HeyGen pricing: credits, plans and real cost

Use this HeyGen pricing page to understand cost structure, usage limits, and where pricing conversations need more detail.

HeyGen sells a subscription that buys minutes. One credit renders one minute of video, so a two-minute avatar clip costs two credits and a weekly three-minute explainer costs twelve a month.

Any comparison between HeyGen and another AI video tool that ignores the credit allowance is comparing the wrong number.

That allowance is the figure we do not publish. Our 1 October 2026 snapshot verifies the five prices and the free tier's single credit, and it does not record how many credits Creator, Pro or Business include.

Read those off HeyGen's own pricing page, because they are what decide whether $29/mo or $149/mo is the cheaper cost per finished minute for you.

Work out the monthly minute requirement before looking at the tiers at all. Count the videos you expect to publish and multiply by their average length. Four two-minute clips a month is eight credits. A daily short at ninety seconds is closer to forty-five.

The second number puts you on a different plan from the first regardless of which features you want.

Annual billing is published for one tier only. Creator drops from $29/mo to $24/mo billed annually, which totals $288 across the year against $348 paid monthly, a saving of $60.

Our check records no annual rate for Pro at $49/mo or Business at $149/mo, so assume the monthly figure for those two until HeyGen's page says otherwise.

The free tier is the clearest number on the card and the easiest to misread. One credit a month, watermarked, with no expiry date.

That is enough to judge avatar quality and lip sync on a script of your own, and it is not enough to publish anything.

Treat it as a quality check rather than a starting plan, and expect to move to Creator within the first week of real use.

The step from Creator at $29/mo to Pro at $49/mo is $20/mo, and from Pro to Business at $149/mo is $100/mo.

Those gaps are large enough that the reason for each should be a specific capability or a credit ceiling you keep hitting, not a feature list you have skimmed. Running out of credits mid-month costs more in stalled production than the upgrade would have.

At the entry price, HeyGen and Synthesia are identical: Creator and Starter are both $29/mo, checked 1 October 2026.

They separate on annual billing, where Synthesia Starter is $18/mo against HeyGen Creator's $24/mo, and on the tier above, where Synthesia Creator is $89/mo against HeyGen Pro at $49/mo. Neither snapshot records included credits, so the cost per minute is still the open question.

The Synthesia and HeyGen comparison is the head-to-head that matters most here, since the two tools target the same avatar and script workflow. The Synthesia profile carries its full rate card.

If the output is generated footage rather than a presenter reading a script, the comparison moves to Runway, where Standard is $15/mo and Pro $35/mo, checked 6 October 2026.

That undercuts HeyGen Creator at the bottom of the range, but it is a different job: text to video rather than avatar to camera. The Runway profile and Runway against Synthesia cover the generative side.

For the wider field, the AI video tools category lists everything we track, our guide to text to video AI covers the generation tools and AI video tools for creators covers the avatar ones.

Put your monthly minute count through the pricing calculators before committing to a year.

Use the free tier for one job: a single watermarked minute that tells you whether the avatars are good enough for your audience. Write the script you would publish rather than a test sentence, because that is the only version of the question worth answering.

Start on Creator at $29/mo monthly rather than annual. One month tells you your real credit consumption, which is the figure the whole decision rests on and the one you cannot estimate accurately in advance.

Move to the $24/mo annual rate afterwards if the usage holds.

Move to Pro at $49/mo when you run out of credits before month end, not when a feature catches your eye.

Repeatedly hitting the ceiling costs more in stalled production than the $20/mo step does, and it is the only signal on this rate card that reliably means the tier is wrong.

Open an Enterprise conversation instead of buying Business at $149/mo if several teams need pooled credits, single sign-on or API volume. Enterprise is custom-priced in our 1 October 2026 check, which means the published tiers are not the ceiling of what HeyGen will negotiate.