AI Avatar Video Cost Per Minute: What HeyGen, Synthesia and Captions Actually Charge

Last updated: 26 August 2026

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

Prices checked weekly against each vendor's own pricing page and credit documentation. This is analysis, not a hands-on review.

Greg Preece has made video for a living for 10 years and runs a YouTube channel of over 130,000 subscribers.

Make 23 minutes of talking-head video a month and it costs $29 on HeyGen, $69.99 on Captions and $89 on Synthesia. That is the same job, a script, a presenter avatar and a finished render, at the same monthly volume, on the cheapest plan each platform sells that actually reaches it. HeyGen is less than half the price of either of the others.

The gap only opens above about 10 minutes a month, though. Under 8 minutes all three land within $4 of each other and price stops being the reason to choose. What changes the answer is not the headline price but where each platform's plan ladder has its rungs. Captions jumps from $24.99 to $69.99 with nothing in between, Synthesia jumps from $29 to $89, and HeyGen's $29 plan keeps going to 30 minutes before it needs replacing. All three meter the same way, in credits, and all three publish what a credit buys, so for once this is arithmetic rather than estimation.

In short

• Under about 8 minutes a month: Captions is nominally cheapest at $24.99, but only just, and its published prices are iOS plans only.
• From about 9 minutes upward: HeyGen, and it is not close. $29 covers 30 minutes of video where Synthesia's $29 plan covers 10.
• Synthesia's free plan and its $29 Starter plan carry exactly the same 1,200 credits a month. The $29 buys downloads, logo removal, a bigger avatar library and 3 personal avatars, not more minutes.
• Synthesia's published pricing stops at 30 minutes a month. Above that the only route is a sales call.
• HeyGen now publishes the top of its Pro ladder. It runs to 100,000 credits a month at $4,300, which is 5,000 minutes, and you can move up or down it at any time.
• A credit costs $0.05 on every single Captions plan, from $9.99 to $279.99. No volume discount exists.
• Captions' cheapest paid plan, at $9.99, does not appear on its pricing page at all. Neither does its free plan any more.
• HeyGen's cost per minute goes up, not down, on its $149 Business plan.

On this page

• What a minute of avatar video costs on each plan
• What counts as a minute here
• Where the cheapest option changes hands
• Platform by platform
• What each plan actually gives you
• What has moved recently
• What people are reporting
• Who this is for
• Where this comparison breaks down
• Method and freshness

What a minute of avatar video costs on each plan

One minute of finished talking-head video. A script, a stock or platform avatar, a render. No B-roll, no translation, no music.

All three sell credits, and all three publish a rate. Synthesia charges 2 credits a second, so 120 a minute. Captions charges 1 credit a second, so 60 a minute. HeyGen charges by avatar engine, 3 credits a minute on Avatar III and 20 on Avatar IV and V. Every cost-per-minute figure below is an estimate calculated from that published rate against what a credit costs on the plan, not a price the vendor quotes.

Read the last two columns together. A cheap-looking rate usually belongs to a plan with a low ceiling, and the plan is what you actually buy.

HeyGen's figures use Avatar IV and V, the engines it currently leads with. Its older Avatar III engine costs 3 credits a minute rather than 20, which is a different page entirely. About $0.15 a minute on Creator, and 200 minutes before that $29 plan runs out.

Now the same thing at three monthly volumes, showing the cheapest plan on each platform that actually reaches them. This holds the amount of work constant instead of the size of the plan, which is the only fair way to line them up.

And what each minute costs once the whole subscription is counted, still at those same three volumes:

HeyGen costs the same at 8 minutes as at 23 because the $29 Creator plan covers both. You are buying a plan, not minutes, so the figure that matters is the one in this table rather than the per-minute rate. On Avatar III the 46-minute column drops to $29 as well, because Creator carries 200 minutes of it.

What counts as a minute here

One minute is 60 seconds of finished presenter video rendered from a script through a stock or platform avatar, at each platform's standard export. Translation, dubbing, interactive video, B-roll generation, music, image generation and API usage are all excluded, because all three meter those separately and at different rates.

Every price in the main table is the standing monthly-billing rate in US dollars, with no annual discount applied. Annual billing changes the ranking rather than just the margin, so it is worth costing separately. At 23 minutes a month on annual billing you would pay $24 a month for HeyGen Creator and $64 a month for Synthesia Creator, against $29 and $89 on monthly terms. Synthesia's annual plans carry the same monthly allowance as its monthly ones, so the saving is real rather than a smaller plan wearing a lower price. Captions says a yearly plan is discounted but publishes no figure, so it cannot be costed at all.

