ElevenLabs
ElevenLabs pricing sells a monthly credit quota, and the credit is the old character unit renamed.
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ElevenLabs pricing: credits, rollover and the catch when you switch plans
ElevenLabs pricing sells a monthly credit quota, and the credit is the old character unit renamed. How many credits a generation costs depends on four things at once: your plan, whether you called the website or the API, which product you used, and which model. The rollover rules are unusually generous and the Pay As You Go mechanics contain a genuine trap when you change plans.
Key takeaways
Plans run $6, $22, $99, $299 and $990 a month, carrying 30k to 6M credits.
Unused credits roll over up to twice your quota, so a balance can reach three times your monthly allowance.
Pay As You Go credits are stored as a dollar value, so switching plans changes how many credits that dollar buys.
Cancelling or downgrading forfeits unused subscription credits at the end of the cycle.
ElevenLabs pricing in 2026
Plan | Price/month | Credits/month | Notes
|
|---|---|---|---|
Free | $0 | 10,000 | No rollover |
Starter | $6 | 30,000 | Commercial licence, instant voice cloning |
Creator | $22 | 121,000 | First month half price |
Pro | $99 | 600,000 | 44.1kHz PCM via API |
Scale | $299 | 1,800,000 | 3 workspace seats |
Business | $990 | 6,000,000 | 10 seats, low-latency TTS from 5c per minute |
Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Monthly or annual quota, overage billing |
Source: elevenlabs.io/pricing, read 22 September 2026.
What ElevenLabs actually meters
ElevenLabs meters a credit, which it used to call a character and renamed without changing the value. The cost of any single generation depends on your plan, whether you generated on the website or through the API, which product you used, and which model you chose. There is no single credits-per-second or credits-per-character figure that holds across the platform.
The free-regeneration rules are documented in more detail than most vendors manage. In the Text to Speech and Voice Changer playground you get two free regenerations, provided you are on the website, the prompt, voice and model are unchanged, the first generation was under two hours ago, and you have not refreshed or left the page. Change any of those and it bills. None of it applies through the API.
The v3 model works differently again: each Generate returns two alternative outputs and charges for one. Click again and you get two more and pay again.
Dubbing Studio grants its own pool of free credits per project, after which regenerations draw on the monthly quota.
How credits work
Rollover is the generous part. Unused subscription credits carry into the next cycle up to twice your usual quota, which caps a maximum balance at three times the monthly allowance. On Starter that means 30,000 a month can accumulate to 90,000. Enterprise accounts choose a monthly or annual quota and roll over on the same two-times basis.
Free tier accounts get no rollover at all.
Pay As You Go credits sit in a separate bucket. They are not affected by monthly rollover, and they expire 12 months after purchase, which is a longer runway than most prepaid credit in this index.
Then the trap. PAYG credits are stored as a dollar value, not as credits, and convert at your current plan's rate. Because credit consumption rates differ by plan, moving between plans changes how many credits your PAYG balance is worth. Prepaying on a cheap plan and upgrading does not carry the credit count across; it carries the dollars.
Cancelling or downgrading forfeits unused subscription credits at the end of the current cycle. PAYG balances survive that.
What happens when you hit the limit
Generation stops. There is no automatic overage on new self-serve subscriptions, because ElevenLabs retired usage-based billing for them and replaced it with Pay As You Go top-ups. Enterprise contracts remain on overage billing and are explicitly unaffected.
Accounts still on legacy usage-based billing, meaning Enterprise and older Creator, Pro, Scale and Business plans, keep a toggle that sets overage to unlimited or to a maximum credit ceiling of your choosing.
How ElevenLabs pricing has changed
Date | Milestone | Source
|
|---|---|---|
7 Sep 2026 | Service account API keys can return enterprise platform limits for credits and Professional Voice Clones | elevenlabs.io/docs/changelog and help centre |
13 Jul 2026 | Workspace invites gain an optional monthly credit cap per invitee | elevenlabs.io/docs/changelog and help centre |
Not dated | Characters renamed to credits, with the value held constant | elevenlabs.io/docs/changelog and help centre |
Not dated | Usage-based billing retired for new self-serve subscriptions and replaced by Pay As You Go. Enterprise keeps overage billing | elevenlabs.io/docs/changelog and help centre |
Source: elevenlabs.io/docs/changelog and help centre, read 22 September 2026.
Customer
Sentiment Highlights
In my experience the pricing there makes the unit economics pretty tough for high volume calls
Voice infrastructure engineer, Hacker News, January 2026
they have to spend quite a bit of credit to get the desired effect
Hacker News user on credit burn, July 2024
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How much does ElevenLabs cost?
Do ElevenLabs credits roll over?
When do ElevenLabs Pay As You Go credits expire?
What happens when you run out of ElevenLabs credits?
