Unclaimed: Are you working at ElevenLabs?
ElevenLabs Reviews: 4.8/5 — Highly Rated
ElevenLabs is a cutting-edge text-to-speech software that leverages advanced artificial intelligence to transform written text into remarkably realistic spoken words. It offers a wide array of customizable voices, allowing users to tailor the output to their specific needs, whether for content creation, accessibility features, or personal entertainment. With its intuitive interface and high-quality audio results, ElevenLabs stands out as a powerful tool for professionals and hobbyists alike looking to bring text to life through speech.
| Capabilities |
AI
API
|
|---|---|
| Segment |
Small Business
Mid Market
Enterprise
|
| Ease of use |
Beginner
|
| Deployment | Cloud / SaaS / Web-Based |
| Support | Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base |
| Training | Documentation |
| Languages | English |
ElevenLabs charges roughly the same for extra audio as for the audio in your plan. Starter includes minutes at about $0.20 each and sells extras at $0.20; Pro includes them at $0.17 and sells extras at $0.17. Exceeding your allowance carries no penalty at all — which is the opposite of most usage-priced software, where overage typically costs two or three times the included rate.
- What it is: An AI voice platform — text to speech, voice cloning, dubbing, sound effects, and music, sold as AI generation tooling.
- Best for: Creators and developers producing narrated audio at any volume, since the rate barely changes.
- Pricing: Free, Starter $6, Creator $22, Pro $99, Scale $299, Business $990 per month. Verified July 2026.
- The honest catch: The Creator plan displays $11 — that is a first-month 50% discount, not the price.
What Is ElevenLabs?
ElevenLabs is the best-known AI voice generation platform, covering text to speech, speech to text, voice design, instant and professional voice cloning, dubbing, sound effects, music, and — more recently — image and video. Its output quality is what built its reputation; the pricing is what this review is about.
Everything is metered in credits, and ElevenLabs helpfully translates them: roughly 1,000 credits buys a minute of text to speech. So the 10,000-credit free tier is about ten minutes a month, and Pro’s 600,000 credits is about ten hours.
The plan ladder runs Free, Starter, Creator, Pro, then a business tier of Scale, Business, and Enterprise.
How ElevenLabs Works
- Credits are the single meter — roughly 1,000 per minute of speech.
- Extra minutes are published at $0.36 down to $0.17 depending on tier.
- Overage costs the same as inclusion at every paid tier.
- Commercial licence starts at Starter — the free tier has none.
- Professional voice cloning requires Creator.
- 192kbps audio and PCM via API require Pro.
ElevenLabs Pricing
Captured from ElevenLabs’ pricing page in July 2026 in US dollars with monthly billing. A yearly billing option is also offered.
| Plan | Per month | Credits/mo | ≈ Minutes | Extra minutes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 10k | ~10 | ~$0.36 |
| Starter | $6 | 30k | ~30 | ~$0.20 |
| Creator | $22 (shown as $11 first month) | 121k | ~121 | ~$0.18 |
| Pro | $99 | 600k | ~600 | ~$0.17 |
| Scale | $299 | 1.8M | ~1,800 | ~$0.17 |
| Business | $990 | — | ~6,000 | ~$0.17 |
| Enterprise | Quoted | Custom | Custom | — |
What actually decides your plan:
- The Creator plan is $22, not $11. The card shows “$22 First month 50% off” above a large $11. The $11 applies to your first month only. Budget from $22 — this is the same pattern seen across several vendors this month, where the promotional figure is set in the largest type.
- There is effectively no overage penalty. Starter’s included minutes work out at $0.20 and extras cost $0.20; Creator is $0.18 and $0.18; Pro, Scale, and Business are all $0.17 either way. That is genuinely unusual — most metered software charges substantially more for exceeding your allowance. Here, running over simply costs the same rate.
- The consequence is that plan choice is low-stakes. Since overage is priced at the plan rate, picking too small a tier costs you the difference in rate, not a penalty. Starting on Starter and letting extras accrue is a reasonable strategy while you work out your real volume.
- The rate stops improving at Pro. $0.36, then $0.20, $0.18, $0.17 — and $0.17 again at Scale and Business. Above Pro you are buying commitment and features, not a better unit price, so upgrade for the capability rather than the economics.
- The free tier has no commercial licence. Ten minutes a month is fine for testing, but anything you publish commercially requires Starter at $6 — a very low bar, and the right one to clear before using the output in anything.
- Professional voice cloning requires Creator. Instant voice cloning arrives at Starter; the higher-quality professional cloning is a Creator feature, which is often the real reason people upgrade.
Who Should Use ElevenLabs
- Creators producing narrated content. The clearest case — quality is the reason it dominates this category.
