Dubbing Studio – advanced interface for post-editing and alignment
Metered by: Minutes
Other details:
Audio quality scales by plan
Both models available from Starter upwards
Ideal for creative, education, and international content workflows
8. Studio Projects
Metered by: Number of projects
Other details:
Quotas range from basic project folders to enterprise-scale workflows
Enables large-scale voice asset management and production workflows
Feature-rich access in Creator+ plans and above
Why does ElevenLabs have two models?
ElevenLabs offers two types of TTS models Flash and Multilingual V2 to serve very different use cases.
Flash Model: Speed-First, Cost-Optimized
Sub-second latency, perfect for real-time voice agents
Double the character limit as compared to Multilingual (e.g., 20k → 10k on Free)
Moderate audio fidelity (128 kbps)
Less expressive or emotional tone
Ideal for: bots, chat UIs, quick output previews
Multilingual V2: Highest-Quality, Emotionally Rich
Full language + accent support (29+)
Expressive tone, better pacing, and emotion
High-fidelity audio (192 kbps, stereo)
Consumes more characters per minute
Ideal for: YouTube, podcasts, dubbing, narration
Feature | Flash | Multilingual V2 |
|---|---|---|
Latency | Fastest | Slower |
Character consumption | Low | High |
Audio quality | 128 kbps | 192 kbps |
Language support | Limited | 29+ |
Expressiveness | Minimal | High |
Ideal use | Bots, agents | Creative content |
Available on | All plans | All plans |
Pro tip: You can toggle between models. Use Flash for drafts, Multilingual for final renders.
How ElevenLabs' pricing has evolved across years
In just under two years, ElevenLabs moved from being a creator-friendly TTS tool to a fully-fledged audio infrastructure platform. And that journey is clearly visible in how its pricing has evolved, across four major shifts between 2023 and 2025.
ElevenLabs launched with a straightforward tiered subscription model. Users could pick from Free, Starter, or Pro plans, each offering a specific number of text characters per month. The focus was on ease of entry letting creators and developers experiment with TTS and voice cloning using pooled credits.
There was no separation between voice models or output types. You paid a flat monthly rate and used credits for whatever features were unlocked at your tier. Credits covered text-to-speech, voice cloning, dubbing, and other voice features. The only differentiator between plans was quantity: how many characters you could generate, and whether you could use voice cloning or APIs.
In August 2024, as ElevenLabs scaled, it introduced more structured plans—Starter, Creator, Pro, Scale, and Business. Each with increasing credit allowances and access to additional features like professional voice cloning, project folders, dubbing studio, and watermark-free audio.
However, even at this stage, usage billing remained credit-based without model-level distinction. You were charged credits for generating speech or dubbing content, but whether that speech was high-fidelity or low-latency wasn’t broken out or priced separately. “High quality” and “low latency” were used as selling points, but not as distinct models with different costs.
In January 2025, ElevenLabs restructured its pricing with a more segmented, model-aware system. For the first time, usage wasn’t treated uniformly; character credits were split across two separate models: Multilingual v2 and Conversational v1. Users received distinct credit buckets for each model, with unique overage rates and usage tracking.
Core features like professional voice cloning, voice design slots, and dubbing credits were tier-gated—nudging users into higher plans for access. This was also when the Business plan was introduced, filling the gap between Scale and Enterprise.
But this complexity came at a cost. With separate quotas, unclear overage mechanics, and features scattered across plans, users had to decode the pricing before they could use the product. It may have made sense internally as ElevenLabs scaled across use cases, but it created friction for teams just trying to get started or scale predictably.
By August 2025, ElevenLabs simplified its pricing a bit. Instead of multiple usage pools, they unified character credits again—regardless of model (Multilingual or Flash). Plans became more transparent: each tier clearly defined how many characters you could use, what models you had access to, and how many voice slots, cloning credits, and dubbing entitlements were included. “Flash” was now treated as a distinct, high-performance model—but it didn’t require users to mentally juggle separate usage buckets. Feature gating still existed, but it was cleaner and more aligned with business tiers.
This shift reflects a broader pricing maturity: from technical segmentation to user-aligned packaging. ElevenLabs didn’t reduce capabilities—they repackaged them to feel more intuitive, especially for teams navigating AI audio at scale.
