Synthesia Pricing in 2026: What a Video Minute Actually Costs

Synthesia pricing runs from a free Basic plan to $89 a month, but the number that decides what you actually get is 120. That is how many credits one minute of finished video costs. Synthesia prints that rate in its help centre, and never on the page where you decide to pay.

I read the pricing page, the credit documentation, the terms, the refund policy and the changelog on 29 August 2026. Then I did the arithmetic the vendor leaves to you. Three of the results surprised me. The free plan and the $19 plan carry the same monthly allowance. The word “minute” on the pricing card stands for four different prices. And moving up a tier makes each minute cost more, not less.

Every figure below came off a live page on the date named. Prices in this category rot fast, so check them yourself before you buy.

What Synthesia actually sells you

Synthesia does not sell videos, and since August 2025 it has not sold minutes either. It sells credits. The help centre article “What are credits, and how do they work on self-serve plans?”, dated 29 July 2026, defines the unit in one line: “Each second of a video uses 2 credits. Ex: A one-minute video will consume 120 credits.”

That sentence is the most useful thing Synthesia has published about its own pricing, and it lives three clicks away from the pricing page, in the Account and Billing section that most people reach after they have already paid. The pricing page itself never prints the number 120. It prints minutes, and a credit balance, and leaves the exchange rate between them unstated.

The same article explains why the vendor bothered: “Credits are now the standard way to measure and track usage across all self-serve plans: Basic, Starter, and Creator.” One pool, spent on everything. Video generation, dubbing, AI images, API calls and the generative b-roll clips all draw from the same balance.

This is the same trick I found when I priced other AI subscriptions: the headline figure is honest, and the unit behind it is where the money moves. It showed up in Jasper AI pricing as words, and it shows up here as credits.

A minute costs four different prices

The pricing card sells one allowance: “10 minutes of video or AI Dubbing/month” on Starter. The help centre rate card prices those two things differently, and adds two more rates the card never mentions. A minute is not a unit here. It is a category with four prices in it.

Two things follow from that table.

Dubbing does work on material you already have: the comparison table lists “File Upload or YouTube Link” as a supported input on every paid tier. So the rates below apply to your existing library, not only to videos generated inside Synthesia.

The first thing that falls out is that “10 minutes of video or AI Dubbing” quietly means ten minutes of one and five of the other. Lip sync is the reason anyone dubs a corporate video in the first place, and the pricing page charges double for it while joining both to the same number with the word “or”. The card does say, in small type, that dubbing “Uses 2× credits when enabled”, so the fact is disclosed. The allowance headline still reads as if it isn’t.

The second is stranger. A minute generated through the API costs 75 credits. The same minute generated in the editor costs 120. That is 37.5 percent less for the identical output, drawn from the identical pool, because the pricing page states plainly that API usage is “deducted from the plan’s usage limits”. On a Starter plan, the API gets you 16 minutes a month where the product you are paying for gets you 10.

I have not seen another AI tool price its own interface at a premium over its own API. If you have developers and a use case that fits, the cheapest way to spend a Synthesia subscription is to not open Synthesia.

The free plan and the $19 plan give you the same amount of video

Basic costs nothing and includes 1,200 credits a month, good for 10 minutes of video and 25 AI-generated video assets. Starter on monthly billing costs $19 and includes 1,200 credits a month, good for 10 minutes of video and 25 AI-generated video assets. Those are not similar numbers. They are the same three numbers, printed on the same page, in the same units.

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The help centre confirms it in its own table: “Basic Plan, 1,200 credits per month, Only available monthly” sits directly above “Starter Plan, 1,200 credits per month, 14,500 credits per year.”

So $19 a month buys you no additional video at all. What it buys is the feature list: MP4 downloads, logo removal, AI Dubbing, 125 or more stock avatars, custom on-brand avatars, one editor and three guests, and chat support. Capacity does not move until Creator at $89.

Equal capacity is not equal output. Free video carries the Synthesia logo and cannot be downloaded as an MP4, so it lives inside the platform and leaves when you do. If the video has to go anywhere else, Basic cannot deliver it at any volume.

The page hides this behind a change of unit. Basic advertises minutes per month. The annual Starter card advertises minutes per year. Put both in the same unit and 10 minutes a month is 120 minutes a year, which is exactly what the $168 Starter plan lists.

I am not the first person to notice the cap. Arcade Software wrote it plainly in April 2026. A user “faces a forced choice: stay on the free plan with watermark and Synthesia logo, or jump to Starter at $29/month for logo removal but the same 10-minute cap.” Of the seven pages ranking when I checked, that was the only one that said so.

What the “25 video assets” number assumes

Every plan card prints a second allowance next to the minutes: 25 AI-generated video assets on Basic and Starter, 75 on Creator, 300 and 900 on the annual plans. Those assets come out of the same credit pool, and they do not have one price. They have four.

Divide 1,200 by 48 and you get 25, the number printed on the card. Divide 3,600 by 48 and you get 75. Divide 14,500 by 48 and you get 302, against the 300 advertised. Divide 44,000 by 48 and you get 916, against 900. The pattern holds on all four cards, which means every asset figure Synthesia advertises is calculated at the cheapest of the four models.

Pick Veo 3.1 with audio, which Synthesia also sells you, and the same budget produces six assets instead of 25. The card does not name the model its promise assumes. Nothing on the pricing page tells you the number moves at all.

Still images are cheaper and behave sanely: a FLUX.2 image costs 3 credits and is free on Enterprise, while Nanobanana 2 and OpenAI GPT Image 2 cost 9 each. At 3 credits, 1,200 credits is 400 images. At 192, it is six clips. Both numbers live under the same word.

