ElevenLabs licensing is the set of terms under which ElevenLabs sells its audio and voice AI platform: text to speech, speech to text, dubbing, voice cloning, sound effects, music generation, conversational agents and the APIs behind them. The company contracts through Eleven Labs Inc. and organises its offer into three product families, ElevenCreative for the website studio tools, ElevenAgents for conversational voice and chat agents, and ElevenAPI for programmatic access. A Terms of Service governs every account, and Service-Specific Terms supplement it for the individual families.[1]
Nothing in the ElevenLabs model is installed software. A customer buys access to hosted services and a bundle of consumption, so the software asset manager’s questions are different from those for a licence key or a processor metric. What is the subscription tier? How many credits does it carry and how fast are they spent? How many seats and voice slots does it include? May the output be used commercially, and may the output be resold? Those answers come from the plan, and the plan in turn comes from the pricing page and the contract documents rather than from a keyed entitlement.
The Terms of Service divide users at the first rule. A person who uses the Services free of charge, a “Free User”, may use them only for non-commercial purposes, and a person on a paid subscription, a “Paid User”, may use them for commercial purposes, in either case subject to the Prohibited Use Policy.[2] The Help Center restates the rule as a plan fact: the free plan has no commercial licence, and every paid plan includes one, unless the customer uses Beta Services.[3] That boundary, between free and paid, is the main licensing control in the self-serve product.
Editions
ElevenLabs publishes list prices for six self-serve tiers and leaves the seventh, Enterprise, to negotiation. The prices below are in US dollars per month and were retrieved from the pricing page on 2026-10-13. The page shows no effective date, so the figures describe the page as fetched and not a contractual price.[4]
| Plan | Price per month | Included credits per month | Notable entitlements |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free plan | 0 | 10,000 | Non-commercial use with attribution; 3 custom voice slots; no cloning |
| Starter plan | 6 (promotional first month 1) | 30,000 | Commercial licence; Instant Voice Cloning; Dubbing Studio |
| Creator plan | 22 (promotional first month 11) | 121,000 | Professional Voice Cloning, 1 slot; music streaming distribution |
| Pro plan | 99 | 600,000 | 44.1 kHz PCM output through the API; extra Full Seats can be bought |
| Scale plan | 299 | 1,800,000 | 3 workspace seats; 3 Professional Voice Clones |
| Business plan | 990 | 6,000,000 | 10 workspace seats; 10 Professional Voice Clones; low-latency TTS |
| Enterprise plan | Custom | Custom | Custom DPA and service levels, BAAs, SSO, elevated concurrency |
Annual billing is priced at ten times the monthly price, which the page describes as two months free.[4] Beyond subscriptions, Pay As You Go lets any self-serve tier, including Free, add a prepaid balance that is drawn after the plan’s included credits.[5] Reception.ai, a separate small-business answering product, sells a 14-day free trial and Basic, Plus and Premium plans at 29, 79 and 199 US dollars per month with its own credit allowance and per-credit overage.[6] The plan structure, the credit arithmetic and the seat rules are detailed in ElevenLabs plans, credits and seats.
Metrics
Almost everything is measured in one unit. A Credit is the shared unit of subscription usage and was previously called a character. The number consumed depends on the plan, on whether the call comes from the website or the API, on the product and on the model.[7] On the pricing page one text-to-speech character costs about one credit on the multilingual v2 models, a minute of speech to text about 330 credits and a minute of music about 900.[4] The text-to-speech API still bills in US dollars per 1,000 characters, and ElevenAgents plans count call minutes instead of credits.[8]
Seats and slots are the second family of units. Every workspace member holds one seat. A Full Seat gives access across ElevenCreative, ElevenAgents and ElevenAPI, and a Basic Seat is intended mainly for agents or API work, with a cap of 50,000 ElevenCreative credits per user per billing cycle.[9][10] Voice slots limit stored voices: a Custom voice slot holds a voice made with Voice Design or cloning, and a Professional Voice Clone slot holds a fine-tuned clone of the account holder’s own voice.[7][11] The concurrency units, Concurrent request for generation and Concurrent call for agents, set how much work runs at once, and the plan also sets queue priority.[12]
Counting / floors
Several rules shape what an organisation can actually consume.
