# ElevenLabs 59 Hacker News commenters recommended ElevenLabs and 20 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 13 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** People recommend it as the top-quality text-to-speech and voice cloning service, with natural voices and easy custom voices. The most common caveat is per-character pricing that gets expensive at high volume. ## Why people recommend it - Best-in-class speech generation quality (7 comments): "ElevenLabs is awesome for speech generation (nothing beats it), but their speech to text is terrible especially for voice activity detection." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46790945)) "ElevenLabs is obviously the quality winner but their per-character pricing eats up all the margin" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46773225)) "its the highest quality transcription model I found for my personal use case" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46882168)) - Strong voice cloning and custom voices (4 comments): "11labs does _way_ more than basic TTS. The options, customizability, quality of voice cloning (for editing your own voices), etc is far more than what you see on the surface." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49405382)) "you could just upload a 30 second clip of someone's voice in another language and hear what it was like in English and it worked really well" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46052794)) "voice cloning as good as 11l (for non-english languages even)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46547063)) - Generous free tier and cheap plans (4 comments): "stay comfortably in the free plan with awesome voice messages" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46567209)) "it came out pretty good on their cheap $5 plan" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46986168)) "eleven labs api which is pretty generous" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46739437)) - Emotional, natural-sounding voice output (3 comments): "ElevenLabs definitely sounds more natural for voice." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49888201)) "very very good with conveying the emotion" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48045270)) "The AI is still noticable but the quality is pretty impressive." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48663553)) ## What people warn about - Expensive per-character pricing (5 comments): "ElevenLabs got a lot of attention for their remarkable zero shot model, but their pricing and enterprise focus created an enduring niche." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49404108)) "ElevenLabs is obviously the quality winner but their per-character pricing eats up all the margin" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46773225)) "the pricing there makes the unit economics pretty tough for high volume calls" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46788193)) - Errors with phone numbers and names (2 comments): "they seem fine (with the occasional weirdness around a proper noun.)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45881607)) "Sometimes the audio isn't great (it tends to mess up phone numbers)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46853838)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Kokoro TTS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/kokoro-tts.md): 59 recommend - [Pocket TTS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pocket-tts.md): 41 recommend - [Qwen3-TTS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qwen3-tts.md): 41 recommend - [Kitten TTS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/kitten-tts.md): 33 recommend - [Piper TTS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/piper.md): 21 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://elevenlabs.io/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "ElevenLabs", https://hackerapproved.com/p/elevenlabs/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).