Synthesia pricing, Synthesia alternatives, Synthesia vs HeyGen and Synthesia cost: what a 30 second AI video really costs

Synthesia publishes three prices and quotes the fourth. Everything here came off synthesia.io/pricing on 30 August 2026, when the page was carrying a banner reading new lower prices, plans now starting from $18 a month, save 38 percent.

On annual billing the allowances are stated as a yearly pool rather than a monthly one, which matters if your video work is seasonal. Starter is 14,500 credits and 120 minutes a year, Creator is 44,000 credits and 360 minutes a year. A year-long pool is more forgiving than a monthly one, because a quiet March does not evaporate before a busy April.

Two costs sit outside the plans. A Studio avatar, the higher-fidelity digital twin, is a paid add-on at $1,000 a year, it is available to annual subscribers only, and Synthesia says creation can take up to 10 days. Enterprise is where SCORM export and one-click translation into 80 or more languages live, so if your videos have to load into an LMS as trackable modules, the published plans will not do it at any price.

Synthesia converts credits to video at a flat rate, which makes it one of the easier tools in this category to budget for once you know the conversion. Basic and Starter both carry 1,200 credits for 10 minutes, and Creator carries 3,600 for 30 minutes. Both work out to the same number.

The b-roll line is the one that catches people out. Ninety-six credits for a single asset with an acting prompt is 80 percent of a minute of finished video, drawn from the same pool, so four of those and you have spent a third of a Starter month before you have rendered the actual video. Synthesia now treats credits as one shared currency across every usage-based feature, which is simpler to understand and also means dubbing, b-roll and video all compete for the same allowance.

API access starts on Creator and is capped at 360 minutes of video a year, deducted from the plan's usage limits rather than added to them. So the API does not buy you capacity. It buys you automation of the capacity you already have, which is worth knowing if you were planning to script bulk generation against it.

This is where the pricing page says something surprising in plain sight. The free Basic plan includes 1,200 credits and up to 10 minutes of video a month. The $29 Starter plan includes 1,200 credits and up to 10 minutes of video a month. They are the same number.

Starter adds no video capacity at all. Every dollar of that $29 buys something other than more video:

That reframes the free plan too. Ten minutes a month sounds like the most generous evaluation tier in the category until you notice you cannot take any of it with you. Basic is a demo you can run for as long as you like, not a free tier you can build on. If your plan was to test Synthesia by shipping one real video, the test costs $29.

Is it worth it? For a training team, comfortably yes, because $29 for ten minutes of finished, narrated, multi-language video is far below what the same ten minutes costs with a camera, a studio and an editor. For an advertiser buying thirty second creatives, the same $29 is buying twenty videos a month at $1.45 each, and that is where the comparison with the ad-focused tools gets interesting.

HeyGen, on every engine except its most expensive one, and the reason is not the plan price. Both charge $29 at the entry paid tier and Synthesia includes twice as many credits for it, 1,200 against 600. The same thirty seconds of video still costs more at Synthesia, because the two vendors bill wildly different numbers of credits for identical output.

Look at the two middle columns together. Synthesia's credits are the cheapest of the three, at roughly 2.4 cents against HeyGen's 4.8 and Creatify's 39. Synthesia is still the more expensive of the first two per finished video, because it spends 60 of its cheap credits where HeyGen spends 8 of its dearer ones. The credit count and the dollar cost are not correlated, and neither is a lower cost per credit a lower cost per video. A credit is not a unit of anything. It is a private currency and every vendor mints its own at a different rate, which is why comparing two plan prices in this market tells you nothing at all until you convert both to a cost per finished video. We worked the same conversion through for HeyGen on our HeyGen pricing page and for Creatify in our breakdown of Creatify's credit system.

There is a second pattern worth knowing, and Synthesia shares it with HeyGen: moving up a tier does not buy cheaper video. On annual billing Synthesia Starter works out at $1.80 a minute and Creator at $2.13 a minute, so the more expensive plan costs about 18 percent more per minute. HeyGen does the same thing, with its Business plan costing roughly double per credit what its Creator plan costs. In both cases the upgrade is buying seats, avatars, API access and collaboration, not volume economics. If you are moving up a tier in this category, check that you actually want what the tier contains, because you are not buying a discount.

The honest counterweight is that price per minute is the wrong lens for most Synthesia buyers. Synthesia sells unlimited minutes on Enterprise, which no ad-focused tool in this comparison offers at all, and for an organization producing hundreds of training modules a year the unmetered tier is the entire point. Cost per video only decides the question when the videos are ads.

Mostly no, and Synthesia is not really pretending otherwise. Its own site organizes around learning and development, sales enablement, HR, compliance training and SOPs. Marketing appears on the list, but the product is shaped around the other jobs.

The mismatch is compositional rather than technical. A Synthesia avatar is a presenter: well-lit, framed at chest height, addressing the camera in a clean environment, holding a steady position for the length of the script. That is exactly right for a compliance module and exactly wrong for a feed. UGC reads as UGC because of handheld framing, imperfect light, a real room, hands entering the shot, and a product being physically used. None of that comes out of a corporate avatar renderer, at any price.

There is also a claims problem that has nothing to do with quality. A synthetic presenter delivering a first-person endorsement, saying they bought the product and it worked, is a fabricated testimonial from a person who does not exist. That is the shape the FTC rule on fake reviews and testimonials addresses, and it does not become safer because the render is good. Synthetic presenters are on firm ground for explanation, demonstration and narration. They are on soft ground the moment the script says I.

What Synthesia is genuinely good at, and it is worth being fair about this:

If your videos are going into an onboarding track rather than an ad account, the render is only half the job. A rendered MP4 is not training until somebody has watched it and the completion is recorded, which is why the SCORM export sitting behind the Enterprise tier matters more than the per-minute price for most buyers here.

It depends which part of Synthesia you are replacing, so here is the routing rather than one answer.

And the case for staying, which is stronger than most alternative pages will tell you. If your videos are training modules, Synthesia is the incumbent for good reasons: unlimited minutes at the top tier, SCORM, the compliance certifications, and 160 languages on every plan including the free one. Nothing in the ad-focused half of this category comes close on any of those. Switching away from Synthesia to save money on a per-video basis, when your actual workload is hundreds of internal videos a year, is likely to cost you more than it saves.

We are not on either side of that decision. UGCMarketplace does not render video, does not supply creators, and is not a substitute for Synthesia or for anything else on this page. We write the brief and the scene-by-scene script, with the opening three seconds spelled out and the technical spec attached, which is the document every one of these tools assumes you already have.