{"id":623,"date":"2026-10-12T11:05:57","date_gmt":"2026-10-12T11:05:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/katteb.com\/blog\/?p=623"},"modified":"2026-10-12T11:05:57","modified_gmt":"2026-10-12T11:05:57","slug":"elevenlabs-ai-agent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/katteb.com\/blog\/elevenlabs-ai-agent\/","title":{"rendered":"ElevenLabs AI Agent: ElevenLabs API Price per 1,000 Characters, Plan Math and Where a Content Agent Fits"},"content":{"rendered":"
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TL;DR.<\/strong> On 12 October 2026 the ElevenLabs API pricing page<\/a> listed text to speech at a pay-as-you-go list price of $0.08 per 1,000 characters for v4, v3 and v2 Multilingual, and $0.04 per 1,000 for v4 Turbo, v3 Conversational and Flash\/Turbo (v4 and v4 Turbo were on a 72% launch discount that ended that day). The ElevenLabs plans page<\/a> listed Free $0 (10,000 credits a month), Starter $6 (30,000), Creator $22 (121,000), Pro $99 (600,000), Scale $299 (1.8M, 3 seats) and Business $990 (6M, 10 seats); yearly billing costs ten months’ price. The cheapest route depends on volume, on whether you need a commercial licence or voice cloning, and on whether anyone can call an API. Below, four scenarios with every figure in US dollars, pre-tax, and the arithmetic shown.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Someone searching “elevenlabs api price” is usually weighing two ways to pay the same company. One is a subscription with a monthly pool of credits that you spend in the ElevenLabs app. The other is the API, billed per 1,000 characters, where your own code, or a tool someone else built, sends the text and gets audio back. There is a third question hiding behind the first two: who writes the script, renders it, checks it and puts it into a video every week? That is the part an AI agent does, and it has its own price.<\/p>\n

This guide takes the three in order. It sets out what ElevenLabs charges and how credits and characters are counted, lists the jobs an ElevenLabs AI agent is used for, and works through four priced scenarios. Where the official pages do not give enough to compare fairly, we say so rather than fill the gap.<\/p>\n

What does ElevenLabs sell?<\/h2>\n

ElevenLabs is best known for text to speech, but its pricing page now groups three products: ElevenCreative<\/strong> (the app: text to speech, speech to text, sound effects, voice design, music, dubbing, image and video), ElevenAgents<\/strong> (real-time voice agents for phone and chat) and ElevenAPI<\/strong> (the same models priced per unit for developers). This article is about producing voice content, so it covers Creative plans and API prices. ElevenAgents, which bills conversational minutes, is a different purchase and is not compared here.<\/p>\n

How credits and characters work<\/h3>\n

According to the plans page FAQ, each plan comes with a monthly pool of credits shared across every product. Text to speech costs about 1 credit per character on the v2 Multilingual model; Flash and Turbo models cost between 0.5 and 1 credit per character through the API. Other products draw from the same pool: speech to text about 330 credits a minute, music about 900 credits a minute, sound effects about 200 credits per generation, voice changer and isolator about 1,000 credits a minute, and dubbing from 2,000 to 10,000 credits a minute depending on the mode.<\/p>\n

Unused credits on a paid plan roll over for up to two months, so a balance can reach three times the monthly quota while the subscription stays active. Downgrading or cancelling forfeits the unused paid credits at the end of the cycle, and the Free plan has no rollover. Pay-as-you-go top-ups are separate from that cap.<\/p>\n

ElevenLabs plans, read from the official page<\/h2>\n

All figures read on 12 October 2026 from elevenlabs.io\/pricing<\/a>. Prices in US dollars, excluding taxes, levies and duties, as the page states.<\/p>\n

\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Plan<\/th>\nMonthly price<\/th>\nYearly price (10 \u00d7 monthly)<\/th>\nCredits per month<\/th>\nNotable additions<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
Free<\/td>\n$0<\/td>\n$0<\/td>\n10,000<\/td>\n3 Studio projects; no commercial licence listed<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Starter<\/td>\n$6 (first month $1 until 18 Oct)<\/td>\n$60 ($5\/month)<\/td>\n30,000<\/td>\nCommercial licence, instant voice cloning, Dubbing Studio<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Creator<\/td>\n$22 (first month $11)<\/td>\n$220 ($18.33\/month)<\/td>\n121,000<\/td>\nProfessional voice cloning, additional credits<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Pro<\/td>\n$99<\/td>\n$990 ($82.50\/month)<\/td>\n600,000<\/td>\n44.1 kHz PCM output via API, 192 kbps audio<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Scale<\/td>\n$299<\/td>\n$2,990 ($249.17\/month)<\/td>\n1,800,000<\/td>\n3 seats, team collaboration, 3 professional clones<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Business<\/td>\n$990<\/td>\n$9,900 ($825\/month)<\/td>\n6,000,000<\/td>\n10 seats, 10 professional clones, low-latency TTS<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Enterprise<\/td>\nCustom<\/td>\nCustom<\/td>\nCustom<\/td>\nDPA\/SLA terms, SSO, HIPAA BAAs<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/figure>\n

