ElevenLabs pricing: API rates, plans and cost per hour of audio
ElevenLabs charges per character for speech, per hour for transcription and per minute for music, with monthly plans that bundle allowances. This page lists the API rates and plan allowances from its pricing page and works out what they mean in practice. Compare other voices in the AI voiceover cost calculator; the topic hub is AI voice, speech and music.
Prices last verified against official provider pages on . How we verify prices. Written by the Chelure Enterprises Editorial Team.
API rates
| Service | Rate | Per 1M characters / per hour (our arithmetic) |
|---|---|---|
| Text to speech: v4, v3, v2 Multilingual | $0.08 per 1,000 characters | $80 per 1M characters |
| Text to speech: v4 Turbo, v3 Conversational, Flash / Turbo | $0.04 per 1,000 characters | $40 per 1M characters |
| Speech to text: Scribe v3, v2, v2 Medical | $0.20 per hour | $0.20 per hour |
| Speech to text: Scribe v3 Live, v2 Realtime | $0.22 per hour | $0.22 per hour |
| Scribe add-ons | Keyterm prompting $0.05 per hour (v2 family), $0.08 (realtime); transcript editing $0.07 (v2), $0.12 (realtime) per hour | - |
| Music | $0.15 per minute | - |
| Sound effects | $0.12 per minute | - |
Plans and allowances
| Plan | Monthly price | TTS v4 characters | TTS Turbo/Flash characters | Scribe hours | Music minutes | Price per 1,000 v4 characters |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 10,000 | 20,000 | 4h 30m | 3 | - |
| Starter | $6 | 75,000 | 150,000 | 30 | 40 | $0.080 |
| Creator | $22 | 275,000 | 550,000 | 110 | 147 | $0.080 |
| Pro | $99 | 1,238,000 | 2,475,000 | 495 | 660 | $0.080 |
| Scale | $299 | 3,738,000 | 7,475,000 | 1,495 | 1,993 | $0.080 |
| Business | $990 | 12,375,000 | 24,750,000 | 4,950 | 6,600 | $0.080 |
The last column is our arithmetic: monthly price divided by the v4 character allowance. Every paid plan lands at about $0.08 per 1,000 characters, the API rate, so the plans are prepaid allowances rather than discounts; usage beyond them is billed at the API rates. Turbo and Flash models get twice the characters for the same plan.
The models behind the prices
ElevenLabs' models page describes Eleven v4 as its flagship text-to-speech model with strong voice cloning, 90+ languages and a 10,000-character limit per request; v4 Turbo as the real-time version with about 100 ms median latency; Eleven v3 at 70+ languages and 5,000 characters; Flash v2.5 as the low-cost, low-latency option with 32 languages and a 40,000-character limit; and Multilingual v2 at 29 languages and 10,000 characters. Scribe v3 transcribes recorded audio in 90+ languages, and Music v2.5 generates music from text prompts.
What it means for a project
A 10,000-character script (roughly 1,600 words) costs about $0.80 on v4 and $0.40 on a Turbo or Flash model. Transcribing an hour of audio with Scribe v3 costs $0.20. For comparison, OpenAI lists tts-1 at $15 per million characters ($0.015 per 1,000); see text-to-speech API pricing compared and speech-to-text API pricing compared.
Frequently asked questions
How much does the ElevenLabs API cost?
Text to speech is $0.08 per 1,000 characters for v4, v3 and v2 Multilingual, and $0.04 per 1,000 for v4 Turbo, v3 Conversational and Flash/Turbo. Speech to text (Scribe v3 and v2) is $0.20 per hour and the live versions $0.22 per hour. Music is $0.15 per minute and sound effects $0.12 per minute.
What does 1 million characters cost?
$80 on v4, v3 and v2 Multilingual, and $40 on v4 Turbo, v3 Conversational and Flash/Turbo. These per-million figures are our arithmetic from the per-1,000 prices.
How much do the plans cost?
Free, Starter $6, Creator $22, Pro $99, Scale $299 and Business $990 per month, with monthly allowances of characters, transcription hours, music minutes and more. Usage beyond the allowance is billed at the per-unit API rates.
Are plans cheaper per character than the API?
Not per our arithmetic: dividing each paid plan's price by its v4 character allowance gives about $0.08 per 1,000 characters, the same as the API rate. A plan is a prepaid allowance at that rate.
Is music billed per minute or per generation?
The pricing page shows $0.15 per minute for music and $0.12 per minute for sound effects, but its FAQ says they are billed per generation. Check the page for how your usage is metered.
Sources
Primary sources opened on November 13, 2026. Prices come from our verified price table (see the methodology).
Rates and allowances were read from ElevenLabs' pricing page on November 13, 2026; the page lists plan columns in the order shown. Words per character is our rough conversion (about 6 characters per word including spaces).