ElevenLabs Pricing Per Minute: What a Five-Minute Voiceover Costs

On ElevenLabs' paid plans a minute of speech costs roughly $0.14 to $0.20 at list price, because about 1,000 credits make a minute and each plan sells credits at a different rate. A five-minute voiceover needs about 5,000 credits: around $1 on Starter, $0.91 on Creator and $0.83 on Pro, for one clean take.

The catch is the words "one clean take". Nobody records a business voiceover once. A mispronounced product name, a line you rewrite, or a pace that feels rushed costs another 5,000 credits each time. This tutorial turns the pricing table into the sums a small business actually needs: cost per take, cost per finished minute with retakes, and which plan stops being wasteful at which volume.

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How credits turn into minutes

ElevenLabs does not charge per minute. It charges per character of text, drawn from a monthly pool of credits. According to its pricing page, the exact cost depends on the model: one text character costs one credit on its V2 Multilingual model, and discounted rates of between 0.5 and 1 credit per character apply to some faster models when used through the API. For most owners generating speech in the web app, one character per credit is the working rule.

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To turn characters into minutes, the pricing table does the work. It lists roughly 30 minutes for the Starter plan's 30,000 credits and roughly 121 minutes for Creator's 121,000. That is about 1,000 credits a minute. A quick check from the other direction: a typical narrator reads about 150 words a minute, and an English word with its trailing space averages around six to seven characters, so a minute is roughly 900 to 1,000 characters. The two methods agree.

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The rule of thumb to keep: 1 minute of speech is about 1,000 credits, so a five-minute script is about 5,000. Measure your own script by pasting it into a word counter and reading the character count with spaces, since that figure, not the length of the finished audio, is what the credit meter charges.

The plans and what a minute costs on each

As of November 2026 the pricing page lists these paid plans. The per-minute figures are my division of the monthly price by the included minutes, so they are list-price averages if you used every credit.

Two points from the table. First, the price per minute falls only a little as you climb. Going from Starter to Pro cuts it from about 20 cents to about 16.5 cents. You are mainly buying volume, not a discount. Second, annual billing works out to two months free, which takes roughly 17 percent off whichever plan you pick. On the pricing page, the annual-equivalent monthly prices are $5 for Starter, $18.33 for Creator and $82.50 for Pro.

The page also showed first-month offers when I read it: $1 for the first month of Starter and $11 for Creator. Offers come and go and sometimes carry end dates, so check the page on the day. Above Scale, the page also lists a Business plan at $990 a month for 6,000,000 credits and ten seats, which only matters at agency volumes. For the full plan comparison, including voice cloning limits, the ElevenLabs plan limits tutorial goes through each tier.

The main worked example: a five-minute voiceover, one plan at a time

Say a specialist food importer wants a five-minute narration for a supplier onboarding video. The script is 750 words, which is 4,900 characters with spaces. For round numbers I will treat it as 5,000 credits per generation. Here is what one clean take, and then a more realistic three takes, cost on each plan. All figures are illustrative sums from list prices at monthly billing.

"Cost of one take" is the plan price divided by how many takes it covers, which only holds if you use the whole allowance. If you make one voiceover a month on Pro, the cost of that voiceover is $99, not $0.83. This is the single most common misreading of per-minute pricing: the unit cost is real only at full use. For one five-minute voiceover a month, Starter at $6 is the sensible plan, and you will use 5,000 of its 30,000 credits.

The Free plan deserves its own sentence. Its 10,000 credits cover two five-minute takes, but the pricing page lists a commercial licence only from Starter. A voiceover for a customer-facing video should therefore sit on a paid plan, even though the credits themselves would have been enough. The free plan tutorial shows where the free credits are best spent, such as testing a script.

What retakes do to the cost per finished minute

A finished minute is not a generated minute. If you generate 15 minutes of audio to get five minutes you keep, your cost per finished minute is three times the list rate. Here is how that compounds, at Starter's $0.20 a minute list rate:

• One take per finished minute: $0.20.
• Two takes: $0.40.
• Three takes: $0.60.
• Five takes: $1.00.

The numbers are still tiny next to a human narrator, so the point is not to fret about 40 cents. The point is that retakes eat your credit pool faster than your minutes suggest. A Starter pool of 30,000 credits holds six five-minute takes. If you need three takes per video, it holds two finished videos a month, not six. That is the figure to plan around.

ElevenLabs' pricing FAQ says credits are charged per generation request, not per download, and that a limited number of free regenerations may be available if the text and certain settings do not change. It also says whether a regeneration is free is shown before you generate. I would not budget on free regenerations, but I would watch for the indicator and use it: if a take is nearly right, changing nothing but pressing regenerate is the cheap way to roll the dice again.