Credit rates come from each vendor's own documentation, last read on 23 August 2026. Synthesia's self-serve credits guide, HeyGen's pricing FAQ and the Captions help centre's AI usage page. Plan allowances come from the pricing pages, except Captions' $9.99 tier and its free tier, which are only in the help centre.

Where two per-minute costs are set against each other on this page, both come from the same monthly volume rather than from each vendor's best rate. Comparing best rates would mean setting a $9.99 plan against a $4,300 one, which tells you nothing except who sells the biggest tier.

Where the cheapest option changes hands

There are three crossovers and all of them are about plan ladders rather than credit prices.

Up to about 8 minutes a month, Captions Max at $24.99 is nominally cheapest. By $4 against a $29 plan on either of the others, on a plan with the lowest ceiling of the three. At that volume the difference is a rounding error and the choice should be made on avatar quality, platform and whether you work on a phone.

At about 8 and a half minutes, Captions triples. Max stops at 500 credits and the next plan up is Scale at $69.99. There is nothing between them. At the same point HeyGen's $29 Creator plan still has 22 minutes of headroom, so the cheapest option flips from Captions to HeyGen and stays there.

At about 10 minutes, Synthesia triples too. Starter and the free plan both stop at 1,200 credits, and Creator at $89 is the next rung. Synthesia has no plan between $29 and $89.

Above 30 minutes a month, Synthesia stops publishing a price. Creator is its largest self-serve plan and everything beyond it is Enterprise and quote-only. HeyGen goes the other way and publishes the whole ladder, all the way to 100,000 credits a month at $4,300, which is 5,000 minutes on its most expensive engine. If you know you will pass 30 minutes, Synthesia is not a decision you can cost from its website and HeyGen is.

Platform by platform

HeyGen

Cheapest of the three at every volume above about 9 minutes a month, and the margin is large rather than marginal. $29 against $89 at 23 minutes. It gets there by having the shallowest credit rate of the three on its own terms, 20 credits a minute against Synthesia's 120, on plans priced within pennies of each other. It is also the only one of the three with a published multi-editor plan, at $149 plus $20 a seat. Signing up through Try HeyGen → gets you the Creator tier's 175 languages and voice cloning from the first month, and I have written about what HeyGen, lip sync from a photo with Avatar IV does with photo avatars separately.

Two gotchas. The first is that cost per minute goes up at Business, not down. $1.99 against $0.98 on Pro, because that $149 buys seats, SSO and interactive video rather than proportionally more credits. If credits are what you want, staying on Pro and moving up its ladder is cheaper than moving sideways to Business.

The second is the avatar engine. Avatar III costs 3 credits a minute and Avatar IV and V cost 20, a nearly sevenfold difference inside one product, decided by which engine you pick in the editor rather than by which plan you are on. Nothing on the pricing page makes that trade-off visible.

Synthesia

The most expensive per minute of the three on monthly billing, at $2.90 on Starter and $2.97 on Creator, and the only one whose per-minute cost barely moves as you go up the ladder. What the money buys is the avatar library, 125 avatars on Starter and 180 on Creator, plus guest reviewers, branded video pages and API access on Creator. Try Synthesia → is also the only one of the three whose free tier is genuinely usable for evaluating output rather than just previewing it.

The gotcha is that the free plan and the $29 plan carry the identical 1,200 credits a month. Paying $29 does not buy you a single extra minute of video. It buys the right to download what you made, remove the Synthesia logo, choose from 125 avatars instead of 9, and make 3 personal avatars of your own face. That last one is new and it is the strongest reason to pay, because a personal avatar is usually the whole point of buying one of these tools. It is also not what a plan card implies when the credit figure on both cards is the same number.

Synthesia plan cards on monthly billing: the free Basic plan and the paid Starter plan both carry 1,200 credits a month and both are usable for up to 10 minutes of video. Captured from a UK browser, so the prices show in pounds. From synthesia.io/pricing, captured 27 August 2026.

Credits do not roll over either. Unused ones reset at the start of each billing period, which is the strictest expiry policy of the three. I have covered what Synthesia, 3.0 keynote breakdown changed in its 3.0 release elsewhere.

