ElevenLabs Startup Grants Program: 12 months free, 33M characters high confidence
Official pricing page lists the Startup Grants Program with '12 Months free', '33M Characters', 'Valid for 12 months' and 'To build, launch & test'. Official blog (Aug 12, 2025) says the term was extended from 3 to 12 months and every recipient gets 33 million credits. Official grants page says '33,000,000 characters', 'over 680 hours of Agents usage', 'More than $5,500+ in value', plus founder community events and startup support. The grant covers the full platform (Text to Speech, Speech to Text, voice cloning and design, sound effects, music, Conversational AI agents, API), not only agents, so the index description 'for startups building conversational agents' is too narrow. A May 13, 2026 LinkedIn post describes the same 33M credits across ElevenCreative, ElevenAgents and ElevenAPI. Credit costs in the shared pool (pricing FAQ): Text to Speech 1 credit per character (V2 Flash/Turbo API models 0.5-1), Speech to Text about 330 credits per minute, Eleven Music about 900 per minute, Sound Effects 200 per generation, Voice Changer and Isolator about 1,000 per minute, Dubbing 2,000 to 10,000 per minute. A third-party summary says the 680-hour figure is an estimate that depends on features used.
- Eligibility
- Startups and small companies with fewer than 25 employees at the time of application, anywhere in the world. Must have a business or monetization strategy and a valid business email, and be building a product for the long term. Not eligible: one-off projects or campaigns, agencies, consulting firms, SMBs, existing enterprise customers, and projects for children aged 18 or under. Paying self-serve customers are eligible. One application per company; a founder with several companies can apply once for each.
- How to claim
- Click 'Apply' on https://elevenlabs.io/startup-grants, which leads to https://elevenlabs.io/grants-application. Describe what you are building, your team and expected growth, using a business email. Applications are rolling with no deadline; ElevenLabs says it will reply within one week. If accepted, the grant plan and credits are applied to the account you applied with (the blog says the account is upgraded immediately), so apply from the account you will build with. The grants-application page's captured text shows only a 'Sign up' link and no form fields, so the full application flow was not confirmed.
- Expiry
- 12 months from award ('over the next 12 months' per the blog). The grant also ends early once all 33M characters are used. The account converts automatically to the Free plan when the grant period ends or once fewer than 10,000 credits remain. ElevenLabs emails you when you near the cap.
- Gotchas
- (1) Auto-conversion: at term end, or when fewer than 10,000 credits remain, the account drops to the Free plan unless you choose otherwise. The official page does not say whether a card is charged on conversion; a third-party summary says no charge. (2) Non-transferable: 'You cannot exchange or resell your text characters'; reselling terminates the grant immediately. (3) Monetization required: hobby, student, coursework or one-off projects are out of scope. (4) After the grant you can move to a paid plan (Starter $6, Creator $22, Pro $99, Scale $299 per month on the pricing page), contact sales@elevenlabs.io for a long-term plan, or pause, per the blog. (5) Third-party sites (e8.team) say an ElevenLabs badge or link must be displayed, previous recipients are excluded, and access is Scale-tier. None of these appear on the official pages checked, so treat them as unverified. The official heading reads 'Scale for 12 months' without defining the features. (6) One anecdotal Reddit report (cited by e8.team) describes weeks 'in queue' with no follow-up, against the official one-week promise. (7) Commercial use during the grant is implied by the monetization requirement but was not explicitly confirmed on the pages checked.
- Source
- elevenlabs.io