How does ElevenLabs pricing work for the API?

Subscription tiers and character allowances

Every tier gives you a baseline allocation. The Free plan costs $0 per month and includes 10,000 credits per month. That translates to 10,000 characters on standard multilingual models or 20,000 characters on Turbo models. It gets you started. But it comes with strict limits and no rollover when the month ends.

Paid plans add volume and remove restrictions:

• Starter costs $6 per month ($1 for the first month) and includes 30,000 credits per month. On the API, that covers 75,000 characters for standard models or 150,000 for Turbo.
• Creator costs $22 per month ($11 for the first month) and includes 121,000 credits per month, covering 275,000 standard characters or 550,000 Turbo characters.
• Pro costs $99 per month with 600,000 credits per month (1,238,000 standard or 2,475,000 Turbo characters). Pro unlocks 44.1kHz PCM audio output via API and 192kbps quality audio.
• Scale costs $299 per month, provides 1,800,000 credits (3,738,000 standard or 7,475,000 Turbo characters), and includes 3 seats.
• Business costs $990 per month, provides 6,000,000 credits (12,375,000 standard or 24,750,000 Turbo characters), and includes 10 seats.

If you commit for a year, annual billing charges for 10 months, which gives you two months free. That puts the equivalent monthly price at $5 for Starter, $18.33 for Creator, $82.50 for Pro, $249.17 for Scale, and $825 for Business. Eligible early-stage startups can also look at the ElevenLabs Startup Grants Program, which provides 33,000,000 characters valid for 12 months for free.

API pricing by model and request limits

Text to Speech API pricing splits into two main model tiers. The first tier covers v4, v3, and v2 Multilingual models at $0.08 per 1,000 characters, which works out to approximately $0.08 per minute of generated audio. The second tier covers v4 Turbo, v3 Conversational, and Flash / Turbo at $0.04 per 1,000 characters.

Payload sizes have hard cutoffs per call. Are you generating long-form articles in a single payload? You will hit walls quickly if you pick the wrong engine. The v3 Text to Speech model has a 5,000 character limit per request, v2 Multilingual has a 10,000 character limit, and Flash / Turbo supports up to a 40,000 character limit.

On the API, metering units depend strictly on what you call: Text to Speech meters per character, Speech to Text meters per audio minute, Music and Sound Effects meter per generation, and Dubbing meters per source audio minute.

Audio, transcription, and realtime endpoints

Beyond Text to Speech, ElevenLabs prices its specialized audio endpoints separately in dollars.

Transcription via the Speech to Text API has three offerings:

• Scribe v2 and Scribe v2 Medical cost $0.22 per hour. Optional keyterm prompting costs $0.050 per hour, and transcript editing costs $0.070 per hour.
• Scribe v2 Realtime costs $0.39 per hour. Keyterm prompting costs $0.080 per hour, and transcript editing costs $0.120 per hour.

Conversational and interactive voice setups use the realtime speech endpoints. Eleven Realtime v1 Mini costs $0.080 per additional minute of connected audio, plus $0.20 per 1M input tokens and $6.00 per 1M output tokens (plans include roughly 14 minutes). Eleven Realtime v1 Max costs $0.080 per additional minute of connected audio, plus $1.80 per 1M input tokens and $9.00 per 1M output tokens (plans include roughly 12 minutes). The standalone Speech Engine API costs $0.080 per additional minute, with baseline allowances scaling by tier: 15 minutes on Free, 75 on Starter, 275 on Creator, 1,238 on Pro, 3,738 on Scale, and 12,375 on Business.

For audio generation, the ElevenLabs Music API costs $0.150 per minute and $1.50 per finetune, with a 5-minute duration limit. Voice Isolator, Voice Changer, and Sound Effects APIs each cost $0.120 per minute.

Dubbing API costs depend on the engine and branding. Dubbing v1 costs $0.33 per minute with a watermark or $0.50 per minute without one. Dubbing v2 costs $2.20 per minute and supports 92 languages.

Credit pool mechanics and rollover rules

All products draw from one shared monthly credit pool, so using credits on one tool leaves fewer for the others.

