ElevenLabs free plan: 10,000 credits is about ten minutes of audio

Ten thousand credits sounds like a lot until you convert it: about ten minutes of finished speech a month.

Checked on elevenlabs.io/pricing, 2 November 2026.

A 1,500-word script is roughly ten minutes of speech, so one episode uses the whole month. Then there is editing: a line read wrong, a name pronounced badly, a pause in the wrong place. Every retake is charged again.

In practice, budget twice your finished runtime. A ten-minute video is twenty minutes of generation, and the free plan covers half of one video.

Starter raises the ceiling to 30,000 credits and adds the commercial licence. If the audio goes into a monetised video, a client project or a product, the licence is the reason to pay, not the credits. At $6 a month it is cheaper than the argument about whether you were allowed to publish it.