Synthesia Pricing in 2026: Seats, Minutes and Cost Per Ad

Quick answer: Synthesia costs $29/month for Starter (10 minutes of video a month) and $89/month for Creator (30 minutes), dropping to $18 and $64 per month on the yearly toggle, where the allowance converts to an annual pool of 120 and 360 minutes. There is a free Basic tier with 10 minutes a month and Synthesia branding, and an unpriced Enterprise tier. Every self-serve plan gives you exactly one editor seat, which is the single most important thing an ecommerce buyer needs to understand about this product. Figures read off synthesia.io/pricing on 10 August 2026.

The plans, both billing modes

Synthesia's pricing changes shape when you flip the monthly/yearly toggle, not just in price but in how the allowance is granted. Monthly plans refresh minutes every month. Yearly plans hand you one annual pool. Both views are in the table:

A wrinkle worth knowing before you buy: the pricing page contradicts itself. The plan cards show $18/month and $64/month on yearly billing, while the FAQ further down the same page still says Starter is "$264 if you go with an annual plan" and Creator is "$804/year". Twelve months at the displayed rates would be $216 and $768. We are not going to guess which is charged at checkout; check the total on the payment screen.

Minutes, credits and what each plan really includes

Synthesia has moved to a credit currency that sits on top of the minute allowance, with roughly 120 credits buying one minute of video. Credits are also spent on dubbing and on generated assets, so the pools interact:

Two credit rates Synthesia publishes are easy to miss. Dubbing with lip sync enabled uses double credits. And a customisable-avatar b-roll asset with action costs 96 credits, which is close to a full minute of video out of the same pool. Beyond that, Starter unlocks downloads, AI dubbing and removal of the Synthesia logo; Creator adds API access (up to 360 minutes a year, deducted from the same allowance), interactive video, branded video pages and multiple avatars per scene; Enterprise adds SAML/SSO, SCORM export, 1-click translation into 80+ languages and a dedicated CSM. Studio Express-1 avatars are a $1,000/year add-on, annual plans only, up to 10 days to process.

What one finished ad costs

Because the meter is minutes, the arithmetic is simple. A 30-second ad is half a minute of allowance:

Around a dollar to a dollar fifty per finished ad is not expensive. The constraint is volume, not unit price: 20 half-minute videos a month on Starter is roughly one creative test a week, before you account for the versions you generate and throw away. Every failed take eats the same pool.

Why seat-based pricing matters more than the sticker price

This is the part that catches ecommerce teams out. Synthesia sells editor seats, and every self-serve plan includes exactly one. Guests, 3 on Starter and 5 on Creator, can comment and review; they cannot build videos. If two media buyers both want to make ads, there is no listed upgrade path other than Enterprise, and Synthesia does not publish an additional-editor price.

Compare that with the alternatives an ad team usually looks at. HeyGen also ships a single seat on its self-serve tiers but publishes a $20/seat/month rate on Business, so at least you can price a team without a sales call. Credit-metered tools like ours do not charge per seat at all. For a solo founder or a one-person content team, Synthesia's model is fine and arguably cheap. For a team of three, the real cost is a conversation with sales.

Who should actually buy Synthesia?

Buy it if your video is corporate: training modules, compliance refreshers, product education, internal comms, onboarding, sales enablement. Synthesia is genuinely excellent at this. 160+ languages and voices, 70+ dubbing languages on paid tiers and 140+ on Enterprise, SCORM export straight into an LMS, embeds that update when you edit the source, brand kits, interactive quizzes and branching. Nothing in the AI UGC category comes close on the learning-and-development side, and 240+ stock avatars with unlimited personal avatars at the top tier is a serious library.

Look elsewhere if you are buying ad creative. Four concrete reasons. One seat, as covered. The annual minute pool on yearly billing does not refresh monthly, so a heavy testing month can leave you waiting for a renewal date. MP4 downloads are capped at Full HD 1920x1080, with no 4K tier published. And the output is a studio presenter in a designed scene, which reads as a corporate explainer rather than a phone camera in a kitchen. That look converts in an LMS. It rarely wins a scroll-stop on TikTok. Our post on what makes AI UGC look fake covers why that gap exists.

Where UGC Vids AI is different

Three structural differences, stated fairly. First, no seats: our plans meter credits, not people, so a second media buyer costs nothing extra and there is no editor-versus-guest distinction to manage. Second, the meter is the clip rather than the minute, and it spends across ten video models instead of one house avatar engine, so a product-in-hand scene, a b-roll cutaway and a talking head all draw on the same balance. Third, the workflow is built around ecommerce ad testing rather than course production, with no video-count cap on paid plans.

The pricingis $49/month for 5,000 credits, $99 for 12,000 and $199 for 25,000, with 30 percent off annually. Set against Synthesia's minute meter, a like-for-like talking head is the fair comparison and we lose it: a 30-second OmniHuman 1.5 read costs 980 credits on Starter, about $9.60, against roughly $1.45 for the same half-minute on Synthesia Starter. Where the credit model pays off is variety rather than duration. Fifteen seconds of Happy Horse 1.1 at 1080p is 550 credits, about $5.39, and the same pool covers the generated scene you cannot get from a studio presenter at all. If what you need is one script in thirty languages, Synthesia is the better purchase and we would say so. If what you need is thirty scenes for one product, it is not.

Compare feature by feature at UGC Vids AI vs Synthesia, see the credit-metered rival in our HeyGen pricing breakdown, or price the whole category in the best AI UGC tools of 2026.

No seats, no video cap, one credit pool across every model. UGC Vids AI starts at $49/month. Free for 3 days. Cancel anytime.