Can you use free text-to-speech audio commercially?
The question that gets asked last and should be asked first. Free tiers and commercial rights are separate things, and on several major platforms upgrading later does not fix what you already made.
This gets asked at the wrong end of the project, usually by someone who has already cut the video. The honest answer is that it depends entirely on which tool produced the audio, and that the defaults are less permissive than most people assume.
Two things get confused constantly, so it’s worth separating them before anything else.
Attribution is a requirement to credit the tool. A commercial licence is permission to make money from the output. They are independent. Satisfying the first does not grant the second, and a tool can — and several do — require attribution and forbid commercial use at the same time.
What “commercial” actually covers
Broader than people expect. It is not only advertising. A monetised YouTube channel is commercial. Client work is commercial, even unpaid work for a client who is paid. A course you sell is commercial. A product demo, an internal training module at a company, a podcast with a single sponsor — all commercial. Roughly: if it operates in service of something that earns money, assume it counts until the terms say otherwise.
The shape of the restriction on major platforms
Using ElevenLabs as the clearest documented example, and dating it because terms change — this is their published position as of September 2026:
- The free plan carries no commercial licence at all. Their help centre states that free-plan content “cannot be used for any commercial purpose.”
- Free-tier and signed-out content must attribute them in the title of whatever you publish, by including “elevenlabs.io” or “11.ai” in it. In the title — not the description, not an end credit.
- Paid plans do include a commercial licence, excluding Beta Services.
Then the clause that catches almost everyone:
Content created outside of a paid subscription (before or after) cannot be used commercially and always requires attribution when shared non-commercially.
Read that carefully, because it defeats the most natural plan in the world. Trying a tool free, building something with it, and upgrading once the project starts earning does not retroactively license the audio you already made. Content from the free period stays non-commercial permanently. To use it commercially you have to regenerate it on the paid plan.
Why regenerating is worse than it sounds
If your project is audio only, regenerating is tedious but survivable.
If it has subtitles, it is considerably worse, because speech synthesis is not deterministic. Running the same text through the same voice a second time produces audio that is close to the first render but not identical — word boundaries land a few milliseconds differently. Your existing subtitle file was timed against the old audio and will drift against the new. So regenerating means re-timing every cue in every clip, which is the part that turns an afternoon into a week.
The lesson is not “avoid free tiers.” It is that the licence question belongs at the start of a project, not the end, because the cost of getting it wrong scales with how much you have already built.
The position here
There is no paid tier, so there is no free-versus-paid distinction to fall foul of. No attribution is required. Nothing has to appear in your title. The audio and subtitle files are yours to use, including commercially, and you do not need permission.
That is genuinely simpler than the alternatives: nothing to upgrade to, nothing to credit, and no distinction between what you made today and what you make once a project starts earning.
The short version
Ask before you build. Check whether the plan you are on includes a commercial licence, whether attribution is required and exactly where it must appear, and whether upgrading later covers work already done — because on at least one major platform, it does not.