ElevenLabs

At a glance

Official website

https://elevenlabs.io

Category

AI Voice & Music

Free plan

$0, no credit card; 10,000 credits/month (~10 minutes of speech); text-to-speech, speech-to-text, sound effects, voice design, music; 3 Studio projects.

Free plan limits

Credits do not roll over; no overage on Free (hard cap). No voice cloning on Free. Commercial use NOT allowed on Free — non-commercial only, and attribution to ElevenLabs is required on public content.

Paid plans from

From $6/month billed monthly ($5/month billed annually) — Starter plan (30,000 credits/month).

Best for

Podcasters, teachers, and creators who need a few minutes of natural voiceover a month for personal projects.

ElevenLabs review: what the free plan really gives you

ElevenLabs is the voice AI tool that other voice tools are measured against. Its text-to-speech voices are strikingly natural — the pacing, breathing, and intonation sound closer to a recorded human than to a machine reading aloud — and the free plan gives you a real taste of that quality. You type text, pick a voice, and get spoken audio back, alongside speech-to-text, sound effects, voice design, and music tools, plus three Studio projects and three Voice Design slots. For a podcaster testing narration, a teacher making audio for a lesson, or a creator adding a voiceover to a video, ten minutes of this quality is enough to judge whether it fits.

The free plan gives 10,000 credits a month, which works out to about ten minutes of speech, since one credit buys roughly one character on standard models and half a credit per character on the faster Flash and Turbo models. Credits do not roll over, there is no overage on the free plan — it is a hard cap — and there is no voice cloning on the free tier: Instant Voice Cloning starts at the Starter plan. Those are manageable limits for a trial. The two conditions that matter most are the ones people miss: commercial use is not allowed on the free plan, which is non-commercial only, and attribution to ElevenLabs is required on any public content made on the free plan. The commercial licence starts at Starter. So a free voiceover can go on a personal project or a test video with credit given, but it cannot go on a monetised channel, a client video, or an audiobook for sale.

There is no audio watermark; the restriction is legal, not technical, which makes it easy to overlook and important to state plainly. Against Suno, the other tool in this hub, ElevenLabs is the speech specialist and Suno the music specialist, so they complement rather than compete: narration and voiceover here, songs there. Against other voice tools generally, ElevenLabs wins on naturalness and loses on free minutes — ten minutes a month is a small allowance, and a regular podcast or video schedule will outgrow it within a week. It suits someone who needs a few minutes of excellent voiceover a month for personal use, or who is testing voice quality before paying. The Starter plan starts at $6 a month, or $5 a month billed annually, with 30,000 credits a month, a commercial licence, and Instant Voice Cloning.

Pros and cons

Alternatives to ElevenLabs

If ElevenLabs does not fit, these tools in the same category are also listed on AI Free List:

• Suno

Frequently asked questions