AI Avatar Video Cost Per Minute: What Five Tools Actually Charge

Last updated: 4 October 2026

Author: Greg Preece — I cover AI video tools and practical creator workflows.

Prices checked weekly on each vendor's own pricing page.

The short answer

HeyGen is the cheapest way to buy a minute of talking-head video at every volume on this page, but only while you stay on its older avatar engine. On the Avatar III model it works out between 19 and 34 cents a finished minute. Switch the same plan to Avatar V and the same minute costs $2.32, which is dearer than D-ID charges for anything.

That's the finding worth taking away. Your bill moves far more when you change engine than when you change how much video you make. Everywhere on this page the price per minute is close to flat as volume rises, so there's no volume discount to chase. What you're really choosing is a rate, and then checking the plan is allowed to do your job.

2 things here will quietly catch you out. D-ID's cheapest tier is licensed for personal use only, so it can't legally touch paid work. And Synthesia quotes its paid allowances per year while quoting its free plan per month, in the same row of the same table.

What's on this page

• The short answer
• What a minute costs at three monthly volumes
• What I'm counting, and how
• Where the cheapest answer changes hands
• HeyGen
• Synthesia
• D-ID
• Creatify
• Captions
• What each tier actually gives you
• What's moved since September
• Who should buy what
• How these figures are kept current

What a minute costs at three monthly volumes

Prices below are what you pay billed monthly, with the annual-billed figure in brackets where the vendor publishes one. Cost per minute is worked out against everything the plan includes, not against the volume at the top of the column.

HeyGen's figures use Avatar IV on a photo avatar. The HeyGen section explains why.

What I'm counting, and how

One unit here is one finished minute of a person talking to camera, exported and ready to publish.

HeyGen and Synthesia and Captions all charge credits rather than minutes, so each credit figure is converted using the rate that vendor publishes. HeyGen is 16 credits a minute, which is Avatar IV on a photo avatar. Synthesia is 100 credits a finished minute. Captions is 16 credits every 6 seconds, which comes to 160 a minute. D-ID is the only one that sells minutes directly, at 4 credits each.

Synthesia quotes prices in pounds for me and everyone else quotes dollars. Where a pound figure needs comparing against a dollar one, £1 is taken as $1.324, read on 4 October 2026.

Monthly billing is the headline because it's the price you pay without committing to a year.

Excluded: anything bought through an API rather than a subscription, because that's a separate meter at a separate rate. Also excluded are the 4 higher Synthesia tiers described below, which carry no published price at all.

Where the cheapest answer changes hands

The crossover isn't where you'd expect. It has almost nothing to do with volume.

Buying more does not buy you a better rate. D-ID charges $1.08 a commercial minute on annual billing and holds that rate from 15 minutes right up to 175, without a penny of discount along the way. Captions is $8 a minute on every tier it publishes, from its smallest to its largest. HeyGen improves by about 12% across a range that runs from $49 to $4,300 a month, which is a 100-fold increase in volume for a rounding error in rate.

The crossover that does exist is between engines. On HeyGen's Creator plan at $29 a month, the same 600 credits buy very different amounts of video:

• Avatar III on a video avatar, 4 credits a minute, 150 minutes, 19 cents a minute
• Avatar III on a photo avatar, 7 credits a minute, 86 minutes, 34 cents a minute
• Avatar IV on a photo avatar, 16 credits a minute, 37.5 minutes, 77 cents a minute
• Avatar IV on a video avatar, 31 credits a minute, 19 minutes, $1.50 a minute
• Avatar V, 48 credits a minute, 12.5 minutes, $2.32 a minute

D-ID sits flat at $1.93 a minute on monthly billing throughout. So HeyGen is the cheaper buy on Avatar III and on Avatar IV photo, and D-ID becomes the cheaper buy the moment you move to Avatar IV video or Avatar V. Nothing on HeyGen's pricing page tells you that, because the engine choice lives inside the product rather than on the plan.

The second crossover is about permission rather than price. Below 16 minutes a month D-ID's Lite plan is far the cheapest thing here at $4.70 a month on annual billing. It's licensed for personal use only, so for anything commercial it isn't an option at all, and the real floor for commercial work is D-ID Pro at $16.

