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.
What the free plan includes
| Item | Free plan |
|---|---|
| Monthly credits | 10,000 |
| Roughly | 10 minutes of generated speech |
| Projects in Studio | 3 |
| Commercial licence | No — starts on Starter at $6 |
Checked on elevenlabs.io/pricing, 2 November 2026.
Why ten minutes runs out
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.
When $6 is the right answer
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.