Hands-on tests of ElevenLabs: text to speech, sound effects and the API. Each guide shows the settings we used, the audio we got and what it cost, so you can judge quality and price before you start.
4 guides
ElevenLabs
We made 25 sounds with the ElevenLabs Sound Effects API on a Free plan key and read the credit counter after each call: 10 credits a second at fixed length, a flat 50 on auto length, a quarter of what the docs say. Vietnamese prompts came back almost silent.
ElevenLabs
We sent one tricky English paragraph through five ElevenLabs and Gemini voice models over the API, three times each. Eleven v4, v4 Turbo and Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS read back with zero errors; Gemini cost $0.0136 a minute, Eleven v4 $0.0624.
ElevenLabs
We timed the audio ElevenLabs returned for each credit on a free API key: Flash v2.5 gave about 125 seconds per 1,000 credits, v4 and v3 about 62–63. What Free, Starter, Creator and Pro list in minutes, and why the API page shows far more than the web app.
ElevenLabs
We created a free ElevenLabs API key with a 2,000-credit cap and ran Flash v2.5, Multilingual v2, v3 and v4 in English and Vietnamese: what each call cost, how fast it was, which models read Vietnamese correctly, and what the free tier blocks.
