Is ElevenLabs free? What the free plan gives you, and why you can't use it for business

Is ElevenLabs free? Yes. ElevenLabs has a Free plan at $0 with 10,000 credits a month, roughly 10 minutes of text to speech. The catch is the licence, not the voices: ElevenLabs' Terms of Service say that if you use it free of charge, "you may only use the Services for non-commercial purposes". So you can test voices and make personal projects free, but a monetised YouTube video, an ad or client work needs a paid plan. The cheapest one, Starter, was $1 for the first month and then $6 a month when we checked on Nov 15, 2026.

ElevenLabs Free vs the paid plans

From ElevenLabs' own pricing page, read Nov 15, 2026. ElevenLabs says annual billing costs the monthly price times 10, so two months free.

Credits are what text to speech and the other tools spend. ElevenLabs' plan comparison puts the Free plan's credits at about 10 minutes of speech and Starter's at about 30.

Can you use ElevenLabs free for YouTube or commercial work?

No. This is the part most "is it free" answers skip. ElevenLabs' Terms of Service, section 1(c), split users in two:

• Free of charge: "you may only use the Services for non-commercial purposes". The same section adds that non-commercial use needs a personal e-mail address.
• Paid subscription: "you may use the Services for commercial purposes".

The pricing page matches it: the Free card has no licence line, and Starter's card opens with "Commercial License". So a voiceover on a monetised channel, a client's ad, a course you sell or a podcast with sponsors should be made on Starter or above. The terms also say you "retain all rights in and to your Output", subject to the terms.

We found no rule that free users must credit ElevenLabs in their videos. The limit is commercial use, not attribution.

What else the free plan doesn't include

• No voice cloning. Instant Voice Cloning starts on Starter, and Professional Voice Cloning on Creator. On Free you use ElevenLabs' voice library and Voice Design.
• No rollover. The pricing FAQ says unused credits roll over "for up to two months" on paid plans, and that "Rollover does not apply to the Free plan."
• Fewer projects. 3 projects in Studio, against 20 on Starter.
• API. The pricing page doesn't list API access on the Free card. Developers can use Pay As You Go instead, which the docs describe as a prepaid balance "drawn down as you use ElevenLabs".

Is Starter enough, or do you need Creator?

Start from minutes. Starter's 30,000 credits come to about 30 minutes of speech a month, enough for a few short videos a week. A faceless channel posting long narrations will run out fast; Creator's 121,000 credits are about two hours, and it's the first plan with Professional Voice Cloning, a clone of your own voice trained on more audio.

Our cost-per-hour comparison of AI voice generators works out what an hour of narration costs on each plan and on rival apps and APIs.

Free alternatives you can use commercially

If you need free narration you can monetise, the honest answer is a local model. Kokoro-82M is open source under Apache 2.0, so its output carries no ElevenLabs-style non-commercial limit. On our own laptop CPU it made 162 seconds of speech in 59 seconds, so an hour of narration takes about 22 minutes and costs only electricity. The trade-off is voice quality and control: see local text-to-speech vs paid voice AI for where each wins, and how to run text-to-speech locally for the setup.

Building a faceless account? Our faceless Instagram stack shows where the voice fits, and if you need a voice agent rather than narration, what an AI voice agent costs per minute covers that.