I assure you they didn't use an LLM to invent their pricing strategy. Elevenlabs subscription levels are designed around converting text-to-speech in the primary use-case. They charge by the character when converting text to speech, so characters are kind of the currency on their site. 1000 characters per minute makes sense in that context and I find it surprisingly expensive compared to generation

I still don't think I understand the pricing model based on your additional info. If characters are currency that you buy with real money, what does "characters per minute" mean? I guess if each character is $0.01 and then you want 20 minutes of audio, you can say that's $10.00 per minute for 20 minutes, but that means that the number of characters in the actual text wouldn't affect it at all, so...why even make up a different currency then?

Not to mention: What if the vocal portion of an audio clip doesn't translate to characters? What if it's all "oooh" and "ahhh," as in a choral segment?