HeyGen

HeyGen is the cheapest per minute at every volume this page covers, and it's the only one of the five whose rate depends on a setting rather than on a plan. Creator at $29 a month carries 600 credits and caps each video at 30 minutes. Pro at $49 carries 1,000.

That 1,000 is not what the plan tops out at. It's the bottom of a range set by a control on the card itself. That range runs to 100,000 credits a month and $4,300. Anyone budgeting off the number the page loads with is reading the floor and calling it the ceiling.

HeyGen's pricing page on 4 October 2026. Creator's 600 credits is a fixed figure. Pro's 1,000 is a dropdown, opened here to show the next steps up.

I built a custom avatar of myself with HeyGen and ruined the first training take by looking away, turning my head and shifting about while recording. The second thing I learned was to hyphenate awkward words into syllables so they enunciate, writing dig-i-tal rather than digital. Getting the recording in at all meant uploading it through a Google Drive shareable link rather than the browser, which is the whole process in how I built my own HeyGen twin.

The gotcha is the credit rate, not the price. Moving from Avatar III to Avatar V multiplies what a minute costs you 12 times over, on the same plan at the same monthly price, and the plan cards say nothing about it.

Business at $149 is worse value per minute than Pro, at $1.27 against 78 cents. You're buying 60-minute video length and $20 seats there, not volume.

Full plan detail sits on my HeyGen page, and you can try it at HeyGen.

Synthesia

Synthesia is the only one here that priced me in pounds, and at £1.15 a finished minute on Pro it lands between HeyGen and D-ID. Starter at £19 covers 12.5 minutes and Pro at £69 covers 60.

Starter does cover a talking head of your own face. It carries 3 personal avatars and Pro carries 5, so the entry plan is a real option for this job in a way Synthesia's own comparison table makes easy to miss.

The gotcha is how that table states what you get. The free plan is quoted at 10 minutes of video a month. Starter and Pro, in the very next columns of the same row, are quoted at around 150 and 720 minutes a year. Read quickly and Starter looks like 15 times the free plan. Converted to the same unit it's 12.5 minutes a month against 10, so £11 a month buys you about 2 and a half extra minutes over free.

Synthesia's plan comparison on 4 October 2026. The free plan is quoted per month and the two paid plans beside it are quoted per year.

Credits don't roll over either. They reset at the start of every billing period, so a quiet month is money gone rather than banked, which is the opposite of how HeyGen treats a monthly plan.

4 higher tiers also exist above Pro, running from 12,500 to 48,500 credits a month. Not one of them carries a published price on either of Synthesia's own pages. If your volume is above 60 minutes a month you're negotiating, whether or not the page tells you so.

My Synthesia page carries every current plan, and Synthesia is where to start a trial.

D-ID

D-ID is the only tool here that genuinely sells minutes. 4 credits buy 1 minute, and that holds at every stop on its plan selector, from 40 credits right up to 700. There's no arithmetic to do and no engine to pick, which makes it the easiest bill on this page to predict.

What you pay for that simplicity is that it never gets cheaper. Pro and Advanced both work out at $1.08 a commercial minute on annual billing whether you buy 15 minutes or 175. Every other tool here rewards volume a little. D-ID rewards it not at all.

The gotcha is the licence. Lite is the cheapest avatar video anywhere on this page at $4.70 a month for 10 minutes, and its licence row reads personal use only. The trial is personal use too. Commercial use starts at Pro, which is $16 a month on annual billing and $29 billed monthly, and that is the number to compare against everything else here. A watermark comes with both of the plans below Advanced.

D-ID publishes the licence row on its own pricing page, which is worth reading before you buy the cheap tier.

Creatify

Creatify doesn't belong on a per-minute axis and I haven't forced it onto one. It charges 2 to 20 credits for a finished ad rather than for time, caps each ad at 2 minutes on Starter and 10 on Pro, and sells 100 credits a month at $39.

What it's actually built for is volume of variations rather than length of video. I uploaded a bottle design for a made-up energy drink, picked a stock avatar called Joanna and had it build 30 distinct ads in under 10 minutes. The first render came back with the label stripe slightly misaligned, which a re-prompt fixed rather than a restart. The full run is in how I generated 30 UGC ads from one product shot.

The gotcha is that the thing making Creatify worth buying is gated. Batch Mode and custom avatar uploads both need Pro at $99 a month, and the free tier watermarks heavily, so the $39 Starter plan buys you the product without the feature it's known for.