- Rollover. On Starter, Creator, Pro, Scale and Business the monthly quota resets at the start of each billing cycle, and unused credits roll over up to twice the monthly quota. The Free tier and Pay As You Go credits do not roll over.[13]
- Concurrent use. The credits a workspace may use at once are limited to twice the monthly quota of the plan.[14]
- Seat ceiling. A self-serve workspace holds at most 11 Full Seats in total. More requires contacting sales.[15]
- Overage. Usage above the volume of a Recurring Subscription is charged as overage as indicated at subscription.[2] Usage based billing is described as a legacy feature that new self-serve subscriptions do not receive.[7]
- Prepaid credits. Prepaid Credits expire twelve months after purchase or issuance unless the purchase says otherwise, with no obligation to give notice before expiry, and they may not be transferred or sold.[2]
- Account closure. Closing or terminating an account forfeits unused credits tied to it.[2]
Virtualization & partitioning
ElevenLabs does not meter hosts, processors or virtual machines, so conventional virtualisation rules do not arise. The partitioning concept that does exist is the workspace. Workspaces hold members, seats and credits, and a consolidated billing arrangement links a billing workspace to reporting workspaces so they share one invoice and one credit pool. The billing workspace must sit in the US environment, while reporting workspaces may be in isolated regional environments.[16] Credentials are personal: an individual account’s credentials may not be shared or used by others.[2]
Cloud / BYOL
The services are hosted, so there is no bring-your-own-licence arrangement. The architecture questions are about data. Customer data is stored in the United States by default, and EU, India and Singapore environments are available as an enterprise option.[17] Zero Retention Mode, available to select Enterprise customers, covers API use only and never the web interface.[18] A Business Associate Agreement under HIPAA is available only on Enterprise subscriptions.[19] Software that ElevenLabs publishes, such as its SDKs, carries open-source licences such as the MIT License, and those licences give no right to use the Services themselves.[20]
Programs
- Terms families. ElevenCreative, ElevenAgents, ElevenAPI, Music and Speech to Text each have a terms page that supplements the Terms of Service.[1] The deeper articles describe them: ElevenLabs Terms of Service, commercial rights and prohibited use, ElevenLabs agents, API and enterprise terms, ElevenLabs voice cloning and Voice Library licensing and ElevenLabs Music licensing.
- OEM Terms. Business Entities on Scale, Business, Enterprise or equivalent plans may bundle ElevenLabs into their own subscription product for End Users. Customers on Free, Starter, Creator or Pro tiers may not.[21]
- Enterprise Pilot. A limited pilot for evaluation that may not be used for commercial, production or public-facing purposes.[22]
- Startup Grants Program. A grant of free usage for startups building conversational agents.[23]
- Impact Program. Non-profits and education institutions are directed to the Impact Program form for discounted or free plans.[24]
- ElevenReader. Content generated in the ElevenReader app is for streaming in the app and personal use only.[25]
Audits and compliance
The public self-serve terms contain no software-style licence audit clause. Compliance runs through other levers. ElevenLabs may remove or restrict content and may suspend or terminate access where content is reasonably likely, in its sole determination, to breach the law or the Terms.[2] The Prohibited Use Policy sets the behavioural limits, for example the bar on training AI models on output and the consent rule for voices.[26] The one explicit verification right is in the OEM Terms: during the authorisation and for three years afterwards, a customer must cooperate with ElevenLabs or its auditor on at least ten business days’ notice, no more than once per calendar year unless material non-compliance is found, and ElevenLabs bears the auditor’s expenses.[21]
For a software asset manager the practical exposure is therefore not a true-up in the usual sense. It is overage billing, expiry of prepaid balances, loss of commercial rights by being on the wrong tier, and breach of use restrictions, notably the ban on free-plan commercial use, the ban on offering the Services or output to third parties on more permissive terms, and the voice-consent rule.[26]
Disputes and liability
Disputes other than small claims and intellectual property disputes go to individual arbitration administered by JAMS under New York law after a 30-day informal process, with a class-action waiver.[2] ElevenLabs’ total liability for any claim is limited to the greater of 100 US dollars and the amount the customer paid in the preceding 12 months.[2] Residents of the EEA, Switzerland and the UK are covered by a separate version of the Terms that includes a statutory withdrawal right for the first 14 days of a subscription.[27]
Out of scope
- Signed Order Forms, Enterprise agreements and negotiated service levels, which are not public.
- Enterprise prices and custom credit allocations. ElevenLabs publishes none.
- Per-model credit multipliers beyond the approximate figures on the pricing page, which change with new models.
- Tax, regional pricing and currency differences other than the US dollar list prices cited here.
- Litigation. No court case about ElevenLabs software licensing, licence scope or open-source terms was identified with a primary court record, so no case article is included.