Got nerfed by ElevenLabs?
1 major change on record. Below: open-source replacements you can switch to today + tracked paid competitors ranked by who’s least likely to nerf you next. Step-by-step guides walk you through the actual install + config + API-key transfer — that part’s a Personal-tier feature.
Self-hosted, free, or freemium tools that cover the same workflow. Every entry is real software with a public repo and an active community.
Production-grade TTS toolkit. Bigger than just one model.
- Mature TTS toolkit (XTTS v2)
- Fine-tune on your own voice
- 1100+ language support via models
Best free ElevenLabs replacement for English/Mandarin chat-style audio.
- Conversational TTS — handles fillers, pauses, multi-speaker
- Mandarin + English
- Real-time on consumer GPU
Voice cloning use case. MIT-licensed (rare for high-quality TTS).
- Voice cloning from a 10-second sample
- Multi-language
- Strong prosody
Other paid tools we track in the same category, ranked by current Nerf Index. Lowest = least likely to nerf you next.
1 major change on record.
ElevenLabs → ChatTTS
- OSS replacement recommendations (§ 02)
- Paid competitor rankings (§ 03)
- Nerf Index + 30d re-nerf forecast
- Receipts + sources for every silent change
- The (from → to) playbook with real commands
- Config-file diffs + API-key transfer scripts
- Verification test + rollback path
- Printable 1-page checklist
ChatTTS installs as a single package. If you already have pipx or your platform’s equivalent, use that instead — it handles its own virtualenv so it won’t pollute your system Python.
Pull your existing key from ElevenLabs’s config and export it into ChatTTS’s environment. Both tools authenticate against the same billing — no second subscription needed.
ElevenLabs respects an implicit ruleset. ChatTTS reads its own config at repo root. The two formats are 1:1 mappable for the common flags — model, max-tokens, edit-format, auto-commits. Run the converter we ship to do it automatically, or copy the diff below by hand.
Run our verification suite against your real repo. We compare token usage + edit quality between ElevenLabs’s last response and ChatTTS’s first response on the same three prompts. If output diverges by >20% you’ll get a structured diff.
Direct link to the cancel-tier page (yes, they hide it three menus deep). Includes the exact email template to send if they try to bill you a partial month.
Reverse playbook to undo the switch within 14 days without losing config history. Restores billing and reverts your repo’s .gitignore so cache directories don’t end up in your tree.