ElevenLabs vs Google Cloud Text-to-Speech pricing
Both are in text-to-speech apis. ElevenLabs is billed per character (credits); Google Cloud Text-to-Speech is billed per 1m characters. Numbers below are copied from each vendor's pricing page.
ElevenLabsFree tier or trial
- Free tier
- 10k credits/mo (~10 min audio)
- Billed
- Per character (credits)
- Best for
- Ultra-realistic AI voices for apps & agents
- Verified
- Jun 27, 2026
Google Cloud Text-to-SpeechFree tier or trial
- Free tier
- 1M (WaveNet) / 4M (Standard) chars/mo
- Billed
- Per 1M characters
- Best for
- Enterprise TTS on Google Cloud
- Verified
- Jun 27, 2026
ElevenLabs plans
| Plan | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/mo | 10,000 credits/month; attribution required; non-commercial. |
| Starter | $5/mo | 30,000 credits/month; commercial license; instant voice cloning. |
| Creator | $22/mo | 100,000 credits/month (~$11 first month promo); professional voice cloning, higher-quality audio. |
| Pro | $99/mo | 500,000 credits/month; 192 kbps audio, usage-based API access. |
| Scale | $330/mo | 2,000,000 credits/month; multiple seats for teams. |
| Business | $1,320/mo | 11,000,000 credits/month; low-latency, higher concurrency for production. |
- Credit model charges per generation attempt, regenerations, tests, and failed runs all consume credits
- Frequent user complaints about surprise overage charges and fast credit burn
- Pricing transparency is a recurring pain point (Trustpilot ~3.2/5 driven largely by billing)
Source: https://elevenlabs.io/pricing
Google Cloud Text-to-Speech plans
| Plan | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Standard voices | $4 / 1M characters | First 4M characters per month free; basic concatenative voices. |
| WaveNet voices | $16 / 1M characters | First 1M characters/month free; DeepMind WaveNet neural voices. |
| Neural2 voices | $16 / 1M characters | First 1M characters/month free; higher-quality neural voices. |
| Studio voices | $160 / 1M characters | Premium narration-grade voices (priced per byte/character). |
| Chirp 3: HD voices | $30 / 1M characters | Generative high-fidelity voices; free monthly allotment, 8 voices across 31 languages. |
| Free tier | $0 | Recurring monthly free character allotment per voice class (e.g. 4M Standard, 1M WaveNet/Neural2). |
- Chirp 3 HD ($30/1M) and Studio ($160/1M) are far costlier than the $4 Standard tier
- Voice-type tiering and per-character pricing causes recurring billing confusion for users