What happens when you exceed your usage plan?
Each ElevenLabs plan comes with fixed monthly quotas across various features like text-to-speech, speech-to-text, voice tools, dubbing, and more. Once you exceed those included limits, you’re charged per unit of extra usage and this overage pricing is tiered. The higher your plan, the lower your per-unit costs, which is ElevenLabs’ way of rewarding scale and nudging upgrades.
Let’s break that down by feature:
1. Text-to-Speech (TTS)
If you're on the Creator plan, you get 100,000 characters of TTS output using the Multilingual model. Anything beyond that is billed at $0.30 per 1,000 characters.
On the Pro plan, the cost drops to $0.24 per 1,000. Scale brings it further down to $0.18, and Business cuts it to $0.12 per 1,000 characters. So if you’re generating high volumes of audio, jumping to a higher plan can save you significantly in overages alone.
2. Conversational AI
This feature, used for generating interactive voice-based dialogues, comes with 250 minutes included on Creator, 1,100 minutes on Pro, 3,600 minutes on Scale, and up to 13,750 minutes on Business. Overages begin at $0.12 per minute and drop to $0.096 per minute for Scale and Business customers.
3. Voice Tools (Voice Changer & Voice Isolator):
Each plan includes a fixed amount of voice tool usage: 100 minutes on Creator, 500 minutes on Pro, 2,000 on Scale, and 11,000 on Business. If you exceed these limits, you're charged between $0.30 and $0.12 per minute depending on your plan. The price is highest for Creator users and lowest for Business users.
4. Speech-to-Text (API-based transcription)
Creator includes around 63 hours, Pro includes 300 hours, Scale includes 1,100 hours, and Business gives 6,000 hours.
Overage rates start at $0.40/hour on Creator and Pro, drop to $0.30 on Scale, and go as low as $0.22/hour on Business.
5. Speech-to-Text (via UI)
The user interface version of STT is significantly more expensive due to the added overhead of waveform previews and manual uploads. Creator users get around 5 hours, Pro gets nearly 25, Scale gets 94, and Business offers 440 hours. Overage rates range from $4.50/hour on lower plans to $3.00/hour on Business.
6. Dubbing:
Included quotas for dubbing are 50 minutes on Creator, 250 on Pro, 1,000 on Scale, and 5,500 on Business. Overage rates again follow a descending pattern from $0.60/min on lower plans to $0.24/min on higher tiers.
7. Sound Effects:
These are measured by the number of generations. You get 500 on Creator, 2,500 on Pro, 10,000 on Scale, and 55,000 on Business. Overage pricing drops from $0.06 to $0.02 per generation depending on the plan.
Bottom line: The more you scale, the more forgiving the per-unit pricing becomes. ElevenLabs doesn’t penalize growth they price it in. But if you find yourself regularly exceeding your quotas, sticking to a lower plan can actually cost you more than just upgrading. Once your overages hit 30–50% of the next tier’s price, it’s almost always smarter to move up.
Which ElevenLabs Plan Should You Choose?
Choosing the right ElevenLabs plan depends entirely on your use case and how consistently you generate voice-based content. If you're just testing the platform or evaluating its capabilities, the Free plan is a good place to start.
It gives you limited access to most features and enough quota to experiment, but doesn’t allow commercial use.
If you're a solo creator working on short-form content like social media clips or small prototype projects the Starter plan at $5/month unlocks instant voice cloning and commercial usage rights, making it ideal for light, professional use.
For those publishing long-form audio content like YouTube videos, audiobooks, or multilingual podcasts, the Creator plan offers a significant jump in both quotas and audio quality. It also introduces professional voice cloning, project management, and higher-fidelity output, which most serious creators will benefit from.
Teams running client projects or agency-style content production should consider the Pro plan. It’s designed for workflows that require more concurrency, better pricing on overages, and access to premium features like PVCs and higher character limits.
When you start dealing with editing at scale especially across multiple team members, the Scale plan is your best bet. It unlocks multi-seat access, higher concurrency, and dramatically reduced per-unit costs.
If you're embedding voice features into a SaaS platform or building an internal product for customers, the Business plan is where you unlock large quotas, enterprise support, and cost efficiency at scale.