Captions (Mirage)

Captions is now trading as Mirage, and both names are still in use. The app is Captions, the company is Mirage, and the help centre uses both. Its credits cost $0.05 each on every plan from $9.99 to $279.99, which makes it the only platform here with no volume discount at all. A minute of AI Creator output costs $3.00 whether you spend 10 dollars a month or 280. That is unusual and it is worth knowing before you upgrade expecting the rate to improve. Try Captions → is the one of the three built phone-first, which is either the point or the problem depending on how you work.

Three gotchas. Its published prices carry a footnote saying they reflect iOS plans only, so a web or Android buyer is not necessarily looking at their own numbers. Its cheapest paid plan, Basic at $9.99 with 200 credits, is absent from the pricing page and appears only in the help documentation, where it is described as the former Pro and Starter tier. And credits are deducted for any AI generation whether or not you export the project, so failed attempts and abandoned drafts are billed at the same rate as finished work. That is the one cost on this page that scales with how picky you are. I have looked at what Captions, best AI video editing apps round-up is actually good at in a separate piece.

The Captions help centre describing the Basic plan, formerly Pro, at $9.99 a month with 200 credits that renew monthly. This plan does not appear on the Captions pricing page. From the Captions help centre, Subscriptions and Plans, captured 27 August 2026.

What each plan actually gives you

HeyGen's free plan is 3 videos a month, one minute each. No credit allocation, a 1-minute duration cap, and Avatar IV access described as limited trial access. It is a demo rather than an allowance.

HeyGen credits roll over one month on monthly billing and accumulate all year on annual billing. They are forfeited entirely if you cancel.

HeyGen Pro is a ladder, not a plan. It runs from 1,000 credits a month at $49 to 100,000 a month at $4,300, every rung carries the same features, and you can switch between them at any time. Upgrades take effect immediately and are prorated. So running out on Pro means moving up a rung rather than being stuck, which is not the same as being able to buy 200 credits to finish a job. Only Business can buy one-off top-up packs or set an auto-reload.

Synthesia credits do not roll over at all. Unused credits reset at the start of each billing period. Nothing carries forward, on any self-serve plan. Upgrade mid-cycle and your balance resets to the new plan's full allocation rather than adding to what you had.

Synthesia's guests are not editors. Starter gives one editor and 3 guests, Creator one editor and 5 guests. Guests comment. They do not make videos. More than one editor is an Enterprise conversation.

Synthesia's API allowance comes out of your video minutes. Creator includes up to 360 minutes of API video a year, deducted from the plan's usage limits rather than added to them. API usage bills at 75 credits a minute against 120 for a Studio video, so it is cheaper per minute but it eats the same pot.

Synthesia sells one avatar as a $1,000 a year add-on. Studio Express-1 is available on annual plans only, at $1,000 a year on top of the subscription. That is more than 3 years of Starter for a single avatar.

Captions credits roll over to a cap of 3 times your monthly allowance, on Basic and above. Downgrading immediately forfeits anything above the new plan's cap, and cancelling forfeits the lot at the end of the period.

Captions cannot sell you individual credits. Top-ups exist only for Teams, Business and Scale 4x customers. Everyone else upgrades a tier or waits for the refresh.

Captions' free tier is a one-time grant, not an allowance. Between 60 and 200 credits, which do not refresh. One to 3 minutes of AI Creator output, ever.

What has moved recently

No plan price or credit allowance on any of these three has changed since I started checking them in mid-August. Every figure in the tables above is the same as it was at the start of the month. What has changed is what the vendors are willing to print.

HeyGen now publishes the top of its Pro ladder. Until last week the pricing page said Pro scaled to higher credit tiers without saying how far. It now names the range, 1,000 credits at $49 up to 100,000 at $4,300. That matters for the comparison rather than for the price, because it means HeyGen publishes a self-serve route to 5,000 minutes a month while Synthesia stops publishing anything above 30.

The HeyGen Pro card with the top of its credit ladder selected: 100,000 credits a month at $4,300, next to Creator at $29 with 600 credits. From heygen.com/pricing, captured 27 August 2026.

Synthesia's Starter plan gained 3 personal avatars. It had none. This is the largest change to what any of these three plans includes since I started tracking them, and it did not come with a price change or an announcement.

Synthesia added an API allowance and a $1,000 a year avatar add-on to the same page at the same time. I cannot tell whether either is genuinely new or whether they were always there and I had not captured them.

