HeyGen vs Synthesia: what AI video credits actually cost per minute

Quick verdict

If you make volume content and can live with HeyGen's cheaper avatar models, HeyGen wins on cost by a wide margin — roughly $0.19 a minute on the $29 Creator plan using an Avatar III Video Look. If you want HeyGen's top-end Avatar V, the price advantage largely disappears, landing near $2.32 a minute, which is the same territory as Synthesia. Synthesia's advantage is predictability: it publishes one flat rate of roughly 120 credits per minute regardless of which avatar you pick, so you can budget a channel before you build it.

What a HeyGen credit actually buys, as of August 2026

HeyGen's pricing page sells plans in credits but does not publish a conversion rate. It says only that "credits are HeyGen's single currency for video and asset creation" and that usage varies "based on which AI model is used, video duration, and the complexity." A second HeyGen help-centre article adds that "credit usage may vary based on the feature, model, duration, or generation type selected" and that the cost is shown in-product before you generate.

That is why so many roundups compare HeyGen and Synthesia on plan price alone: the number you need is not on the page you are shopping from. It is published, but in a separate help-centre article, and it is the single most important figure in this comparison.

Credit rates from HeyGen's "How to Use Credits" help article, read August 2026. The minutes column is our arithmetic, rounded down. HeyGen also charges fixed credit amounts for non-video assets: 1 credit per generated look, 2 per image, and 60 to train an AI model.

Two things the table shows that most comparisons miss

• The spread is 12x, not marginal. Avatar V costs twelve times what an Avatar III Video Look costs per minute. No plan comparison is meaningful without naming the model, and a "HeyGen costs $29 a month" claim is close to meaningless on its own.
• Photo and Video Looks flip between generations. On Avatar III, a Photo Look costs more than a Video Look (7 vs 4). On Avatar IV, that reverses and a Video Look costs nearly twice a Photo Look (31 vs 16). If you assumed one look type is always the cheap one, you will budget wrong on one of the two generations.

What each HeyGen plan costs per finished minute

HeyGen's published plans as of August 2026: Free at $0 with a watermark and up to 1080p output; Creator at $29 a month with 600 credits and no watermark; Pro at $49 a month with 1,000 credits and up to 4K; Business at $149 a month plus $20 per seat with 1,500 credits and five custom digital twins; and Enterprise on request.

Our arithmetic on HeyGen's published plan prices and credit rates. Business figures use the base $149 and exclude per-seat charges. Plan prices from HeyGen's pricing page, read August 2026.

Cost per minute barely improves as you move up HeyGen's plans — it gets worse. Creator and Pro are within a cent of each other per minute, and Business is roughly double both. You upgrade on HeyGen for capability (4K export on Pro, more digital twins and seats on Business), not for cheaper minutes. If your only problem is running out of credits, the higher tiers do not solve it economically.

Synthesia charges roughly 120 credits a minute, flat

Synthesia publishes its conversion directly on the pricing page, and the implied rate is consistent across every tier: 1,200 credits for 10 minutes, 3,600 for 30 minutes, 14,500 for 120 minutes, 44,000 for 360 minutes. That works out to about 120 credits per minute everywhere. There is no cheap-model escape hatch and no expensive one either.

Prices and allowances from Synthesia's pricing page, read August 2026; cost per minute is our arithmetic. Annual plans grant the full year's credits up front, so the monthly figure is the annual allowance divided by twelve. Plans also differ on editor and guest seats, stock avatar libraries and personal avatars.

The Starter plan trap

Read the free row and the Starter monthly row again. Both give 1,200 credits and 10 minutes of video a month. Paying $29 a month for Starter buys you zero additional minutes over the free plan. What it does buy is watermark removal, a jump from 9 stock avatars to 125-plus, and guest seats.

That is a legitimate upgrade — a watermark makes free-plan output unusable for anything client-facing. But if you upgraded because you kept running out of video minutes, Starter will not fix it, and you will hit the same wall in the same week of the following month. The plan that actually adds minutes is Creator, at three times the volume.

The real test: one 5-minute video a week

Plan comparisons get abstract fast, so here is a concrete workload. Four 5-minute videos a month is 20 minutes of finished output — a realistic cadence for a faceless channel or a small business publishing weekly.

Our arithmetic on the published credit rates above. Note the Avatar IV Video Look row: 620 credits misses HeyGen's 600-credit Creator allowance by 20 credits, which is one of the easiest ways to get pushed onto a higher plan by a rounding margin.

If you are building this workload into an actual publishing system rather than testing tools, our faceless YouTube channel blueprint covers the script-to-upload pipeline, and the wider AI video tool comparison covers the options beyond these two.

Rollover, expiry and buying more credits

Credit systems create a second cost that plan tables never show: the credits you pay for and never use.

HeyGen's help centre states that monthly subscribers' credits last up to 60 days — the original 30-day subscription cycle plus the next one — while annual subscribers accumulate unused credits across the full subscription year. Downgrading to the free plan forfeits them. That 60-day window is generous by industry standards, but it does mean a quiet month followed by two more quiet months loses you the allowance.

Running out mid-month is a smaller problem on HeyGen than it looks. Business users can buy supplemental credits at $0.05 per credit, sold in blocks of 100 for $5. At that rate an extra minute of Avatar III Video Look costs about $0.20 and an extra minute of Avatar V costs about $2.40 — close enough to the in-plan rate that an occasional overage is not punitive.

Synthesia's annual plans front-load the full year's credits, which is the friendlier structure for irregular publishing: a heavy production month can draw down credits that a quiet month left untouched. The trade is that you commit to twelve months to get it, and the annual saving is what makes the per-minute maths work at all — $1.80 against $2.90 on Starter.

A note on Fliki, and why we did not price it

Fliki is the usual budget third option in this category, and its feature tiers are clearly published: the free plan exports at 720p with a watermark, caps videos at one minute and excludes commercial rights; Standard adds 1080p, no watermark, commercial rights, one voice clone and a 15-minute cap on 2,160 credits a year; Premium raises that to three voice clones, a 40-minute cap and 7,200 credits a year. Annual billing is discounted 25%.

What we could not verify was the price. Fliki's pricing page did not return plan prices to automated retrieval, and the third-party sources reporting them disagree with each other — we saw Standard quoted at roughly $28 a month in one place and Premium quoted at both $88 and $99 in others. Rather than publish a number we cannot stand behind, we are flagging the discrepancy: check Fliki's own pricing page directly, and do not trust a Fliki price quoted in a roundup without confirming it. The same caution applies to every figure on this page once it ages.

Final recommendation

Pick the model before you pick the plan. On HeyGen that one decision moves your cost per minute between $0.19 and $2.32 on identical $29 billing, which swamps every other variable in this comparison. Default to Avatar III Video Look for volume, and treat Avatar V as a per-video splurge rather than a channel-wide setting.

Choose Synthesia when forecastability is worth paying for. Its flat 120-credits-a-minute rate means you can plan a year of output without knowing which avatar you will use, and if you bill annually the per-minute cost is competitive with HeyGen's mid-tier models. Just do not buy Starter expecting more minutes than the free plan gives you.

Re-check every figure here on the vendor's own pages before you pay. Credit rates in this category change without announcement, and this page is a snapshot of August 2026.

Related reads: comparison hub, best AI video tools for small businesses and creators, video translation and AI voice dubbing, the faceless YouTube channel blueprint, and ElevenLabs vs PlayHT.