Pricing desk
AI video generator pricing, compared with sources
Three platforms, three different billing units, and one derived number that makes them comparable.
The short answer
AI video generator pricing for talking-head video on the three published platforms starts at $5.90 a month and reaches $196 before anyone calls sales.
The prices are not comparable as published, because HeyGen caps one video at 30 minutes while Synthesia and D-ID ration the month instead.[1, 2, 3]
One unit, three platforms
Every plan below has been divided by the output it permits, so the last column is the same measurement on every AI avatar platform in the table. That is the only column on this page that can honestly be read top to bottom.
| Tool | Monthly price | What the allowance is | Cost per finished minute | License | Who is recommending it |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Synthesia Creator | $89 | 30 min per month | $2.97 | Commercial use | Tripling the allowance does not lower the unit cost on this ladder. |
| Synthesia Starter | $29 | 10 min per month | $2.90 | Commercial use | Priced from the standard table. Some countries are served a cheaper one. |
| D-ID Pro | $29 | 15 min per month | $1.93 | Commercial use | D-ID's real entry price once the work is commercial. |
| HeyGen Creator | $29 | 30 min per video, no monthly ration | $0.97 | Commercial use | The per-minute figure assumes one full-length video a month, which is the least flattering reading. |
| D-ID Lite | $5.90 | 10 min per month | $0.59 | Personal use | Personal use only. Not an option for business video at any price. |
How this was scored. Each vendor's own pricing page read 2026-08-25, with the billing toggle set to monthly where one exists, dividing the plan price by the minutes the plan permits and assuming the allowance is spent in full, then ordering the rows by that derived figure rather than by preference. The full scoring method.
Why the headline prices are not comparable
HeyGen sells a per-video minute cap, a ceiling on the length of any one video, and never asks how many you make. Synthesia and D-ID sell a monthly allowance and never ask how long any one video runs.
Those are two different products wearing the same price tag. A reader who makes one long video a quarter and a reader who makes twelve short ones a month should choose opposite platforms, and the headline figures give no hint of that.
Cost per finished minute across the three platforms
The method, in three lines
Take the plan price. Divide by the minutes the plan permits. Print the result beside the assumption it rests on, which is that the allowance is spent in full.
That assumption is the least flattering one available and it is applied to every platform equally, which is what makes the ordering fair even where the absolute figure does not describe your month.
How much does AI charge for video
None of these platforms charges for a video. They charge for a month, and the video is what you are allowed to do inside it. That distinction catches out anyone who arrives wanting exactly one piece of work done.
Why nobody sells a single video
Synthesia says so directly: the answer to whether you can pay per video is no, because the product is a monthly or yearly subscription.[2] The other two are structured the same way without stating it as plainly.
For a genuine one-off the honest route is a free tier, or one month of the smallest paid plan followed by a cancellation. All three allow that, and two of them let you cancel without contacting anyone.
How much does it cost to make a 30 minute AI video
Thirty minutes is where the three platforms separate hardest, because it is long enough to break two of the three entry plans outright.
The published routes to 30 finished minutes
HeyGen Creator does it for $29, because thirty minutes is exactly its per-video ceiling and there is no monthly ration to exhaust. Synthesia Creator does it for $89, which is its whole monthly allowance. D-ID Advanced does it for $196.
- There is a lower-cost D-ID route if you are not in a hurry: two months of Pro at $58 covers the same thirty minutes, because the allowance renews.
- Patience is worth $138 on that one decision.
How much does a 2 minute video cost
At two minutes the platforms barely separate, and the free tiers become the real answer. Synthesia's free plan covers it five times over in a month, and HeyGen's free plan does not cover it at all, because its ceiling is 1 minute per video.
On paid plans a two-minute video is noise against any allowance. What matters at this length is the shape of the limit rather than the price, which is the opposite of what matters at thirty.
What you are actually paying for
On two of these three ladders the cost per minute rises as you climb. That looks irrational until you notice that minutes are not the product being sold at the higher tiers.
- Watermark removal, which is what turns output into something publishable.
- Personal avatars, meaning presenters trained on a specific real person.
- Seats, and on one platform the right to have more than one person creating.
- The commercial license itself, on D-ID.
