Eleven Labs review
What it does
ElevenLabs is an AI audio platform spanning text-to-speech, voice cloning, dubbing, and a shared voice library. A single monthly credit pool is consumed across these products, with each character of speech drawing credits at a rate that varies by model.
Pricing
The Free plan costs $0 and includes 10,000 credits per month. Paid tiers, checked 2026-07-30, are Starter at $6 per month (30,000 credits), Creator at $22 per month (121,000 credits), Pro at $99 per month (600,000 credits), Scale at $299 per month (1,800,000 credits), and Business at $990 per month (6,000,000 credits). Annual billing grants two months free.
Limits that bite
Free-plan output is licensed for non-commercial use only and requires attribution; commercial rights begin at the $6 Starter tier. Credits reset monthly, and only up to two months of unused credits roll over. The Free plan is limited to three concurrent requests, which constrains batch generation. Per-request length also depends on the model: the expressive Eleven v3 model caps each request at 5,000 characters, while the low-latency Flash v2.5 model allows 40,000, so long scripts on v3 must be split.
How it compares
OpenAI's text-to-speech offers fewer preset voices and no voice cloning. Murf targets studio-style narration workflows. Play.ht competes directly on voice cloning and a large voice catalog.
Good fit / poor fit
A good fit for creators and developers wanting one credit pool across speech, cloning, and dubbing, plus expressive multilingual output. A poor fit for teams on the Free plan needing commercial use, or for very high-volume pipelines that would exhaust credits between monthly resets.