- Anyone with unpredictable volume. Overage at the plan rate means a spike costs money but not a premium.
- Developers building voice into products. PCM audio via API at Pro, with per-minute economics that stay flat.
- Teams needing dubbing or cloning. Dubbing Studio from Starter, professional cloning from Creator.
It fits poorly for teams who need only occasional short clips, where the free tier’s ten minutes may genuinely suffice; for buyers expecting bulk discounts at scale, since the rate flattens at Pro; and for video-first workflows, where HeyGen or Descript may fit better.
Honest Pros and Cons
Strengths
- No overage penalty — extra minutes cost the plan rate.
- Published per-minute extra rates at every tier, so costs are forecastable.
- A genuinely free tier with ten minutes a month across many tools.
- A very low commercial entry at $6 for a commercial licence.
- Credits translated into minutes on the page, which many vendors do not do.
- Broad tool coverage — speech, dubbing, sound effects, music, image, and video.
Limitations
- The Creator price shown is a first-month discount — $11 against a real $22.
- No commercial licence on the free tier.
- The unit rate stops falling at Pro, so scale brings no further discount.
- Professional voice cloning requires Creator at $22.
- 192kbps and PCM audio require Pro at $99.
- Credits, not minutes, are the billed unit, so the translation is approximate.
ElevenLabs Alternatives and How It Compares
- Descript combines AI voice with full audio and video editing, better for podcast workflows.
- HeyGen focuses on AI video with avatars rather than voice alone.
- Murf and Play.ht compete directly on text to speech at similar quality tiers.
- Speechify targets consumer listening rather than production.
- Synthesia is the enterprise AI video platform, with voice as one component.
For a broader survey, browse our AI video generation directory.
The Verdict
ElevenLabs is the default choice in AI voice for a straightforward reason — the output is better than the alternatives — and its pricing turns out to be unusually fair in a way that is easy to miss. Extra minutes cost essentially the same as included minutes at every paid tier: $0.20 on Starter, $0.18 on Creator, $0.17 from Pro upward, whether the minutes came with your plan or not. In a survey where overage typically runs two to three times the included rate, charging the same rate either way is a genuinely good piece of design.
The practical consequence is that choosing a plan is low-stakes. You cannot really pick wrong, because exceeding your allowance costs the same per minute as staying inside it. So start on Starter at $6 — which is also where the commercial licence begins, and you should not publish free-tier output commercially — and let extras accrue while you learn your actual volume. Upgrade when the maths says so, not defensively.
The one thing to correct before budgeting: the Creator plan is $22, not $11. The card sets “$22 First month 50% off” in small type above a large $11, so the number your eye lands on applies for one month. And note that the rate curve flattens at Pro — $0.17 per minute at Pro, Scale, and Business alike — so the higher business tiers buy features and commitment rather than cheaper audio. If professional voice cloning is what you need, that sits at Creator; if you need PCM output via API or 192kbps quality, that is Pro at $99.
FAQ
How much does ElevenLabs cost?
Captured in July 2026 in US dollars with monthly billing: Free at $0 with 10,000 credits a month, Starter $6 with 30,000, Creator $22 with 121,000, Pro $99 with 600,000, Scale $299 with 1.8 million, Business $990, and Enterprise quoted. Roughly 1,000 credits buys a minute of text to speech, so those allowances are about 10, 30, 121, 600, and 1,800 minutes respectively.
Why does ElevenLabs Creator show $11?
Because $11 is a first-month promotional rate. The card reads “$22 First month 50% off” above the larger $11 figure, so the recurring price is $22 per month. Budget from $22 rather than $11, particularly when comparing against competitors whose displayed prices are not discounted.
What happens if I exceed my ElevenLabs credits?
You pay for extra minutes at approximately the same rate as your included ones — $0.20 on Starter, $0.18 on Creator, and $0.17 on Pro, Scale, and Business. That is unusual: most metered software charges a premium for overage. Here there is effectively no penalty for running over, which makes choosing a smaller plan far less risky than it normally would be.
Can I use ElevenLabs’ free tier commercially?
No. The commercial licence begins on the Starter plan at $6 per month, along with instant voice cloning, 20 projects in Studio, music commercial use, and Dubbing Studio. The free tier’s ten minutes a month are for evaluation and personal use, so anything you intend to publish commercially needs at least Starter.
Does ElevenLabs get cheaper at higher volumes?
Only up to Pro. The per-minute rate falls from about $0.36 on the free tier to $0.20 on Starter, $0.18 on Creator, and $0.17 on Pro — then stays at $0.17 on Scale and Business. Above Pro you are paying for features, capacity commitments, and support rather than a better unit price, so upgrade for what the tier adds rather than expecting a volume discount.
