Verified August 2026 against ElevenLabs' official pricing page and help center. If you're reading a guide that says Creator is 100k credits — it's out of date.
ElevenLabs prices everything in "credits", and the conversion rules are scattered across a pricing page, a help center and a dozen contradictory blog posts. Set your volume in the calculator below to get your plan in five seconds — then read on for how the credit system actually works, with the 2026 numbers.
For standard text-to-speech, one credit buys one character of input text. ElevenLabs' own planning ratio is ~1,000 characters ≈ 1 minute of audio, so the mental shortcut is:
1,000 credits ≈ 1 minute of finished voice over. A 1,500-word script (~8,000 characters) costs about 8,000 credits ≈ 8 minutes of audio.
ElevenLabs updated plan quotas in 2026. A large share of comparison articles still quote the old 100k/500k figures. The current numbers:
| Plan | Price (monthly) | Credits / month | ≈ TTS minutes | ≈ Dubbing minutes* |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 10,000 | 10 | — |
| Starter | $6 | 30,000 | 30 | 10 |
| Creator | $22 (first month $11) | 121,000 (was 100k) | 121 | 40 |
| Pro | $99 | 600,000 (was 500k) | 600 | 200 |
| Scale | $299 | 1,800,000 | 1,800 | 600 |
| Business | $990 | 6,000,000 | 6,000 | 2,000 |
* Watermark-free dubbing at 3,000 credits/min. Yearly billing ≈ 2 months free. Free tier is non-commercial and requires attribution.
This is the single most expensive misunderstanding in the ElevenLabs ecosystem. Credits are shared across features, but features burn at different rates:
The same $22 Creator plan is "121 minutes" for voice over but only ~40 minutes for commercial dubbing. If you're budgeting a dubbing workflow on TTS math, your real cost is 3× what you think. Multi-language dubbing multiplies again — every target language is billed separately.
Usage-based overage billing is now a legacy feature — new self-serve subscriptions can't enable it. In practice your quota is a hard cap: run out mid-month and your options are upgrading a tier or waiting for the reset. Budget against your real volume, not your average month — one viral week can eat a quota fast.
On August 27, 2026 ElevenLabs launched its hosted MCP connector: voice, transcription, dubbing, music, image and video generation inside Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor — one OAuth sign-in, no API keys, running on your existing ElevenLabs account.
What is not documented yet: what MCP calls cost. As of launch, neither the announcement nor the official MCP page publishes credit burn rates for MCP usage — including whether the "50+ creative models" it can route to (some third-party) bill at different rates. Until that's documented, treat MCP sessions the way you'd treat dubbing: do one short session, then check your usage page before building a workflow on it. Your plan's hard cap applies to MCP usage like everything else. We'll verify and publish the actual burn rates here once they're documented.
Don't do this math by hand. Paste your script or set your monthly volume — the calculator picks the exact plan across ElevenLabs, Murf, Speechify, Cartesia and more:
Voice Over Cost Calculator → Dubbing Cost Calculator →