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Is ElevenLabs free? What it actually costs in 2026

The short answer

ElevenLabs is free for 10,000 credits a month without a commercial licence. Starter is $6 a month; Creator $11; Pro $99; Scale $299.

Free gives 10k credits a month across text-to-speech, speech-to-text, sound effects, voice design and music, limited to 3 Studio projects — and no commercial use.

What the free tier actually includes

  • 10,000 credits a month
  • No commercial licence
  • 3 projects in Studio

Where the wall is

Publishing. The moment a voice goes into anything that earns — a video, a podcast, an app — you need a paid plan for the licence, whatever the credit count.

After that: Starter $6 a month; Creator $11 (a 50% first-month promotion applies); Pro $99; Scale $299. All paid plans include commercial use.

Can you self-host ElevenLabs? No — cloud only

ElevenLabs is hosted only. Open text-to-speech models compared here — Kokoro, Piper, XTTS — run on your own GPU with no per-character metering.

What it actually takes to run one yourself

Real RAM against the documented minimum, monthly cost, setup time, and the one thing that catches people out.

Self-hosting Kokoro

needs Well under 2 GB of VRAM on a GPU — Kokoro-FastAPI measured 758 MiB freed on unload after a short clip and 1,656 MiB after 7.5 minutes of long-form audio on an RTX 4060 Ti. On CPU, an ordinary laptop with a couple of GB free is enough (estimate; not stated at source). (docs say Not stated by the project. The weights are 327 MB (kokoro-v1_0.pth) and the community ONNX export is 92 MB at 8-bit; it runs on CPU.)$0 — it runs on the machine you already own

Self-hosting Chatterbox

needs About 5–6 GB of VRAM for the original 500M model — one user reports ~5 GB normally and 6 GB at peak on a GTX 1060 6 GB (GitHub issue #508). The project states no VRAM figure; Turbo (350M) is described as needing less. (docs say Not stated by the project. The smallest variant, Chatterbox-Nano (110M, English only), runs on CPU — Resemble says 3x faster than realtime on 8 cores.)$0 on a PC with a 6 GB+ NVIDIA card you already own; otherwise a 24 GB RTX 3090/4090 on RunPod at $0.22–0.74/hr (read 2026-09-30) is more than enough

When paying is still the right call

If you need the very best multilingual quality with zero infrastructure work, ElevenLabs is still an easy call. It remains ahead on emotional range across many languages, its API is genuinely pleasant, and at low volume the cost is trivial compared to running a GPU. Teams without ML infrastructure people, or anyone whose volume stays modest, will likely spend more in engineering time self-hosting than they save.

What you are locked into

Voice clones live in ElevenLabs' account and are not portable — a cloned voice cannot be exported and used elsewhere, so the more voices you build the more expensive leaving becomes. Generated audio files are yours, but the pipeline that produced them is not.

If you would rather not pay: Kokoro

94

Kokoro

82M parameters, Apache-2.0, and the top of the TTS leaderboard.

Free — weights are Apache-2.0. Costs are hardware only; a rented GPU capable of faster-than-real-time synthesis runs roughly $20–$80/month, and nothing at all if you already own a suitable card.

What will the GPU cost? Compare every company’s hourly price

See all 3 ElevenLabs alternatives compared

Compare the free options head-to-head

Kokoro vs Chatterbox→Kokoro vs Piper→Chatterbox vs Piper→

Read from ElevenLabs's own pricing and documentation on 2026-09-24 — 33 days ago. Vendors change prices without notice; confirm before you commit.

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