ElevenLabs Free Plan: 10,000 Credits/Month (2026)

ElevenLabs' Free plan gives you 10,000 credits a month, which ElevenLabs puts at about 10 minutes of text-to-speech, along with access to its speech-to-text, sound effects, Voice Design and music tools. It is a real ongoing free tier, not a trial. The limits are what you can do with the output: Free-plan audio has no commercial license, and if you publish it you must credit ElevenLabs in the title. Voice cloning, commercial rights and credit rollover start with the Starter plan at $6 a month.

What the Free plan includes

Everyone who signs up is placed on the Free plan automatically. According to ElevenLabs' pricing page and billing docs, it includes:

• 10,000 credits per month, shared across every product. Credits reset monthly.
• Text to Speech, Speech to Text, Sound Effects, Voice Design and Music, as listed on the pricing card.
• 3 Studio projects for long-form audio.
• 3 custom voice slots, usable for voices you create with Voice Design. Voices you save from the Voice Library don't use slots.
• 128 kbps, 44.1 kHz audio and 2 concurrent requests, per the plan comparison table.

What it doesn't include: a commercial license, Instant or Professional Voice Cloning, credit rollover, higher audio quality (192 kbps or PCM via API), or the Dubbing Studio. Those start on paid plans.

How far 10,000 credits go

Credits used to be called characters, and for the multilingual text-to-speech models one character still costs one credit. ElevenLabs' pricing FAQ gives approximate credit costs for each product:

The right-hand column is our arithmetic: 10,000 divided by the credit cost. Because every product draws from the same pool, using one leaves fewer credits for the others. A 1,500-word blog post is roughly 9,000 characters, so narrating one article uses almost the whole month.

ElevenLabs says credits are charged per generation, not per download. Some regenerations are free if the text and settings don't change, and the interface tells you before you generate whether a regeneration is free.

The license: non-commercial, with attribution

This is the most important rule on the Free plan. ElevenLabs' Help Center says:

• The Free plan does not include a commercial license and can't be used for any commercial purpose.
• If you publish content generated on the Free plan, or while not signed in, you must attribute it to ElevenLabs by including "elevenlabs.io" or "11.ai" in the title. For Eleven Music generated on Free, you reference "Eleven Music" instead.
• Content created outside a paid subscription, before or after one, can't be used commercially and always needs attribution when shared non-commercially.
• Content generated during a paid subscription can be used commercially indefinitely, subject to ElevenLabs' terms, unless it was made with Beta Services, which can't be used commercially or in production.

Upgrading later does not make earlier Free-plan audio commercial. If you might monetize a project (a YouTube channel with ads, an audiobook for sale, a client project), generate the final audio while on a paid plan.

Using the API on the Free plan

ElevenLabs' API pricing page lists a Free / Pay as you go tier alongside the paid plans, with included usage at these rates:

The page lists these amounts in columns without plan labels; the first column sits under "Free / Pay as you go", which is how we read it. ElevenLabs' API FAQ says API usage is billed in US dollars, not credits, and you can see characters and minutes used in the analytics tab of the Developers dashboard.

Creating an API key

1. Sign in at elevenlabs.io and open your API Keys settings from your profile.
2. Create a key. You can limit which endpoints it can reach, set a credit quota, restrict it to IP addresses, and set it to expire after anywhere from 15 minutes to 30 days.
3. Keep the key server-side. ElevenLabs takes part in GitHub's secret scanning program, so a key pushed to a public GitHub repository is disabled automatically.

curl -X POST "https://api.elevenlabs.io/v1/text-to-speech/<voice_id>" \
  -H "xi-api-key: $ELEVENLABS_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"text": "Hello from the free plan.", "model_id": "eleven_flash_v2_5"}' \
  --output hello.mp3

Topping up without a subscription

If 10,000 credits isn't enough but you don't want a monthly plan, ElevenLabs offers Pay As You Go top-ups on every self-serve plan, including Free. Its docs say:

• You add a payment method and prepay a balance, from a minimum of $5 (or ₹500). The option is called Top Up in Developer settings.
• Top-up credits last 12 months and are used only after your monthly plan credits run out.
• Without two-factor authentication, Free, Starter and Creator accounts can top up at most $100 a month; enabling 2FA removes the cap.
• If the balance reaches $0 and Auto Top Up is off, service pauses immediately; there are no overage charges.
• Plan restrictions still apply. A Free-plan account with a PAYG balance still has Free-tier voice slots, and content made on Free still has no commercial license.

What paid plans add

Prices exclude taxes. ElevenLabs runs first-month discounts on Starter and Creator; in October 2026 the pricing page showed Starter at $1 for the first month (83% off) and Creator at $11. Annual billing charges ten months for a year, which ElevenLabs lists as $5 a month for Starter. On paid plans, unused credits roll over for up to two months as long as you don't downgrade or cancel.

For the full plan-by-plan comparison of other AI tools, our pricing pages such as ChatGPT pricing and Google AI plans follow the same format.

Who the Free plan suits

• Trying voices before paying: 10 minutes a month is enough to compare models and voices on your own scripts.
• Personal and educational projects that you don't monetize and can label with "elevenlabs.io".
• Developers prototyping a text-to-speech or speech-to-text feature, using the included API usage and switching to a paid plan before launch.
• Not suited to: monetized YouTube or podcast content, client work, products you sell, or anything that needs your own cloned voice.

Startups building voice agents can apply for the ElevenLabs Startup Grants program, which ElevenLabs lists as 12 months free with 33 million characters.

Free tier blocked? The abuse check

ElevenLabs limits free accounts to stop people creating many of them. Its Help Center explains the message "Unusual activity detected. Free Tier usage disabled." It can appear if you use a VPN or proxy shared with another account, if someone in your home, school or office also has a free account, or on mobile networks that share IP addresses. ElevenLabs says the only fixes are a paid subscription, which is never affected, or using an IP address that hasn't been flagged. It says it can't reverse the flag once an account is flagged.

Free alternatives for voice and speech

Our free AI API keys guide lists more options.

Common mistakes

• Publishing Free-plan audio without the "elevenlabs.io" or "11.ai" credit in the title.
• Monetizing Free-plan audio after upgrading. The license follows when the audio was made, not your current plan.
• Expecting unused credits to carry over. Rollover is for paid plans only.
• Cancelling a paid plan and losing credits. After cancellation you drop to Free at the end of the cycle and unused paid credits expire.
• Using a VPN on the free tier, which can trigger the abuse check.