ElevenLabs Creator 121,000 shared credits vs Sume per-job music

An ElevenLabs credit pool is shared, so the same 121,000 credits on the Creator plan ($22 a month) can be spent on speech or on music but not on both at once. The pricing page says credits are shared across every product and its FAQ lists about 1 credit per character of text to speech and 900 credits per minute of music. A music-only month on Creator is 121,000 / 900 = 134 minutes; a speech-only month is 121,000 characters.

Sume does not pool. It charges a fixed price per music generation, $0.125 on the Music 1.0 page, and the Music Router says every router model charges that same fixed price. So the two-product question is simply the sum of the two bills.

A mixed month worked through

Say you make 20 one-minute music beds and read 100,000 characters of narration. On ElevenLabs credits that is 20 x 900 = 18,000 plus 100,000 = 118,000, which fits inside Creator's 121,000 with 3,000 left. The cost is the $22 plan.

On Sume the 20 music tracks are 20 x $0.125 = $2.50. The narration side depends on whichever text-to-speech you choose and is not priced in the music docs I read, so I leave it out. That is the point of the comparison: Sume's music line is small and separate, and the plan comparison is only fair once you add the speech price from the catalog.

Length is the hidden variable

ElevenLabs bills music by the minute at 900 credits. Sume bills a fixed price per generation, and Music Router controls length through the prompt, for example "a 2-minute track", and it rejects duration fields. Plan around that: a 30-second sting costs $0.125 on Sume and 450 credits on ElevenLabs, while a 3-minute track is $0.125 versus 2,700 credits.

If you make long tracks, Sume's flat price is easier to forecast. If you make many short ones, the credit pool is cheaper per second. A price per second is only a useful comparison when the length you will actually generate is known.

• Starter: 30,000 credits buys about 33 minutes of music, or 48 Sume tracks at $6 / $0.125.
• Creator: 121,000 credits buys about 134 minutes, or 176 Sume tracks at $22 / $0.125.
• Sume says Music Router model engines are chosen for you; Lyria 3.5 is the current default engine.

Verdict

If you do speech and music in one place and iterate heavily, one pool on a plan is simple. If music is an occasional step in a video pipeline, a fixed $0.125 per track is easy to put in a cost model.

A final check is to price your own month in both systems before choosing. List the number of tracks, their length and the characters of narration. Convert music to credits at 900 per minute and add characters at one credit each, then compare with the plan tiers on the page. For Sume, count tracks at $0.125 and add the speech price from the catalog. The answer often changes with the length of the tracks, which is why the table lists minutes instead of tracks.