ElevenLabs Free 10,000 credits is 11 minutes of music, no license

The ElevenLabs Free plan is a decent music sketchpad, and it is the wrong place to make a track you will publish in an ad. Its pricing page gives 10,000 credits a month, which at the FAQ rate of 900 credits per minute of music is 10,000 / 900 = 11.1 minutes, and it lists the commercial license as not included. Starter at $6 a month is the first tier that includes it.

If you prototype on the free plan and then need a track you can ship, the question is what the shipping step costs. On Sume, music is a fixed $0.125 per accepted generation.

How prompts carry over

The sketch is only useful if you can carry the brief across. A Sume music prompt takes 1 to 5,000 characters, accepts a time-range style such as "[0:00-0:30] Intro: ..." to shape structure, and takes length from the prompt text, not from a duration field. Put exclusions in the positive prompt, because negative_prompt is rejected unless empty. An optional public HTTPS image can accompany the prompt.

The job returns audio in result.artifacts and, when the engine reports them, lyrics or a section map in result.lyrics. With model omitted or sume/music-auto, Sume selects the engine (Lyria 3.5 today); you can also pin lyria-3.5 or lyria-3-pro from the catalog.

Licensing is a separate check

Sume's docs describe how to call and bill music, not what rights come with an output. Whatever route you take, read the current terms before an ad or a client delivery, and keep the prompt and job id with the file so you can show where it came from.

Also remember that the 11 minutes on the free plan is a ceiling, not a guarantee: speech uses the same pool, and any other product that draws credits will eat into it.

A practical split is to write five or six candidate prompts, run them on the free plan, and pick the one or two whose structure and mood you like. Then rewrite the winning brief for Sume, keeping the instrument names, tempo and section timings, and generate only those. At six tracks that is $0.75, and at two it is $0.25. Because each Sume generation is a fixed price, re-running a track with a revised prompt costs the same as the first try, which makes it easy to budget a few retries per keeper without worrying about the length of the result.

• Free plan: sketch only, per the page's license line.
• Starter: first ElevenLabs tier with a commercial license, $6.
• Sume: pay $0.125 only for the tracks you commit to.

Takeaway

Using a free pool to explore and a metered API to finalize keeps cost low when most ideas get thrown away. It only works if the final prompt is portable, so write the brief in plain language that does not depend on one engine's controls.