Captions took its free plan card off the pricing page. The free tier still exists and still appears in the comparison table further down, but it no longer has a card or a price of its own. Together with the $9.99 Basic tier being help-centre-only, that means the two cheapest ways into Captions are both things you now have to go looking for.

Synthesia's free-dubbing promotion has ended. It offered up to 450 free dubbing minutes and ran to 15 August. Dubbing now comes out of the same 1,200 or 3,600 credits as your video, at 120 credits a minute without lip sync and 240 with it.

There is not much history here yet. It gets more useful the longer I keep checking.

What people are reporting

Almost nothing, and an honest short section beats an invented one.

Nothing about Synthesia or Captions came up in the reactions I gathered this month. Not one recurring complaint, positive or negative, from enough people to be worth passing on. Nobody I saw was complaining. That is not the same as nobody having a problem.

The one HeyGen announcement I followed, Cartesia voice agents running inside LiveAvatar on 13 August, drew 3 responses in total. Three is not a pattern and I am not going to write it up as one.

Who this is for

• Under 8 minutes a month, working on an iPhone, wanting AI actors rather than your own face: Captions Max at $24.99. Check the iOS-only footnote against what you actually see at checkout.
• 10 to 50 minutes a month of straightforward presenter video: HeyGen. Creator at $29 to 30 minutes, Pro at $49 to 50.
• You want a personal avatar of your own face on the cheapest possible plan: Synthesia Starter at $29 now includes 3 of them, which HeyGen's $29 Creator plan matches with 1 Custom Digital Twin.
• You want a specific stock avatar and the library matters more than the rate: Synthesia Creator at $89, and expect a sales conversation the month you pass 30 minutes.
• High volume where a slightly older-looking avatar is acceptable: HeyGen on Avatar III. 200 minutes on the $29 plan, at about $0.15 a minute.
• Very high volume, hundreds of minutes a month: HeyGen, because it is the only one of the three that will tell you the price without a phone call.
• More than one person needs to make the videos: HeyGen Business at $149 plus $20 a seat is the only published multi-editor plan of the three.
• You just want to see whether avatar video is good enough yet: Synthesia's free plan gives 10 minutes a month, which is far more evaluation than HeyGen's 3 one-minute videos. You just cannot download the result.

Where this comparison breaks down

It compares price, not output. Nothing here was tested. Avatar realism, lip-sync quality, voice naturalness and how the thing handles a difficult script are exactly the variables that decide this purchase, and none of them appear in a credit rate.

Captions publishes iOS pricing. Its own footnote says features and prices reflect iOS plans only. Every Captions figure on this page carries that caveat, and a web buyer may be looking at different numbers.

Captions publishes no rate for AI Twin. The 1 credit per second used above is the published rate for AI Creator, AI Ads and AI Skits. AI Twin, which is the feature for your own digital twin rather than a stock actor, appears in the plan comparison with no credit cost anywhere. If a digital twin of yourself is the reason you are looking at Captions, that cost is unpriced and I am not going to guess it.

Captions also publishes no annual price. Its questions page says a yearly plan is discounted but never says by how much, so the annual comparison above covers only two of the three platforms.

All three Enterprise tiers are quote-only, and for Synthesia that starts at just 30 minutes a month. A low ceiling to hit before pricing goes private.

Retries are not counted, and on one platform they are billed. Captions deducts credits for any AI generation whether or not the project is exported. At 2 attempts per usable minute, its figures double.

Agent Opus is deliberately absent. It added talking-head output in August, but it builds a finished, edited video from a brief rather than rendering your script through an avatar you chose, which is a different purchase however similarly it meters.

Prompt-to-video is a different job and priced differently. Kling AI and the other prompt-to-video platforms sell clips generated from a description rather than minutes of presenter footage, and the two are not substitutes.

Plenty of tools do this job and are not here. This page covers the three I follow. Colossyan, Elai, D-ID, Hour One, Vidnoz and Creatify all make avatar video and none of them appear above.

Method and freshness

Figures come from each vendor's pricing page, help centre and credit documentation, checked weekly. This page was last reviewed on 26 August 2026 and the prices in it were last read off the three vendors' own pages on 23 August 2026. Every cost per minute is calculated rather than quoted, a published credit rate multiplied by what a credit costs on that plan, and should be read as an estimate of what a plan works out at rather than as a price any vendor advertises. Where a vendor does not publish what a credit buys, that feature is marked unpriced rather than guessed. Nothing on this page was tested for this comparison.