A habit that saves credits more reliably is to retake only the broken part. Instead of regenerating five minutes because of one mispronounced name, split the script into paragraphs of about 600 to 800 characters, generate each separately, and redo only the bad one. A paragraph retake costs 700 credits, not 5,000. Over a month of videos that is the difference between a pool that lasts and one that runs dry on the 20th.

A script-prep checklist that cuts retakes

Most retakes come from the script, not the voice. Before you press generate, work through this list on the text. It takes about ten minutes for a five-minute piece and typically removes the retakes that would have cost you a third of the pool.

1. Spell out numbers and symbols. Write "twenty-five pounds" rather than a symbol and number if you want a particular reading; "10kg" might be read oddly.
2. Respell product and brand names phonetically in a copy of the script only if the first test gets them wrong. Keep the original for captions.
3. Break the script into paragraphs of 600 to 800 characters, so any single retake is small.
4. Cut long sentences. A sentence of 40 words often comes out with odd emphasis. Two sentences of 20 are safer.
5. Add punctuation for pacing. A comma or a full stop changes the breath. Adjust once in the text, not repeatedly in the audio.
6. Test the first paragraph only with your chosen voice before generating the whole script. If the voice is wrong, you have lost 700 credits instead of 5,000.

A before-and-after, illustrative. Before: "Our 12.5% off bundle covers the SKU-4471 range, ships within 3-5 days, and is available to all B2B accounts." After: "Our twelve and a half percent bundle discount covers the four-four-seven-one range. It ships within three to five days. It is available to all trade accounts." The second version is longer by characters, so it costs slightly more, but it needed one take instead of three.

Which plan fits which volume

Match the plan to monthly finished minutes and your retake rate. Assume three takes per finished minute until you have your own figure, then adjust.

The last row shows a trick: plans bill monthly and can be cancelled, so a one-off large project is best done on a higher plan for one month. For 540,000 credits the Pro plan at $99 is cheaper than buying credits in smaller plans over several months. After the project, drop back. Remember that downgrading forfeits unused credits at the end of the cycle, so use them before you step down.

Rollover helps the opposite case. ElevenLabs says unused credits roll over for up to two months, capped so your balance reaches at most three times the monthly allowance, provided you keep a paid subscription and do not downgrade or cancel. If you make most of your videos at the start of each quarter, a Starter plan that rolls credits over can serve a bursty pattern better than you would think.

What else draws on the same credit pool

The pricing FAQ says every product draws from one shared pool, which matters because speech is the cheap item. These approximate rates come from the page, all per minute unless stated.

The practical lesson: dubbing a five-minute video without a watermark costs three times a straight voiceover, and using the studio route costs ten. If your plan is to translate training videos, budget by the dubbing rate, and read the dubbing cost-per-minute tutorial before choosing a plan. A Starter pool of 30,000 credits covers only two five-minute automatic dubs without a watermark.

A realistic mistake worth knowing: a furniture maker buys Starter for narration, then also uses the voice changer to clean up a recorded demo and transcribes four interviews. The pool runs out in week three, with the narration unfinished. Each product was cheap; the total was not. If you mix products, add up credits across all of them before picking the plan.

When a plan upgrade is worth the extra $16

The jump from Starter ($6) to Creator ($22) costs $16 more and quadruples the pool (30,000 to 121,000 credits). Beyond volume, the pricing page also lists professional voice cloning from Creator upwards, and additional credits (a pay-as-you-go top-up). The Starter versus Creator tutorial covers cloning in detail, including the fact that ElevenLabs' professional cloning is for your own voice.

A simple rule for the upgrade: move to Creator when your honest monthly need, with retakes, exceeds about 25,000 credits. Below that, Starter has headroom. Above it, one unlucky week would push you into running dry. At $16 extra, Creator is cheap insurance against a stalled project.

Two more sums. A three-person online clothing store making one two-minute product clip a week (eight a month, 16 finished minutes) with three takes per clip needs 48,000 credits, which is Creator, not Starter. Annual billing at $18.33 a month for Creator saves about $44 over the year against $22 monthly, and is worth taking once you have two or three months of steady use.

Phone greetings, ad reads and training audio, costed

Five minutes is only one shape of job. Short items cost so little that the plan, not the credits, is the real expense. Illustrative sums at 1,000 credits a minute, and three takes each:

• A 20-second phone greeting. About 330 characters, so 330 credits a take and about 1,000 for three. You could produce 30 greetings from a Starter pool. Cost in credits: a few cents. The decision that matters is the commercial licence, which the pricing page lists from Starter.
• A 30-second radio-style ad read. About 500 characters. Three takes are 1,500 credits, so a Starter pool covers about 20 ad variants for a promotion, which makes A/B testing wording cheap.
• A 12-minute staff training module. About 12,000 characters, so 12,000 credits a take and 36,000 for three. That already exceeds a Starter month and fits easily in Creator. Split it into six two-minute sections and retake only the weak ones, and a realistic total falls to about 18,000.
• An hour of course narration. About 60,000 credits a clean take. With retakes of a fifth of the material, about 72,000. Creator covers it in one month with credits to spare.