Finally, if your organization requires HIPAA compliance, SLAs, SSO, or custom support terms, you'll want to explore the Enterprise tier, which is fully customizable based on your infrastructure and usage needs.
Still not sure if it’s time to upgrade? Use this rule of thumb: if you're regularly hitting more than 1.5× your plan's quota and paying for overages, it’s almost always cheaper and more reliable to move to the next tier.
Why does this pricing strategy work for ElevenLabs?
The reason ElevenLabs’ pricing works so well isn’t just because of its usage-based model, it’s because of how thoughtfully it’s layered. At the core, the platform follows a hybrid pricing structure, combining subscription-based access with usage-based metering.
Usage-based pricing means customers pay for what they consume, whether that’s characters for TTS, minutes of dubbing, or hours of transcription. But instead of charging purely per unit, ElevenLabs uses feature-based gating to control access to things like professional voice cloning, higher-quality audio, or API concurrency. This ensures that users with advanced needs are moved into higher tiers where both the value and the cost make sense.
Concurrency limits serve as an invisible upgrade lever. If you need to process multiple voice jobs in parallel, you'll quickly hit a ceiling on lower plans and find yourself nudged into Pro or Scale tiers,not because you’ve run out of characters, but because your workflow demands speed and scale.
Then there’s the interface-based price discrimination: UI users pay significantly more for STT than API users. This subtly separates developers building apps from creators using the platform as a tool,allowing ElevenLabs to serve both without flattening value.
Lastly, by offering both Flash and Multilingual models, ElevenLabs lets users self-select based on their priorities. Flash gives you more output for less cost, while Multilingual gives you polished, expressive voices. The model choice becomes part of your pricing experience,without needing a whole new pricing tier.
The result? A system that’s transparent, scalable, and naturally segments users without friction. It’s a pricing model built not just for AI tools,but for serious infrastructure-backed products.
How can you replicate ElevenLabs pricing with Flexprice?
This guide demonstrates how to replicate 11labs' tiered pricing structure using flexprice.io (Starter plan). Perfect for AI audio companies with credit-based pricing.
Overview
11labs uses a credit-based pricing model:
Plan | Price | Credits | Target Audience |
|---|---|---|---|
Free | $0/month | 10k credits/month | Individuals trying AI audio |
Starter | $5/month | 30k credits/month | Hobbyists creating projects |
Creator | $22/month | 100k credits/month | Content creators (Most Popular) |
Pro | $99/month | 500k credits/month | Professional creators |
Prerequisites
✅ flexprice.io account
✅ API key ready
✅ Basic understanding of REST APIs
Step 1: Get your API key
Log in to your flexprice.io dashboard
Navigate to Settings → API Keys
Copy your API key
Step 2: Create features
Create the core features for 11labs' credit-based system:
2.1 Credits feature
2.2 Core features
Step 3: Create Plans
Create the four pricing plans with credit limits and feature entitlements:
3.1 Free Plan
3.2 Starter plan ($5/month)
3.3 Creator plan ($22/month)
3.4 Pro Plan ($99/month)
3.5 Special Offers- Annual Billing with Discount
First Month Discount
Step 4: Create customer
Step 5: Create subscription
Step 6: Track Usage
Send usage events to track credit consumption.
Step 7: Monitor Usage
Check current usage for the billing period:
Wrapping up
ElevenLabs has mastered AI pricing through usage-based metering, strategic feature gating, and natural upgrade incentives. Their evolution from simple credits to multi-dimensional pricing shows how to scale complexity without sacrificing user experience. The key insight: modern AI pricing must balance model performance trade-offs, interface preferences, and growth economics, rewarding scale rather than penalizing it.
What traditionally required months of custom development can now be implemented in days. The detailed implementation guide above shows exactly how to replicate ElevenLabs' entire pricing strategy using Flexprice's infrastructure.
If you're ready to build your own ElevenLabs style pricing, then either you can sign up for the tool or use our open source to create it.
If you're tired of solving billing from scratch, you don’t have to keep doing it alone.
⭐ Star us on GitHub to follow our progress
🤝 Join our community to share feedback and collaborate
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