Only D-ID Advanced is genuinely a volume purchase, at nearly seven times the Pro allowance for under seven times the price. Everywhere else on these three ladders, upgrading for cheaper video is a mistake.
Watermarks, ranked by how much they cost to remove
Synthesia removes its logo at the first paid tier, $29 a month, and the same step opens downloads. HeyGen does not stamp paid output. D-ID steps its mark down across three tiers and only replaces it with your own logo at $196.
If a clean frame is the thing you actually need, that single fact reorders the whole comparison, and it appears in none of the vendors' headline figures.
Is there a 100% free AI video generator
Two of the three, and neither is a trial. HeyGen runs a permanent $0 plan capped at 1 minute per video. Synthesia runs a permanent $0 plan with 10 minutes a month.
D-ID is the exception: free for 14 days, with 3 minutes and a full-screen watermark, after which the plan ends rather than reverting to a free tier.
What a free tier cannot finish
Rarely the minutes. Synthesia keeps its logo on free output and blocks the download entirely, so the video never leaves the platform. HeyGen's one-minute ceiling rules out anything longer than a social cut.
As evaluation tools they are genuinely good, and ten minutes is enough to form a real opinion about whether an avatar reads convincingly to your audience. As production tools they are closed.
What annual billing changes
All three discount it. Two change the shape of the allowance as well, which is the part worth more than the discount to anyone whose output is uneven.
- Synthesia converts a monthly ration into a yearly pool, so a quiet month is no longer lost.
- D-ID shows the annual figure first and the monthly figure only after you move the toggle.
- HeyGen changes credit rollover terms rather than the allowance itself.
Seats, and when a team changes the answer
Headcount can outweigh minutes. HeyGen bills additional seats separately on Business at $20 each, which turns a $149 plan into something else entirely for a team of five.
Synthesia splits its seats into editors, who can create, and guests, who can only comment, so a plan advertising five seats may permit one person to make anything. D-ID does not publish a per-seat charge on its studio plans at all.
Personal avatars, and what they oblige you to get
Counts differ sharply: 3 personal avatars on Synthesia Starter, 3 personal avatars on D-ID Pro, 1 custom digital twin on HeyGen Creator. A company with three spokespeople is constrained by this long before it is constrained by minutes.
Training an avatar on a real person also carries consent and likeness obligations, which are a legal matter rather than a pricing one and have their own page in the guides desk.
The commercial use license, and why it moves the table
Only one of the three gates commercial rights behind a tier, and it happens to be the platform holding the lowest figure in the table above. Applied honestly, that single row moves D-ID's entry price for business work from $5.90 to $29 a month.
Read the table with the license column covered and D-ID wins on price. Read it with the column visible and the ordering of the three platforms changes for most readers, because most readers are making video for a business. That is the difference between a comparison and a ranking.
- HeyGen and Synthesia grant commercial use on every paid plan, so the question does not arise.
- Check it anyway on any tool not covered here: a personal-use tier is an inexpensive way for a vendor to publish a low headline figure.
What this page does not price
Tools that render a scene from a prompt rather than a presenter from a script are usually billed per second or per generation. They are a different market with a different unit, and folding them into this table would undo the work the table exists to do.
The editorial desk here prices platforms that publish a plan table, because a published price is what makes a comparison checkable months later, and because a quoted price is a negotiation rather than a fact that can be cited.
- Published plan table, with a date: priced here.
- Quoted by sales, or metered per second: named here and priced nowhere.
Every figure here traces to a vendor page and a fetch date on the child page it came from. This desk has not run any of these tools, so it prices them and quotes reviewers on everything else. How we source and review this.
How to check a price yourself
Three habits catch almost every error in this category, and none of them takes longer than a minute.
- Set the billing toggle yourself before reading anything, because one of these pages opens on annual.
- Check which country the page thinks you are in, because one of them serves a cheaper table to some markets.
- Read the license row rather than only the price row, because one of them gates commercial use behind the middle tier.
Why the numbers may move
Vendor pricing changes without notice and without an announcement. Each child page carries the date its figures were read, and that date is the warranty. Where a vendor page disagrees with a page here, the vendor is right and this desk is stale.
Two of these three vendors changed a published price within the year, and one of them is currently advertising the fact on its own page. Any AI video generator cost you read anywhere, including here, is a snapshot with a date attached, and a figure quoted without one is not evidence of anything.