The pattern: short jobs are almost free, medium jobs need the right plan, and long jobs are where script discipline pays. Nothing here needs a technical background, only a character count and a calculator.

Is it cheaper than a human narrator, and when it is not

For a five-minute business voiceover, the credit cost of a few dollars is a small fraction of any professional narrator's fee, and that is why AI voices are used for internal training, phone greetings and product clips. But the cost per minute is not the whole cost. Add your own time: a careful script prep, test and review of a five-minute piece typically takes an hour or more. At an assumed $30 an hour of staff time (use your own figure), the human-hours dominate the $1 of credits.

That reverses the usual advice. Because credits are cheap and time is not, the best saving is fewer retakes, not a cheaper plan. And for content where voice carries trust, such as a founder message or a customer apology, a human recording is still the right choice regardless of price. The ElevenLabs worth-it tutorial weighs those trade-offs for voiceovers and training audio, and the business narration tutorial gives more use cases for greetings and ad reads.

A quick calculator you can copy

Put these four lines in a spreadsheet and fill them in each month. It replaces guesswork and shows when to change plan.

Finished minutes planned this month:        [A]
Takes per finished minute (start with 3):    [B]
Credits needed = A x B x 1,000:              [C]
Choose plan: Starter if C < 25,000
             Creator if C < 100,000
             Pro if C < 500,000
Add credits used by dubbing, music or speech-to-text: [D]
Check C + D against the plan's monthly credits.

Fill in an example to see it work. A craft brewery supplier plans 12 finished minutes of product narration plus 6 minutes of dubbed content without a watermark. A is 12 and B is 3, so C is 36,000, which already rules out Starter. D is 6 times 3,000, which is 18,000. The total of 54,000 credits fits comfortably inside Creator's 121,000, with room for a second month's worth to roll over. Without the calculator, the dubbing would have been forgotten and Starter bought.

If you would like to sanity-check your own volumes before choosing, that is the kind of thing my AI implementation consultation is for. Read the credit figures on the current pricing page before you pay, because ElevenLabs can change plans, credits and offers at any time.

ElevenLabs per-minute cost questions

How many credits is one minute of ElevenLabs speech?

ElevenLabs charges per character, and on its standard multilingual models one character costs one credit. Its pricing table treats 30,000 credits as roughly 30 minutes, so plan on about 1,000 credits a minute. A fast speaker or a script full of long words uses a little more; a slow one uses less.

Do unused credits carry over?

On paid plans, yes, for up to two months. ElevenLabs says unused credits roll over for up to two months, so your balance can reach at most three times your monthly allowance, as long as you keep an active paid subscription. Downgrading or cancelling forfeits the unused credits, and the Free plan has no rollover.

Is annual billing cheaper?

Yes. ElevenLabs says annual billing works out to two months free, so you pay for ten months. That makes the monthly equivalent $5 for Starter, $18.33 for Creator and $82.50 for Pro, against $6, $22 and $99 billed monthly. It only helps if you will use the plan all year.

Are retakes free?

Not as a rule. Credits are charged per generation request, not per download. ElevenLabs says a limited number of free regenerations may be available when the text and certain settings stay the same, and it shows whether a regeneration is free before you generate. Budget for paid retakes and treat any free one as a bonus.

Can I use the Free plan for client work?

The pricing page lists a commercial licence from Starter upwards, and the Free plan does not include one. For anything a customer will hear, such as an ad, a phone greeting or a training video, start on a paid plan. Check the terms on the current pricing page before you publish.

Further reads

• ElevenLabs vs Speechify: Which Voice Tool Suits Business Audio? — A rival voice tool for business audio, compared.
• Best AI Filmmaking Tools by Job for a Small Production Business — Tools for paperwork, rough cuts, audio, captions, voice and generated shots, with plan costs and the check to run before a client sees the file.
• Best AI for DJ Drops: Custom Voice Tags for Event DJs — How an event DJ makes custom voice tags and client name drops with AI, from script to sampler pad, with the licence and consent checks to pass first.
• AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.

Sources: ElevenLabs pricing page and its FAQ on credits, per-product credit costs, rollover, annual billing and regenerations, and ElevenLabs' Professional Voice Cloning documentation, read 5 November 2026. Sums are illustrative.