Compare ElevenLabs with other popular tools in the same category.
I liked it because it was a quick and easy solution to dub my videos for TikTok
The product only left something to be desired when converting some words into Portuguese.
O produto me salvou ao produzir meus vídeos para o TikTok
É muito próximo a voz humana, poissui uma qualidade até então nunca vista antes.
Mudança de tom durante a leitura do texto, inclusive com o volume diminuindo. Algumas vezes muda o idioma no meio da leitura. Exemplo: lendo em português e altera para espanhol ou muda o sotaque.
Eliminando a necessidade de realizar narrações de textos, encurtando o tempo de produção de vídeo.
The quality of the voices is outstanding, dubbing with cloning is very fast and acurate although still buggy.
Sometimes when text are over 30 seconds reading time, the voice distorts so if you have a long text might have to explit it.
I build apps and currently building one where user create stories for which then a reading outloud voice becomes an option, eleven labs is my go to for this sort of work.
Very high quality for how short it takes. A super functional way to prototype courses is to give the narration to ElevenLabs
Wish there was watermarked previews. Not being able to hear mispronunciatons until I henerate (and am charged) makes me nervous. That's a fixable workflow.
eLearning rapid prototyping.
We use the tool daily for our content creation. Cloning our voices was incredibly simple. It's an easy-to-navigate platform that delivers exceptionally high quality. Voice cloning is just a matter of uploading an audio file, and you're ready to use the voice. We also build apps where we utilize the API from ElevenLabs; the API is very simple for developers to use. So, if you need a voiceover, use ElevenLabs. It's the best on the market. Implementing Eleven Labs into our workflow was incredibly simple; we no longer have to wait days for a voice-over artist to send the audio file back of our script. The editors can now generate the voice-over and finish the video within a minute, saving us a tremendous amount of time. We have never reached out to customer support because the platform always works perfectly for us.
There aren't many things I would do differently if I were ElevenLabs. The platform works very well and quickly. The only adjustment I would make is to the pricing, so that the jumps between the packages aren't quite so large.
For our video projects, we often need voice-overs. It can be quite time-consuming to often wait days for a voice-over artist because they need to record the script. Now, we can generate a well-read script with just a few clicks.
I enjoy the reliability and documentation of there API as well as the solid rendererd perforamcnes.
Account management including remaining balance would be useful.
Generating narrations for my client's stories
I really like the features it has with a variety of sounds
If possible, the letter limit is slightly increased, the price is 5%
Make YouTube videos without being visible
Voice cloning! Such a great feature!!!!!
Breaks and speed 🥲 it's s bit annoying!
We can easily clean NE voices!
It works like a dream and it's easy to use. It does the job.
That if I want to listen or make a test that a have to generate and therefore use characters.
It gives me a perfect voice over.
Elevenlabs made my life simpler. I now just dont havr to chase my VO Artist for delievring the VO's on time. The cloning feature of elevenlabs is just way beyond imagination. The VO generated through elevenlabs just fit into my workflow very swiftly.
Downside i felt was that at times the emotion needed when pronoucning a certain word was'nt there.
Elevenlabs is helping me generate VO's for my videos without the need to run after my video editor. It's cost effective & saves a lot of time.
ElevenLabs is a game-changer in the world of AI voice production. This innovative platform offers a seamless and efficient solution for generating lifelike, natural-sounding voiceovers. One of the standout features of ElevenLabs is its exceptional voice quality. The AI-generated voices are remarkably close to human speech, making them perfect for various applications, from narration to customer service interactions. The tool provides an extensive selection of voices with different tones, accents, and languages, offering great flexibility.
One area that might benefit from improvement is pricing. While ElevenLabs offers a free trial, the cost of ongoing usage may be a consideration for some users. Additionally on some instances, errors due occur. That being said they are easily mitigated with a browser refresh.
Producing voiceovers of my scripts has gone from taking me hours to minutes.
I like that ElevenLabs uses cutting-edge AI and deep learning to create incredibly natural-sounding speech synthesis and text-to-speech. The voices generated are lifelike and emotive.
I don't have any major complaints so far. The only small issue is that it can sometimes take a little tweaking to get the voice to sound exactly how you want.
ElevenLabs solves the problem of generating natural human-like voice recordings without needing to hire voice actors. This saves me a ton of time and money in development. I can iterate quickly and test different voices.
I think the quality of translation is the best part of ElevenLabs! It is the best I have seen on any platform and their pricing structure is reasonable.
As with any AI translation, it is not perfect and many times there is many gaps in speech or mispronunciation of simple things. They generally make things right if you reach out to them though.
Making it simple to make videos that have a personalized feel without having to record an actual actor.
The fact that the voices don't sound mechanical.
