ElevenLabs Free Gives 10,000 Characters. No Commercial Use.
The credit limit is the number everyone quotes. The clause that actually stops people earning money sits on a different page entirely.
ElevenLabs Free costs $0 and includes 10,000 credits a month, roughly ten minutes of generated speech, across text to speech, speech to text, sound effects, voice design, music generation and three Studio projects. It carries no commercial licence and requires attribution to elevenlabs.io or 11.ai on anything published. Starter is $6 a month with 30,000 credits and a commercial licence.1
By the numbers alone the free tier looks like a small but real allowance. The limit that matters is not a number.
ElevenLabs states plainly that the free plan cannot be used for any commercial purpose. That includes monetised video, client work, an ad read and a voiceover on your own company's landing page.
What the free plan actually includes
| Free | Starter | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 | $6/mo |
| Credits | 10,000/mo | 30,000/mo |
| Speech, roughly | 10 minutes | 30 minutes |
| Commercial licence | No | Yes |
| Attribution required | Yes | No |
| Instant voice cloning | No | Yes |
| Studio projects | 3 | 20 |
| Credit rollover | None | Up to 2 months |
| Seats | 1 | 1 |
The full voice library is available on free, which matters: you are auditioning the actual product rather than a reduced voice set.
No commercial licence, no exceptions
The help centre language is unambiguous. Free output may only be used for non-commercial purposes, and published content must credit elevenlabs.io or 11.ai in the title.
For a hobby project that is fine. For a YouTube channel with ads it is not, and the boundary is reached far earlier than most creators expect. A sponsored podcast episode is commercial. A client's explainer is commercial.
Starter at $6 is the floor for anyone earning anything from the audio, which makes it one of the cheapest real upgrades in this series. Suno's free tier draws the same line in music: the generation is free and the rights are not.
One nuance the summaries miss
The commercial licence attaches to when audio was generated. Content produced while subscribed stays commercially usable after you cancel.
Content generated before you subscribed, or after you cancel, is not covered. So the sequence matters: subscribe first, generate the work, then cancel. Upgrading later does not retroactively license what free produced.
The credits are characters, with a model-dependent rate
On the Multilingual and v3 models, one character costs one credit. On Flash and Turbo it is roughly half a credit per character, so 10,000 credits buys about 20,000 characters on the faster models.
That difference doubles the practical allowance and is rarely mentioned. If latency does not matter for your project, the cheaper model is also the more generous one.
Credits do not roll over on free. Unused allowance is lost each month.
Other meters sit alongside it
Speech to text bills around 330 credits per minute, so 10,000 credits covers roughly 30 minutes of transcription rather than ten minutes of speech.
Sound effects cost about 50 credits each and voice design around 350, which makes both comfortably usable within a month on free.
Dubbing is the expensive one at 2,000 to 10,000 credits per minute, so free covers one to five minutes of dubbed audio a month at most.
When the free plan is enough
Testing whether the voice quality suits a project. A personal video with attribution, no monetisation, and under ten minutes of speech.
It is also enough for prototyping a product's voice before you commit to a subscription.
For music rather than speech, Udio runs a daily generation cap on its free tier.
When it stops being enough
The moment the output is published for money, or the attribution line is unacceptable on a brand asset. If the video needs a presenter rather than a voice, HeyGen generates talking avatars on a free tier. Starter at $6 solves both at once, and 30,000 credits is three times the speech.
Frequently asked questions
Is ElevenLabs free?
Yes, with 10,000 credits a month and access to most products, but no commercial licence.
Can I use ElevenLabs Free commercially?
No. The free plan cannot be used for any commercial purpose. A licence starts at Starter, $6 a month.
Do I have to credit ElevenLabs on the free plan?
Yes. Published content must include elevenlabs.io or 11.ai in the title.
How many minutes is 10,000 ElevenLabs credits?
About ten minutes of speech on the standard models, or roughly twenty on Flash and Turbo.
Do free credits roll over?
No. Unused free credits are lost each month.
Credit allowances, licence terms, attribution requirements and pricing verified against ElevenLabs' pricing page and its help centre on 20 October 2026.
Sources
- ElevenLabs pricing: elevenlabs.io/pricing. Used for: Credit allowance, plan ladder and the commercial licence boundary.
All sources are the vendor's own plan or documentation pages, checked on 20 October 2026. Plan terms change without notice, so confirm current limits before you rely on them.