The plans page also lists approximate extra-minute prices for text to speech in the app, falling from about $0.36 on Free to about $0.17 on Pro and above, and concurrency limits rising from 2 requests on Free to 25 on Business.<\/p>\n

ElevenLabs API price per 1,000 characters<\/h2>\n

The API pricing page<\/a> prices each model directly. List prices, read 12 October 2026:<\/p>\n

\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Model<\/th>\nPrice per 1,000 characters (list)<\/th>\nPositioning on the page<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
v4<\/td>\n$0.08 ($0.022 during a launch discount ending 12 Oct)<\/td>\nMost emotive, audio tags, 90+ languages<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
v4 Turbo<\/td>\n$0.04 ($0.011 during the same discount)<\/td>\nReal-time and agents, about 100 ms latency<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
v3<\/td>\n$0.08<\/td>\nExpressive delivery, multi-speaker dialogue, 5,000 character limit per request<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
v3 Conversational<\/td>\n$0.04<\/td>\nAbout 280 ms latency, tuned for conversation<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
v2 Multilingual<\/td>\n$0.08<\/td>\nStable long-form audio, 29 languages, 10,000 character limit<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Flash \/ Turbo<\/td>\n$0.04<\/td>\nAbout 75 ms latency, 32 languages, 40,000 character limit<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/figure>\n

Other API prices on the same page: Scribe v2 speech to text $0.22 an hour (Realtime $0.39), Music $0.15 a minute, Voice Isolator, Voice Changer and Sound Effects $0.12 a minute, Dubbing v1 $0.33 and Dubbing v2 $2.20 a minute.<\/p>\n

One detail worth flagging: the API page’s plan table shows “characters included” per plan, and those figures equal the plan price divided by the per-character rate (for example Creator $22 \u00f7 $0.08 per 1,000 = 275,000 v3 characters). The plans page describes the same Creator plan as 121,000 credits. The two pages count in different units, so before you budget a large job, check the balance your own dashboard shows for the model you will actually use. In the scenarios below we use the plans page credits for app use and the per-1,000 rate for API use, and never mix them.<\/p>\n

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Need the voice-overs made, not just priced?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Tell Katteb what you publish each week. It drafts the scripts, works in the tools you already use and delivers the finished files on schedule.<\/p>\n

Start my content agent<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

What does an ElevenLabs AI agent actually do?<\/h2>\n

ElevenLabs renders the voice. The agent does everything around the render, which is where most of the hours go:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Weekly explainer or product videos.<\/strong> Draft a 60 to 90 second script from a changelog or a blog post, render it, and lay it under screenshots.<\/li>\n
  2. Podcast and YouTube narration.<\/strong> Turn an outline into a full narration script, render it in chapters, check the pronunciation of names, and re-render the lines that fail.<\/li>\n
  3. Multilingual versions.<\/strong> Translate one script into several languages and render each one, keeping a log of which voice and model produced which file.<\/li>\n
  4. Course and training audio.<\/strong> Convert lesson text into narration for every module, with consistent voice settings.<\/li>\n
  5. Social clips.<\/strong> Cut a long article into ten short hooks and render each as a voice-over for a reel.<\/li>\n
  6. Transcripts and captions.<\/strong> Use speech to text on recorded calls or videos and turn them into show notes or caption files.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    A render takes seconds. The script, the review and the publishing take hours. That is the honest boundary between paying ElevenLabs and paying for an agent.<\/p>\n

    Subscription, API or an agent: four priced scenarios<\/h2>\n

    Assumptions for every scenario: US dollars; one month unless stated; list prices read on 12 October 2026 (launch discounts ignored, because they expire); taxes excluded; roughly 1,000 characters equal one minute of speech, the ratio the ElevenLabs API page itself uses (“10,000 ~10 min”); staff time valued at $30 an hour; engineering time for an API integration not included. Katteb figures from the Katteb pricing page<\/a>: Lite $19 a month or $190 a year with 30 hours of agent time a week; Business $99 a month or $990 a year. Katteb does not replace ElevenLabs: it works in your ElevenLabs account through the browser, signed in once, so in every Katteb row the ElevenLabs plan is still paid.<\/p>\n

    Scenario A: a small business, eight short voice-overs a month<\/h3>\n

    Eight explainers of about 1,500 characters each: 8 \u00d7 1,500 = 12,000 characters a month, used commercially. The Free plan’s 10,000 credits are not enough and the commercial licence starts at Starter, so the app route is Starter at $6<\/strong> (30,000 credits covers 12,000 characters at 1 credit each). By API at the v3 list rate the characters cost 12 \u00d7 $0.08 = $0.96, or $0.48 on Flash; the plans page does not say whether pay-as-you-go use carries the same commercial licence, so check that before choosing it.<\/p>\n

    Adding Katteb Lite: $6 + $19 = $25 a month against $6 alone, so Katteb is $19 more<\/strong>. It pays for itself only if it saves more than $19 \u00f7 $30 = 0.63 hours, about 38 minutes, of scripting and editing a month. For eight videos that is under five minutes each, but it is still a cost, not a saving, and we label it that way.<\/p>\n

    Scenario B: a weekly podcast or YouTube narration<\/h3>\n

    Four episodes of 20 minutes: 4 \u00d7 20 = 80 minutes, about 80,000 characters a month.<\/p>\n