The character limit even on paid plans, if only there was a way to get around it.
I tried numerous TTS services before zeroing in on Eleven Labs. It gives a life like quality to the voices without any considerable modification. That gives the edge i needed to produce my own Podcasting app.
Powerful Realistic Voices, API access, Fast Voice Cloning
Dubbing fee per minute, Project part has a problematic for using a different setting of a same voice in different paragraphs counts again, didn't remember the last version of the same voice
Realistic voice and fast cloning
Affordable prices, the easy manner in which you could create new voice-overs, the lab for clonning voices.
The absence of a "remove breathing" feature. Some cases when we are needed to remove the breathing from the voice-overs, a feature would be amazing.
Nowadays, finding the right voice for content creation seems more and more complicated, ElevenLabs solved this problem.
The voices are amazing even in french. Sometimes there is some glitch, but with the support team, you can send them the info and they will recover your characters. I hope, it will improve with more emotion to touche the sky
Long sentences have sometimes voices changing
use french voices wich is quite impossible on other site
I love creating stories with my kid, and then throwing it into ElevenLabs. It makes for quality bonding time. The interface is simple to use and the voice training tools are the best around. I've bot messed with the API yet, but from what I've seen, the Implementation is starting forward. I've not ever needed to contact customer support, so I guess that makes customer support top notch when they're so good, I never have to talk to them.
I'm hearing Adam everywhere. And it is still obvious that a computer is talking to me. GPT4 with voice sounds better. I wish my credits rolled over. If I paid for a certain usage amount and only use a tenth of it (maybe 3 uses a week), I should be partially compensated.
It can fluently read stories and articulate points that are difficult to say.
The natural sounding results of its TTS output
The cost is still quite high, one of the most expensive TTS options.
Convering large quantaties of text to speech quickly and efficiantly
You can generate a professional audio reading in minutes with the projects tool
No way to force the reading style yet (whisper, yell etc.)
Generating audio for YouTube videos
Easy of use and quick to get going. Little effort
Missing some la fishes but for acceptable reasons
Allowing us to test quickly
Excellent text to speech abilities and voice cloning. I used it for two of my ebooks.
Their pricing is very expensive and you have no way of testing how a voice sounds without using up your characters which can eat things up fast. Also, the voice cloning was good but not exact.
TTS using my own voice and others to create voiceovers and ebooks
One of the best VO software I know. Many voices sound very natural
The only thing that could be better is the 5000 character length and when you use a space that it count one character.
It offers naturel voice overs with many options.
The audio quality and dubbing features are great. The pricing is also affordable. Extremely easy to use. I am just used a few times, but I think it will change in the future.
Saidly at the time when I writing, the Hungarian language isn't available. If it will get in, this will be 10/10
The speaking. I can use my voice by ai to improve my speaking skills.
Very good experience in terms of Italian voice quality. I think that on this side it is the best on the market, I tried many services, and EL have the voices that sounds more "human" overall.
1) sometimes it makes very bad mistakes in pronunciation, and still it charge your credit, consuming the number of carachters. 2) it doesn't allow to choose the right pronunciation for those words that have more than one pronunciation (ad other tool, such as Murf.AI do) 3) It must be allowed to generate a speech without charging, but charge only when the speech generated it's downloaded, otherwise I'm paying for something that maybe is wrong, or maybe I don't like 4) It doesn't allow to choose the tone of voice (yell, whisper, and so on) 5) it's running too damn fast!! :D Why don't you put an option to insert pauses (as Murf.AI does)?
No need of a professional voice: cost cutting. Easy and fast to achive the result.
I can do audio book in french, and make a clone voice in 4 weeks.
French talk is not good with "ses" "ces" ou les liaisons.
it can buy me time and focus.
I like the possibility of your services allowing people with a lot of creativity, but few resources, to create fun and even useful applications. I have been trying to carry out some freelance projects with him, but so far I have not been successful, but I keep trying. Additionally, I have seen game mods, usually including a companion, and giving him a voice. This has also allowed mods that generate dialogue through AI to have their own voice as well. I have high expectations now with the dubbing role, I know there is still a lot to improve, and I can see the potential of breaking down language barriers in interpersonal relationships
I don't like how audio generated in languages other than English is monotonous. If it's in English, I can do any project, from audiobooks to interviews. Now outside of this language, the audio generation does not produce correct intonations, which prevents me from using it in projects where this factor is important.
I like creating content for my personal projects, and it's often interesting to add a voice, but I don't feel comfortable adding my own voice. With ElevenLabs I can meet this need, and create projects that were previously impeded by this detail.
The highest fidelity voice cloning I know of yet
The commitment to quality of output is lacking.
It generates the voices I integrate into my platform