ElevenLabs Passive Income: Should You Exclude Free Users for Your Voice?

ElevenLabs sent out a newsletter this week announcing a new feature: you can now exclude free-tier users from accessing your voice in the Voice Library. The toggle sits under My voices > Share voice > External & Voice Library > Manage your voice.

On paper, it sounds like a win for creators. More control, more security. But I run a voice with 61,300 users and €382 in payouts after three months, and I will not be turning this on. Most creators shouldn’t either.

What the Feature Actually Does

The toggle is simple. When enabled, anyone on ElevenLabs’ free tier cannot select your voice. Only users on a paid subscription (Starter, Creator, or higher) will see it as available.

ElevenLabs framed this as giving creators “more flexibility and security.” The security angle makes sense if you are worried about misuse. The flexibility part is harder to justify once you look at how the economics actually work.

Free Users Don’t Cost You Anything

This is the part most creators get wrong. The assumption is: free user uses my voice, I don’t get paid, so I’m losing something. But you’re not.

ElevenLabs pays voice creators from the subscription pool (I break down how the whole payout system works in our main guide). When a paid subscriber uses your voice, a portion of their subscription fee gets allocated to you based on character usage. When a free user uses your voice, they’re spending their own limited free credits. That usage doesn’t subtract from your earnings. It doesn’t dilute your payout. It costs you exactly €0.00.

What it does give you:

• A higher total user count – the number displayed on your voice profile. 61K looks a lot more credible than 4K.
• More total usage volume – which likely feeds into how ElevenLabs ranks and surfaces voices in the library.
• Future conversions – free users who like your voice and later upgrade to a paid plan will keep using it. Now they generate revenue.

Blocking free users removes all three of these benefits while protecting you from exactly nothing. A free user has never cost any voice creator a single cent.

What 61K Users and €382 Actually Look Like

My voice has been live for about three months. Here is the full payout history, weekly, directly from my ElevenLabs dashboard.

My ElevenLabs earnings dashboard as of April 2026.

Broken down by month:

January to March: earnings more than doubled. The voice grew from roughly 20K users to 61K in that same period. Most of those new users are almost certainly on free accounts. And my earnings went up, not down, the entire time.

61.3K users on my voice profile. Three months old.

The Reddit Pattern: “Lots of Usage, No Money”

If you spend any time on r/elevenlabs, you have seen this post. Someone shares their usage stats, shows thousands of characters generated, and says: “Why am I barely earning anything?”

The answer is almost always the same: most of that usage is from free-tier users who don’t contribute to the revenue pool. And every time, the reaction is frustration, followed by “I wish I could block them.”

Now ElevenLabs has given them that button. And I think a lot of people will press it without thinking about what happens next.

Your user count stops growing. Your voice looks less popular. It drops in whatever internal ranking algorithm ElevenLabs uses. Paid users who might have discovered your voice through organic browsing now see a competitor with 40K users instead of yours with 8K. You didn’t gain any paid users. You just lost the ones who might have found you.

What I’d Actually Want Instead

The “Exclude free users” toggle solves a problem I don’t have. What I’d actually find useful: a dashboard breakdown showing how many of my 61K users are on free accounts vs. paid subscriptions.

Right now, there is no way to see this. You get a single “users” number and a payout amount. You cannot tell what percentage of your user base is generating revenue and what percentage is still on free. That data would let creators make informed decisions instead of guessing.

If ElevenLabs showed me that 58K of my users are free and 3K are paid, I’d know my conversion rate. I could track whether that ratio improves over time. I could compare it across multiple voices. That would actually help me make decisions. A toggle to block the 58K? Not so much.

When Excluding Free Users Might Make Sense

There are a few narrow cases where the toggle could be reasonable:

• Voice misuse concerns – if your voice is being used for content you don’t want associated with it, and most of that misuse comes from throwaway free accounts.
• Extremely niche professional voices – if you built a voice specifically for corporate training and don’t want it diluted by casual use.
• Testing – briefly toggling it on to see if your per-user revenue changes, then toggling it back.

My Recommendation: Keep Free Users On

I have 61K users. My earnings are growing month over month. I cannot wait to create more voice clones and see how to optimize them. Blocking free users would slow down every voice I release from day one.

The growth engine for a new voice works like this: free users try it, the user count climbs, the voice looks more established in the library, more people (including paid users) pick it. Cutting off the first step kills the whole thing.

Free users are better than no users. Let the numbers do the work and focus on creating more voices instead of gatekeeping the ones you have.

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