ElevenLabs credits explained: one pool, seven rates
ElevenLabs is one of the few AI vendors that publishes what its own unit buys. Read the rates and the free plan stops looking generous: the same 10,000 credits is 10,000 characters of speech, or a single minute of studio dubbing.
- One shared pool. Every product spends from the same monthly credits, so using one leaves fewer for the others. ElevenLabs states this plainly.
- Seven published rates. 1 credit per character for speech, 330 per minute to transcribe, 900 per minute of music, 200 per sound effect, 1,000 per minute of voice changing, and 2,000 to 10,000 per minute to dub.
- The free plan has no commercial licence. That arrives at $6, alongside Instant Voice Cloning and Dubbing Studio.
- Removing the dubbing watermark costs 1,000 credits a minute, not dollars. It is priced in the same unit as the work.
- Rollover caps at 3x your monthly quota and does not apply to the free plan. Cancelling or downgrading forfeits the balance.
The seven rates
ElevenLabs describes these as approximate credit costs. The right-hand column is what the free plan's 10,000 monthly credits buys if you spend all of them on that one product.
Rates read from elevenlabs.io/pricing on 25 August 2026, from the vendor's own published FAQ. The "10,000 buys" column is our arithmetic on those rates, assuming the entire free allowance is spent on that single product.
The free plan's real limit is the licence
Credits are not what stops most people using the free tier for real work.
Free
3 Projects in Studio
no rollover
Starter
20 Projects in Studio
rollover applies
This is the third time in a week we have priced a category where the paid feature is not more compute but the removal of a restriction: an image generator charging $12 for privacy, a video tool charging for the right to keep your own export, and here a voice tool charging $6 for permission to use what you made. It is a coherent way to build a free tier. It is also the fact that decides whether the free tier is any use to you, and it never appears in a credit comparison.
The watermark has a price, and it is in credits
Most tools treat the watermark as a plan boundary. ElevenLabs makes it a line item on the meter.
Credits per minute of dubbing. Bar length is proportional to credit cost.
Read as a decision rather than a table, this says something useful: if you are dubbing at volume, the watermark is a 50 percent surcharge on the automatic route and the studio route costs five times the cheapest option before you have compared quality at all. Budget the watermark, because on this platform it consumes the same allowance as the audio itself.
The plans
| Plan | Per month | Credits / mo | Commercial licence | Rollover |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 10,000 | No | No |
| Starter | $6 | 30,000 | Yes | Yes |
| Creator | $22 (first month $11) | 121,000 | Yes | Yes |
| Pro | $99 | 600,000 | Yes | Yes |
| Scale | $299 | not read | Yes | Yes |
| Business | $990 | not read | Yes | Yes |
ElevenLabs also publishes an effective cost per minute of audio that falls as the tier rises: $0.36, then $0.20, then $0.18, then $0.17. That is a second, dollar-denominated disclosure of the same thing the credit rates describe, and almost no competitor offers either one.
On the 121,000 credit figure
The Creator tier's allowance is 121,000 rather than 120,000 or 125,000. Round numbers are a marketing decision and unround ones usually are not, so this most likely reflects an internal calculation, such as a target number of audio minutes at a particular model's rate, rather than a headline chosen for the page. It is a small thing, and it is the kind of detail that suggests the allowances here are derived from costs rather than picked to look generous.
The Scale and Business credit allowances were not read on the visit and are marked "not read" above rather than estimated.
Rollover, and how you lose it
Your allowance resets at the start of each billing cycle, which begins on the day you subscribed rather than on the first of the month. Unused credits roll over for up to two months, capped at 2x your monthly quota, so a balance can reach at most 3x the monthly quota: this month's allotment plus up to two months of rollover.
It requires an active paid subscription. Downgrading or cancelling forfeits unused credits at the end of the cycle. Rollover does not apply to the Free plan at all, and pay-as-you-go top-up credits are separate and not subject to the cap.
How this was checked, and when it expires
Every rate, price and allowance here was read from elevenlabs.io/pricing on that date, including the credit-cost figures the vendor publishes in its own pricing FAQ. Prices exclude tax. The "10,000 buys" column is our arithmetic on the vendor's published rates and is labelled as such.
Rates move more quietly than prices. A change from 900 to 1,200 credits per minute raises your real cost by a third without touching a single number on the pricing table. If a figure here no longer matches the vendor's own page, the vendor's page is right and this one is stale.