Synthesia pricing starts at $18/month — and that number is doing a lot of work to look reasonable. What it doesn’t tell you is that $18/month on the Starter plan buys you exactly 10 minutes of generated video per month. One typical corporate training video. One onboarding module. One product explainer. That’s your month. Done.
This article tells you what each Synthesia plan actually gets you — in video minutes, not just dollars — what it locks behind Enterprise pricing, and the four gotchas that corporate buyers consistently report finding after they’ve already paid. Synthesia’s website won’t surface any of this.
Synthesia’s pricing page leads with the monthly dollar figure. The number that actually determines whether the plan works for you is the video minute allocation. Here’s every plan with both figures visible at the same time.
| Plan | Monthly billing | Annual billing | Video minutes | Custom avatar |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free / Basic | $0 | — | 3 min/month · watermarked · 9 avatars | ✗ |
| Starter ⚠ | $29/mo | $18/mo ($264/yr) | 10 min/month · 120 min/year · no rollover | 1 included (annual only) |
| Creator | $89/mo | $64/mo ($804/yr) | 30 min/month · 360 min/year · no rollover | 3 included (annual only) |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | Custom annual | Unlimited | Unlimited (fair use) |
Row highlighted in red is the Starter plan. The reason is direct: 10 minutes of video per month is the number that catches most new corporate subscribers by surprise, and it’s the central pricing fact this article exists to surface clearly.
One thing confirmed by Synthesia’s own FAQ: unused minutes do not roll over. If you generated three minutes of video this month and have seven minutes remaining at renewal, those seven minutes disappear. You start fresh at ten.
The math is straightforward and Synthesia’s website confirms it plainly: “A starter plan provides you with 10 video minutes per month.” One minute of script generates one minute of video. A typical employee onboarding video runs eight to twelve minutes. A compliance training module runs ten to fifteen minutes.
A Starter subscriber who creates their first onboarding video has consumed their entire monthly allocation. They have nothing left for the product demo, the quarterly update, or the second onboarding module they planned to make that week. Those videos wait until next month, when the allocation resets — to the same ten minutes.
The $18/month annual Synthesia Starter plan is not priced for regular corporate video production. It’s priced for someone who needs one short video per month — a use case that describes almost nobody who searched for Synthesia pricing with a professional need in mind.
This is not a flaw in the platform itself — Synthesia’s video quality is genuine and its enterprise features are robust. It’s a flaw in how the pricing is presented. Leading with $18/month and burying “10 minutes per month” in a FAQ creates the predictable outcome: corporate users subscribe to Starter expecting to make training videos, hit the ceiling in their first session, and discover that the plan they need is Creator at $64/month or Enterprise at negotiated custom pricing.
“They were dishonest from the beginning about the credits rolling over. There are massive limitations for this platform including the following: facial features do not match the words, you are limited—”
— Trustpilot reviewer, January 2026“I subscribed to Synthesia thinking I was signing up for a monthly plan, but I was charged for a full year upfront without clear warning. After using it, I found the product very limited and not worth—”
— Trustpilot reviewer, Rocio Raña, October 2025Two patterns from Trustpilot reviews: the credits-not-rolling-over complaint, and the annual-vs-monthly billing confusion. Both are avoidable with information that Synthesia’s own website does not make prominent. That’s not a bug. That’s the business model.
Count your planned videos for one month. Multiply total scripted minutes by 1.1 (allow for re-renders and revisions). If that number exceeds 10, Starter is the wrong plan before you start. Go directly to Creator at $64/month annual. The $46/month difference between Starter and Creator saves significant time and frustration compared to discovering the ceiling after you’ve committed to annual billing.
The right Synthesia plan is determined by three questions, in this order: how many minutes of video do you actually generate per month, do you need SCORM/LMS delivery, and do you need a custom avatar. Answer those three and the plan choice is unambiguous.
Multiple G2 and Trustpilot reviewers reported a specific pattern: accounts suspended or videos rejected for content that the user considered benign, with no clear explanation and no meaningful appeal process.
“I subscribed to Synthesia, paid for a 1-month subscription, and within 30 minutes, my account was banned without any valid reason. I was simply creating a promotional video for my dental clinic about dental implant pricing.”
— Trustpilot reviewer, 2025A G2 enterprise reviewer described testing Synthesia for investor and clinician presentations based entirely on public corporate website content. Their video was automatically rejected as “medical related” — with support explaining that medical content requires a $1,000/year custom avatar upgrade. The content contained no diagnosis, no treatment guidance, and no health claims. It was an investor overview of a medical diagnostics company.
The pattern is consistent across reviews: Synthesia’s moderation triggers on industry category, not on content harm. Healthcare, biotech, dental, pharmaceutical, and adjacent industries are flagged by default, regardless of whether the specific content is sensitive. The workaround — a $1,000/year Studio Express avatar — is positioned as an add-on feature rather than as a compliance bypass.
Contact Synthesia’s sales team before purchasing any plan and describe your content category explicitly. Ask whether your specific content type can be created with stock avatars on the plan you’re considering. Get the answer in writing. Multiple reviewers paid for subscriptions before discovering their content category was incompatible with stock avatar usage — and found no refund path after the fact.
Both platforms appear at similar price points on comparison tables. The difference that matters is what those price points buy you in terms of video output.
At roughly the same monthly price, HeyGen’s Creator plan gives you unlimited standard avatar video generation with no per-minute cap. Synthesia’s Starter plan gives you 10 minutes. For high-volume structured content production, HeyGen wins on pure volume economics at this price tier. For corporate enterprise requirements — SOC 2 Type II compliance, SSO, SCORM export, platform stability guarantees — Synthesia’s Enterprise plan is genuinely differentiated and worth the custom pricing conversation.
The decision is not “Synthesia vs HeyGen on $18–$29/month plans.” The honest version of that comparison is: for individual creators and small teams making regular videos, HeyGen Creator at $24/month produces more output for the money. For enterprise L&D teams who need compliance infrastructure, Synthesia Enterprise is the right tool regardless of HeyGen’s pricing. The mid-tier plans ($64/month Creator on Synthesia vs $29/month Creator on HeyGen) are where the comparison gets genuinely nuanced — Synthesia adds 30 minutes/month versus HeyGen’s unlimited Avatar III, but Synthesia’s avatar polish on longer content is more consistent.
The full HeyGen pricing breakdown — including the Premium Credits system that affects Avatar IV and translation costs — is in the HeyGen pricing guide if you’re comparing both platforms for the same use case.
If you’re still deciding whether Synthesia or HeyGen is the right tool for your use case, the HeyGen alternatives comparison maps each platform’s strengths to specific workflow types — including when Synthesia’s enterprise compliance posture is the decisive factor.
Synthesia’s free plan gives you three minutes of watermarked video and access to nine avatars. That’s not enough to make a real training video, but it’s enough to verify two things before paying: whether the avatar quality meets your standard, and whether your content category will pass moderation. For regulated industries, the moderation check is the more important of the two. For everyone else, the avatar quality check will tell you whether Synthesia’s output justifies the premium over alternatives. Then, when you subscribe, go directly to the plan that matches your actual monthly video volume — not the cheapest plan with the plan to upgrade later. The upgrade path costs time and frustration that the $46/month difference between Starter and Creator doesn’t compensate for.
Synthesia pricing verified April 2026: Starter $18/mo annual ($264/yr), 10 min/month, no rollover. Creator $64/mo annual ($804/yr), 30 min/month. Enterprise custom annual, unlimited. Studio Express avatar $1,000/year add-on. SCORM export and 1-click translation are Enterprise-only features.
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