ElevenLabs vs OpenAI TTS pricing
Both are in text-to-speech apis. ElevenLabs is billed per character (credits); OpenAI TTS is billed per 1m characters / tokens. 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
OpenAI TTSNo free tier
- Free tier
- None (pay-as-you-go credits)
- Billed
- Per 1M characters / tokens
- Best for
- TTS bundled into the OpenAI API
- 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
OpenAI TTS plans
| Plan | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| tts-1 (standard) | $15 / 1M characters | Latency-optimized model; ~$0.015 per 1K characters. Per-character billing. |
| tts-1-hd | $30 / 1M characters | Higher-fidelity, quality-optimized model; ~$0.030 per 1K characters. Per-character billing. |
| gpt-4o-mini-tts | $0.60 / 1M text input tokens + $12 / 1M audio output tokens | Token-based pricing; OpenAI estimates ~$0.015 per minute of generated audio. Newest, steerable model. |
- No guaranteed uptime/latency SLA on the default Standard tier, 99.9% SLA only on Scale/Priority tiers
Source: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/text-to-speech