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ElevenLabs sells synthetic speech, and its pricing page does something most pricing pages do not: it prints the price and the allowance in the same sentence. The rule that decides whether you may use the result is somewhere else.
What the pricing page settles in one sentence
Most pricing pages give you a figure in one place and an allowance in another, and leave the arithmetic to you. ElevenLabs answers both at once, in a question near the foot of its pricing page: the free plan is $0/mo, 10,000 credits, and the first paid step is $6/mo, Starter, carrying 30,000 credits.
That is worth more than it sounds. A price for generated audio means very little without the allowance attached to it, because the same dollar buys different amounts of work depending on what the vendor counts. Reading an AI pricing page is mostly about reconstructing that relationship from two places on one screen. Here there is nothing to reconstruct.
What a credit converts into is the next question, and the same page answers it per tier rather than globally: the minutes of speech a credit yields move with the audio quality you ask for. So the step from one figure to the other is three times the credits for six dollars, and that is a ratio of credits rather than of finished minutes. Our profile of ElevenLabs sets the same figures beside the rest of what the vendor publishes.
The allowance you can use for work starts at the paid step
The free plan's 10,000 credits are not a smaller version of the paid one. ElevenLabs publishes a separate Prohibited Use Policy, dated in its own text, and section 9 lists among prohibited uses: "If you are a free user, using our Services for any commercial purpose, including for advertising or running pyramid schemes, contests, or sweepstakes."
Read that against what a free tier is normally for. Our own note on free tiers argues that the allowance is a budget to spend on the version you would actually ship, and to put that in front of whoever signs it off. That note was written about the video products in our ranking, and this is the case it does not cover: here the vendor's policy bars a free user from shipping the result at all.
So the free plan answers a narrower question than its credit balance suggests. It can tell you whether the voices sound right, whether pronunciation holds on your own script, and whether the API behaves. It cannot produce the deliverable, because the terms you accepted on the way in say it may not be used for one.
None of that is hidden. It is written down, it is dated, and it is readable before you spend anything. It is simply not written where you would go looking for it.
The voice rules are in the other document
If you want to know whether you may replicate a colleague's voice, the document to open is not the one called Terms of Use. We read the whole of that document on August 26, 2026, and the word clone appears in it zero times. So does the word consent.
The rule exists, and it is clear. It is in the Prohibited Use Policy, and it is worded as replication rather than cloning: creating or using output "to intentionally replicate the voice of another person: a) without consent or legal right, including to take unauthorized action on behalf of such individual".
That is a statement about two documents we opened, not a claim about the company. ElevenLabs plainly does use the word cloning, because Voice Cloning is the name of a product in its own navigation. What can be said is narrower and more useful than a verdict on the vendor: a buyer who searches the Terms of Use for the voice rules finds nothing there, because the rules live in another document and under another word.
For a category where licensing and consent decide the purchase, that is the practical finding. The answer is available. It is one document further than you would expect.
What the score rests on
Our methodology publishes the five components and their weights, so here is what each one had under it on this page rather than a number with nothing behind it.
Fit for the stated job, 30 percent. ElevenLabs publishes speech synthesis, voice cloning, dubbing and speech to text, which is the whole of what this category is about rather than one corner of it.
Cost to get started, 25 percent. Both figures arrive from the vendor in one sentence, so there is no gap between price and allowance for a reader to close. Against that, the free tier cannot be spent on commercial work, so what it costs to get started on a real job is the paid step and not zero.
What the vendor commits to, 20 percent. A Prohibited Use Policy that dates itself, an explicit consent requirement for replicating a voice, an explicit restriction on free accounts, and a documented zero retention mode on the API. Held back by where the voice rule sits rather than by what it says.
Portability, 15 percent. A public REST API, POST /v1/text-to-speech/:voice_id, with a runnable example printed on the reference page and an output format chosen in the request.
Documentation quality, 10 percent. That same reference page answers a real question with a command you can paste, and the words contact sales, talk to sales and request a demo appear on it zero times.
Weighted, that comes to 8.2, which is the same total our Synthesia review reached by a different route. We have left it there rather than nudging either page: Synthesia earns its total on a free tier denominated in the unit a client understands, and ElevenLabs earns the same total on clarity and documentation while giving ground on what its free tier permits. Two products can be equally good buys for opposite reasons.
What we could not settle
The reference page shows one output format in its printed example and we have not published a list of the rest, because counting a file extension in a page's prose is not the same as reading a documented list of supported formats.
And there is no quality score here, on voices or on pronunciation, because we did not measure it. We have not found a published benchmark of synthetic speech we would be willing to rank on, and inventing one to fill the row would be worth less than the empty space.