Pro is also a slider rather than a price, running from $99 at 300 credits to $999 at 5,000. Credits expire yearly.

You can try it at Creatify.

Captions

Captions is the dearest minute here by a wide margin and it isn't close. Max at $24.99 carries 500 credits and Frontier starts at $69.99 for 1,400. Its own published rate works out at 160 credits a minute, so that's $8 a finished minute at every single tier, which is roughly 10 times what HeyGen charges and 4 times what D-ID does.

The reason is that its credits are priced for short-form generation rather than for long talking heads. 16 credits buys 6 seconds. That's fine economics for a 20-second social clip and ruinous for a 5-minute explainer.

Frontier also hides its ceiling the way HeyGen does. The card loads on 1x at $69.99. Clicking through the usage control takes it to 2x and then 4x, where $279.99 buys 5,600 credits. Credits scale exactly with price across that control, so there's no volume reward there either.

The gotcha is that Captions publishes no commercial-use terms at all. Neither the plan cards nor the full feature comparison carries a commercial-use row for any tier, free or paid. Every other tool here states a licence somewhere. If you're making client work, that silence is worth an email to their support before you spend anything.

What each tier actually gives you

HeyGen. Creator caps export at 1080p and each video at 30 minutes, and includes unlimited photo avatars and watermark removal. Pro lifts export to 4K. Business lifts that to 60 and adds seats at $20 each. Unused credits roll over one extra billing cycle on a monthly plan, accumulate until renewal on an annual one, and are lost entirely if you drop to Free. Extra credits are sold at 5 cents each in blocks of 100.

Synthesia. Free watermarks everything and won't let you download at all. Starter gives 3 personal avatars and 3 guest seats, Pro gives 5 of each, and Enterprise lifts personal avatars to unlimited. Stock avatars run 9 on free, 125+ on Starter and 180+ on Pro. Studio Avatars are a paid extra at $1,000 a year and only for annual customers. Credits reset every period.

D-ID. Trial watermarks full screen and caps translated video at 30 seconds. Lite watermarks, offers no subtitles and no voice clones, and is personal use only. Pro gives 3 personal avatars and 1 voice clone and keeps an AI watermark. Advanced swaps the watermark for your own logo and gives 5 avatars and 3 voice clones. Team collaboration appears only at Enterprise.

Creatify. Starter runs one generation at a time with 5GB of asset storage. Pro runs 5 in parallel with 10GB and tracks up to 10 competitor brands. Free watermarks exports.

Captions. Free gives one caption template against more than a hundred on paid, and no generative editing, translation or voice cloning. Max is locked out of the Frontier model tier entirely.

What's moved since September

Comparing what these vendors published on 6 September against 4 October, 2 things changed and 1 didn't.

Captions removed its cheapest paid plan. On 6 September you could buy Basic at $9.99 a month for 200 credits. That is gone, and the least you can now pay Captions is $24.99 for Max. The 200-credit allowance still appears in their own credit tables, so the plan hasn't been deleted so much as taken off the shelf. For anyone who hadn't subscribed yet, the entry price went up 150%.

Synthesia renamed its middle plan from Creator to Pro and raised what it includes from 3,600 credits a month to 6,000. That's a 67% increase in included video at a tier that kept its position in the range, which is the rarer direction for this to move.

HeyGen didn't move at all. Creator, Pro and Business carry the same prices and allowances and seat charge they did a month ago. The Pro control still runs to 100,000 credits at $4,300.

Who should buy what

• Making under 12 minutes a month and wanting your own face: D-ID Pro at $16 on annual billing, which is the cheapest commercial licence here and covers 15 minutes.
• Making under 12 minutes a month and wanting a large stock avatar library: Synthesia Starter at £11 on annual billing, for 125+ stock avatars and 3 personal ones.
• Making 20 to 60 minutes a month: HeyGen Creator at $29, which covers 37.5 minutes on Avatar IV photo and far more on Avatar III.
• Wanting the newest avatar quality rather than the cheapest minute: D-ID Pro, because HeyGen's own newest engines cost more per minute than D-ID charges flat.
• Making short product ads rather than long talking heads: Creatify Pro at $99, where batch variations are the point and minutes aren't.

How these figures are kept current

Prices are checked weekly on each vendor's own pricing page. Last updated 4 October 2026.