Platform credits map to usage through specific conversion ratios:

• Text to Speech costs 1 credit per character on V2 Multilingual models.
• For V2 Flash/Turbo English and V2.5 Flash/Turbo Multilingual models, API usage receives discounted pricing of 0.5 to 1 credit per character.
• Speech to Text consumes approximately 330 credits per minute.
• Eleven Music costs about 900 credits per minute.
• Sound Effects consume about 200 credits per generation.
• Voice Changer and Voice Isolator cost about 1,000 credits per minute.
• Dubbing costs 2,000 credits per minute for automatic with watermark, 3,000 without watermark, 5,000 for Dubbing Studio with watermark, or 10,000 for Dubbing Studio without watermark.

Credits are charged per generation request rather than per download. Unused credits roll over for up to two months, up to a cap of 2x your monthly quota. That means your total balance can reach at most 3x your monthly quota (your current month's allotment plus up to two months of accumulated rollover), provided you keep an active paid subscription.

Rollover does not apply to the Free plan. If you upgrade to a higher plan, unused credits from your previous plan roll over into the next billing cycle. But if you downgrade or cancel, your plan stays active until the end of the current billing cycle, your account drops to Free, and any unused paid credits expire. Pay-as-you-go top-up credits are completely separate and avoid the 2x rollover cap.

Concurrency, overages, and tracking spend

When your subscription credits run out, the account behavior depends on where the requests happen. On the web platform UI, extra minutes cost roughly $0.36 on Free, $0.20 on Starter, $0.18 on Creator, and $0.17 on Pro, Scale, and Business. UI concurrent requests range from 2 on Free, 3 on Starter, 5 on Creator, 10 on Pro, 15 on Scale, to 25 on Business.

For API endpoints, usage is billed in US dollars rather than credits. If you run both Realtime models or the Speech Engine API above your plan's concurrency ceiling, burst pricing kicks in at $0.160 per minute for connected audio. Concurrent call limits are set to 4 on Free, 6 on Starter, 10 on Creator, 20 on Pro, 30 on Scale, and 40 on Business.

You can monitor your usage through the web portal. To check remaining platform credits, log into the platform and navigate to your subscription page from the profile menu. To inspect API consumption in characters and minutes, open the Developers dashboard and look under the analytics tab. If you also build on other generative media platforms, see How does fal.ai pricing work? for another breakdown of consumption models.

Monitoring and capping API spend with Costbrake

Because ElevenLabs bills API usage in US dollars beyond your included allowance, an unmonitored script or runaway worker can push your monthly bill well past your subscription base. Costbrake monitors what you spend across 23 cloud and AI providers, reading usage in dollars directly from ElevenLabs. It evaluates spend hourly on the Free plan and every 5 minutes on paid tiers, triggering alerts on budget thresholds (50%, 80%, and 100%), month-end pace forecasts, and sudden spikes where an hour costs 3x your 7-day baseline and at least $5 more than usual.

Costbrake also includes an opt-in killswitch called brakes, which require manual admin confirmation before running. For ElevenLabs, brakes can disable a service account API key or freeze a key's credit usage to what it has already consumed this month. Personal keys cannot be managed this way; you must use a service account key.

You can provision a read-only service account key via the API using a temporary script:

HOST=api.elevenlabs.io
SA_ID=$(curl -s -X POST "https://$HOST/v1/service-accounts" -H "xi-api-key: $ELEVENLABS_ADMIN_KEY" -H "content-type: application/json" -d '{"name":"Costbrake"}' | jq -r '."service-account-user-id"')
D=$(mktemp -d /tmp/costbrake.XXXXXX)
curl -s -X POST "https://$HOST/v1/service-accounts/$SA_ID/api-keys" -H "xi-api-key: $ELEVENLABS_ADMIN_KEY" -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name":"costbrake-read","permissions":["user_read","workspace_analytics_full_read"]}' > "$D/key.json"
jq 'del(."xi-api-key")' "$D/key.json"

Send the resulting key string securely to Costbrake and remove the temporary file. For automated setup steps, review agent setup or read How do I limit ElevenLabs API spend per key?.