☀️ AI Morning Minute: ElevenLabs' Costs
The tool behind a lot of the AI voices you've been hearing lately with pricing that's a little weird.
ElevenLabs is the tool behind a lot of the eerily-good AI voices you’ve may have heard on TikTok, audiobooks, podcasts, and phone systems. It doesn’t charge a flat $20 like the chatbots do. It runs on credits, which is where people get confused and occasionally get a surprise bill. Let’s sort it out.
Quick caveat first: everything below is right as of this morning, and AI pricing moves around a lot. The exact numbers will drift, probably soon. The way to think about the choice sticks around longer, so that’s the part to hang onto.
What the money buys
Every plan hands you a monthly pile of credits, not a flat set of features. And the simplest way to think about a credit is roughly one character of text turned into speech. So one credit is about one letter. A rough rule of thumb: 1,000 credits is about a minute of audio.
The tiers climb like this. Free gives you around 10 minutes a month, but here’s the catch that bites people: no commercial rights. You can test, you can’t publish. Starter at $6 is the first real one, since it unlocks commercial use and voice cloning. Creator at $22 is the sweet spot for most solo folks (about two hours of audio and the good voice cloning). Above that, Pro at $99 and up is production-volume territory.
What it doesn’t buy
That free tier looks generous until you realize you can’t legally use anything you make. It’s a demo, not a plan. The moment your work goes public, you need at least Starter.
And credits vanish faster than you’d think, because they get spent on everything: not just text-to-speech, but dubbing, sound effects, and every re-generation. Don’t love how a line came out and run it again? That’s another charge. The sticker price is the floor, not the ceiling. Run out mid-project and you’re either buying more or waiting for the month to reset.
The math
$22 a month is $264 a year, or about $18 a month if you pay yearly (they frame it as two free months). Real money, but for a working creator it undercuts hiring a voice actor by a mile.
The prices will change. The test won’t: how much audio do you actually make, and are people going to hear it? If it’s just for you and it’s a few minutes, the free tier is a fine sandbox. The second it goes public, you need a paid plan, and honestly the $6 Starter is a stupidly cheap place to start. Pick the tier for your volume, not your ambitions. You can always climb when the credits, not the features, run you dry.