ElevenLabs vs Fish Audio: Breadth or Minutes per Dollar

The short answer: if your job is a lot of plain narration, around 200 minutes a month for explainers, courses or long reads, Fish Audio covers it on Plus at $15 a month billed monthly, while ElevenLabs Creator at $22 lists about 121 minutes of speech, so the same volume pushes you to Pro at $99 (Fish Audio plans, ElevenLabs pricing, both checked on 26 October 2026). If the job is broader than narration, dubbing a video, a voice agent on the phone, music beds, a player on your blog, ElevenLabs does all of it from one credit pool and speaks 90+ languages to Fish Audio's 30+. Fish wins on minutes per dollar; ElevenLabs wins on everything around the voice.

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Before you compare voices:

1. Divide the price by the minutes. For example, $15 / 200 = $0.075 a minute on Fish Audio Plus and $22 / 121 = $0.18 on ElevenLabs Creator, using the minutes each plan card states (Fish Audio plans, ElevenLabs pricing). You are not misreading Fish's page if the sums look off: the FAQ there says a minute costs roughly 600 to 625 credits, while 250,000 credits for up to 200 minutes works out at 1,250. Budget on the card's 200.
2. Check the alphabet of your scripts. ElevenLabs charges 1 credit per character on its V2 Multilingual model (pricing FAQ); Fish Audio charges 1 credit per UTF-8 byte, where English letters are one byte and most Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters are three (Fish Audio MCP docs). For example, the Dutch word "geïnteresseerd" is 14 characters but 15 bytes, because ï takes two. Dutch barely moves; a Greek or Russian script, at two bytes per letter, comes close to doubling.
3. Pick the listening number now. Completion rate of the narrated video or article over its first 28 days, against the version without a voice.

The two middle plans, row by row

Read on 26 October 2026 from the ElevenLabs pricing page and homepage, and the Fish Audio plan page and homepage.

Where the decision sits

Volume of one thing, or a little of many

Fish Audio's plan cards lead with generation time: Plus up to 200 minutes, Pro at $100 up to 1,620 minutes with 3 seats (plans). ElevenLabs sells one pool spent across products, with music at 900 credits a minute and dubbing from 2,000 credits a minute (pricing FAQ). A team that only narrates gets more from Fish's meter. A team that narrates on Monday, dubs on Wednesday and scores a podcast on Friday gets more from one pool, and from rollover: ElevenLabs banks unused credits for up to two months, while Fish says unused minutes do not roll over.

How little audio a clone needs, and who can use it

Fish Audio says a clone can start from as little as 10 seconds of audio (homepage FAQ); ElevenLabs recommends 1 to 2 minutes for an Instant Voice Clone and asks you to confirm the right and consent to clone before saving (cloning guide). Mind Fish's defaults, though: new clones are unlisted, so anyone holding the voice ID can use them, and generated audio comes back as permanent links anyone with the link can open (Fish Audio MCP docs). Ask for a private voice before you upload a founder's sample. Consent records and the AI Act Article 50 disclosure for a cloned voice are covered in the AI voiceover use case.

What the rest of the account does

ElevenLabs ships a dubbing studio, a web player for articles and ElevenAgents for phone and chat. Fish Audio has grown sideways too: Story Studio for multi-speaker audio, audio translation, a voice agent and image and video models (homepage). For developers, Fish's API charges $15 per million UTF-8 bytes on its S2.1 Pro model, which it puts at about 12 hours of speech (API pricing).

Prices, both pages, 26 October 2026

ElevenLabs (pricing), billed monthly: Free $0 with 10,000 credits; Starter $6 with 30,000 and the commercial licence; Creator $22 with 121,000; Pro $99 with 600,000; Scale $299 with 1.8 million and 3 seats. A year costs ten months. Starter showed $1 and Creator $11 for a first month until 1 November.

Fish Audio (plans), billed monthly: Free $0 with 8,000 credits and up to 7 minutes, for personal use only; Plus $15 with 250,000; Pro $100 with 2,000,000 and 3 seats; Max $999 with 25,000,000 and 10 seats. Annual billing showed a first year at half price, Plus at $66 for the year, with an offer ending 12 November.

One agent step: narrate a script, then check spend

Fish Audio runs an MCP server at https://api.fish.audio/mcp; in Claude, add it under Settings, Connectors, Add custom connector and sign in with your Fish account (MCP docs). Ask it, in the docs' own pattern, to find a calm narration voice in your language, read the script aloud and return the audio link, then ask how many credits are left. Speech costs the same as in the web app; voice search is free. The human check: the editor plays the whole clip with the script open, marks every misread product name and every sentence that changed meaning, and only then is the file downloaded into the edit. Treat the returned link as public from the moment it exists.

Choose ElevenLabs if your job is

• Several kinds of audio from one budget: narration, dubbing, music beds, sound effects and a voice agent.
• Publishing in many languages, or listening numbers from an embedded player on your own articles.
• A cloned voice with a consent step in the product and credits that carry over a quiet month.

Choose Fish Audio if your job is

• Long narration at volume, where the cost per minute decides the budget.
• Cloning from a very short sample, kept private on purpose.
• Building speech into your own product on a pay-as-you-go API.

Plans and setup for ElevenLabs are in its entry; Fish Audio has no entry here, so start at fish.audio.

A blind test on both free tiers

Fish Audio's free tier allows up to 500 characters per generation, and ElevenLabs' gives 10,000 credits a month (Fish Audio plans, ElevenLabs pricing), so take one paragraph of under 500 characters with three of your product names in it. Voice it on both in the closest stock voices, label the files A and B, and ask five colleagues which they would listen to for ten minutes. Neither free tier allows commercial use, so the files stay internal.

The $66 on the Fish Audio Plus card is a first-year price for twelve months paid at once, under a countdown to 12 November, and the card does not print what the second year costs; the discount turns a $15 monthly decision into a yearly one before the renewal figure is in front of you (Fish Audio plans). Ask for the renewal price in writing, or stay monthly.

FAQ

Can I use Fish Audio voices commercially?

On paid plans, with verified voices that you own; free-plan output is for personal, non-commercial projects only, per the FAQ on the plan page.

Which one handles Dutch?

ElevenLabs lists Dutch among its 90+ languages (homepage). Fish Audio puts its coverage at 30+ languages, and the FAQ on its homepage names English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, French, German, Arabic and Spanish without mentioning Dutch. Test a Dutch paragraph free first.

Does either keep credits I do not use?

ElevenLabs carries them for up to two months on paid plans and forfeits them on a downgrade or cancellation (pricing FAQ). Fish Audio resets quotas each billing cycle (plans FAQ).