ElevenLabs vs Murf: AI voice pricing, and what happened to Play.ht

A quick heads-up before the numbers: Play.ht, which used to be the third name in every one of these comparisons, was acquired by Meta and shut down at the end of 2025. Accounts, saved audio, API endpoints — gone. If you built anything on it, you've already had to migrate. This entry is now a two-horse race.

ElevenLabs starts absurdly cheap — $6/month for the Starter tier — and scales up through Creator ($22), Pro ($99), Scale ($299) to a $990/month Business plan. That range exists because the product covers everything from "clone my voice for a YouTube intro" to "power a call-center IVR at volume," and the pricing tracks characters generated, not a flat seat fee.

Murf starts higher, around $29/month, and stays in a narrower $29–$166 band. It's built less around voice cloning and more around **presentation-style narration** — pairing AI voiceover with a slide/video editor, which is the actual job for a lot of Murf's buyers.

| | Entry price | Built for |
|---|---|---|
| ElevenLabs | $6/mo | voice cloning, dubbing, app/IVR integration, widest voice library |
| Murf | $29/mo | narrated video and presentation voiceover in one editor |

If your use case is "I need to narrate a video and don't want to touch an audio editor," Murf's bundled workflow probably saves you more time than ElevenLabs' cheaper entry price saves you money. If your use case is "I need programmatic, high-volume, realistic speech" — for an app, an audiobook pipeline, dubbing — ElevenLabs' range gives you somewhere to grow into without switching tools.

Six dollars is a low bar to clear for testing either one before you commit to a real budget line.