What AI video generator pricing pages leave out
None of the three publishes a cost per finished minute, and none publishes what a comparable minute costs on a rival. Both absences are commercially sensible and both are the reason this hub exists.
A per-minute figure invites exactly the comparison above, and no seller benefits from making that easy. Deriving it is not an accusation, it is arithmetic anyone can repeat from the same public pages.
What a price comparison cannot tell you
Everything above is arithmetic on published figures, which is exactly as far as this desk can honestly go. Whether an avatar reads convincingly, whether the editor is pleasant to work in and whether the output survives contact with a real audience are not price questions.
Reviewers who have actually run these tools are the right source for that half, and they tend to be less decisive than a comparison table would like them to be.
- Priced here: what each platform charges and what that buys, from published tables.
- Not judged here: how good the output is. That belongs to people who have used it.
That is worth holding onto while reading the table above. A derived unit cost tells you which platform is expensive for the work you plan to do. It does not tell you which one you will still be using in six months, and no amount of arithmetic will.
The practical consequence is to test before committing to a year. Two of the three platforms let you do that at no cost, and the third gives you two weeks, which is enough to answer the questions a price table structurally cannot.
What demand for AI video generator pricing is doing
Searches for ai video generator pricing run at roughly 50 a month in the US at a keyword difficulty of 12, down about 56 percent year on year.[4]
The composition of the results says more than the volume does. A third of the questions Google attaches to this term are about paying a human video editor rather than a tool, which is what a search engine does when the query is not yet settled and the good answer does not exist.
Which page to read next
Route by the constraint that binds you, not by the price. The three vendor pages each carry the full ladder, the derived unit costs and the vendor's own wording on the terms that matter.
Pick by the limit that will stop you
- One long video at a time A per-video ceiling is your constraint and a monthly ration is irrelevant. Start with the HeyGen page. 30 min
- A steady publishing rhythm A monthly allowance is your constraint, and whether it rolls over matters more than the rate. Start with the Synthesia page. 30 min
- A tight budget and commercial work Read the license row before the price row. Start with the D-ID page. $29
- A named presenter on camera Personal avatar counts decide it on every platform, and consent obligations come before the purchase.
Priced per video
HeyGen pricing explained, plan by plan
Five tiers, a per-video cap that stands still across two of them, and the seat surcharge that changes what a team pays.
Priced per month
Synthesia pricing explained, plan by plan
Four tiers, a shared credit pool, and a second price table served to countries the vendor marks tier T1.
Priced per month
D-ID pricing explained, plan by plan
A page that opens on annual billing, a personal use license on the entry tier, and every render rounded up to 15 seconds.
AI video pricing FAQs
How much does AI video generation cost?
How much does it cost to make a 30 minute AI video?
Is there a 100% free AI video generator?
Why do AI video prices look so different between tools?
Which AI video generator has the lowest cost per minute?
Do AI video plans include commercial rights?
Do unused AI video minutes roll over?
Is annual billing worth it for AI video tools?
What is Enterprise pricing for AI video platforms?
Does this page price text-to-video models?
What the price does not buy you
Every plan compared on this page is priced per minute or per credit, and every one of them leaves the same question unanswered: what do you own when the render finishes? In the United States, the Copyright Office has said that supplying prompts, however many, however detailed, is not authorship. Where a piece of work mixes human and machine contributions, only the human part is protectable.
For a marketing team that matters more than it sounds. A video assembled almost entirely by the model may have no owner in a position to stop a competitor reusing it, and the licence summary in a vendor’s pricing table is a permission to use the tool, not a grant of exclusivity in what came out. Scripts, direction, editing and the human performance captured in a custom avatar are where the ownership actually lives, which is an argument for putting more of the work on those and less on the prompt.
What this does not say: US law only; the Office states the analysis is case-by-case and may change as the technology evolves.
U.S. Copyright Office, NewsNet Issue 1060 (Part 2 report: Copyrightability) (2025-01-29)
Sources
Work in AI video?
We take pitches from people building and using these tools. Tell us what you know that the vendor pages do not.
Pitch a guest postStill comparing?
Every figure on this site carries the page it was read from and the date it was read.
See the pricing deskBy the Humva Desk. Checked against primary sources and updated .