Every plan, in dollars per minute

Once you know a minute costs 120 credits, you can price each plan properly, which is something no page publishing Synthesia pricing currently does. Take the plan cost for a period, divide by the credits it grants for that period, multiply by 120. Here is what that gives, using the prices live on 29 August 2026.

One warning before you use those figures. They are averages of a capped allowance, not a metered rate you can buy more of. Nothing here lets you spend $500 and receive 279 minutes.

Read the last column downward. Buying more capacity makes each minute more expensive. On monthly billing Creator costs $2.97 a minute against Starter’s $1.90, which is 56 percent more. On annual billing Creator is $1.93 against Starter’s $1.39, which is 39 percent more for the identical output.

Volume pricing normally runs the other way. Here the discount attaches to the commitment, not the size. Paying for a year cuts Creator by 34 percent and Starter by 26 percent, and the page advertises the larger figure in a banner reading “NEW LOWER PRICES” and “Save 34%”. Stepping up a tier buys you seats, avatars, API access and interactive video. It does not buy you cheaper minutes.

Arcade came closest, working out $2.90 a minute back when monthly Starter was $29, but it stopped at one tier and never drew the line to the others. Nobody in the ranking field calculated the annual figures, which is where the gap between tiers is widest. If you are comparing Synthesia against per-token AI costs, our AI pricing comparison has the same arithmetic run across the major models.

The same maths translates the credit rates into money. On an annual Starter plan a credit costs about $0.0116. A minute of video is $1.39. A minute through the API is $0.87. One Veo 3.1 asset with audio is $2.22, and a minute of dubbing with lip sync is $2.78. That last figure is the one to hold onto. Localising a five-minute onboarding video into one extra language, with lip sync, costs 1,200 credits. That is about $14, and it is an entire Starter month gone on one translation of one video.

What paying for a year actually adds

Annual billing is the one place where the discount is real and large. It is also where the capacity bonus is close to nothing.

Starter monthly grants 1,200 credits twelve times, which is 14,400 a year. Starter annual grants 14,500. That is 100 extra credits, or about 50 seconds of video, spread across twelve months. Creator monthly gives 43,200 a year against the annual plan’s 44,000, a bonus of 800 credits, or six minutes and forty seconds.

So the annual commitment is worth taking for the price cut and not for the allowance. What you are buying is a 26 percent discount on Starter and 34 percent on Creator, plus a year of not being able to leave. Whether that trade is good depends entirely on the cancellation terms, which are further down this page and are worse than you would guess.

What Enterprise actually unlocks

Enterprise is the only tier with no number attached, and Synthesia pricing gives you no way to estimate it. The comparison table does tell you which four things you are being sent to sales for. SCORM export, one-click translation into 80 or more languages, SAML and SSO, and unlimited video minutes. Brand kits, live collaboration and unlimited personal avatars come with them.

Two of those four decide most upgrades. If your videos have to land in an LMS and report completion, you need SCORM, and SCORM is not sold at any published price. If you produce in one language and publish in twelve, one-click translation is the feature you are actually buying, and it is behind the same wall. Everything else on Creator is a convenience by comparison.

“Unlimited video minutes” is also narrower than it reads. The credit pool does not disappear on Enterprise, it changes shape: the plan card says “CUSTOM CREDITS”, and the changelog spells out that Enterprise gets unlimited video creation with “no credits needed”, while dubbing, generative assets and bulk personalization still draw credits. So unlimited applies to the avatar minutes and not to the newer features layered on top of them. One small compensation runs the other way: FLUX.2 images are free on Enterprise and cost 3 credits everywhere else.

The table also sells “Priority content moderation time” to Enterprise, against “Regular content moderation time” for everyone else, and notes that moderation is applied to all Synthesia videos. Read carefully, that is a queue position rather than a different standard. Self-serve customers are in the same review process, further back. For a team publishing to a deadline, that is a real operational difference, and it is the sort of thing nobody thinks to ask about until a video is stuck.

The pricing page argues with itself, four times

All four of these were on synthesia.io/pricing in the same session.

1. The annual price. The plan card and the comparison table both say $14 a month billed yearly, and $59 for Creator, which works out to $168 and $708. The FAQ lower down the same page says Synthesia “costs $29 per month or $264 if you go with an annual plan”, and “$89/month or $804/year”. Both FAQ figures are stale, and the $264 is now higher than a full year billed monthly at $19, which is $228.
2. Personal avatars. The comparison table gives Starter three personal avatars and Creator five. The FAQ says “One custom personal avatar is included with the annual Starter and Creator plans.” The table is the more specific of the two and matches the plan cards, so treat three and five as the operative numbers, and confirm inside the account before you plan around them.
3. Who can buy a Studio avatar. The table shows “Paid add-on ($1,000/year)” under all three paid columns. Its own tooltip narrows it: the add-on is “for annual plan users only”, and the avatar “can take up to 10 days to process”. A customer on monthly billing reading that row cannot actually buy the thing.
4. Switching to annual. The FAQ says that to upgrade a Starter or Creator plan to annual you must “get in touch with customer support”. The help centre article on managing billing, updated in July 2026, describes the same move as self-service: “To move from monthly to annual billing, follow the steps in Upgrade your plan, and select an annual plan option when prompted.”

Four contradictions on one page is unusual even by the standards of this category, and I have read a lot of these pages. When I priced what QuillBot and Grammarly actually charge you, the disagreements were between the vendor and the checkout. Here they are between one part of the page and another.

Which is operative? The cards. Synthesia cut its prices in 2026, and the FAQ still carries the old ones. Back when Starter billed at $29 a month, $264 a year was a discount of about 24 percent, and $804 was the matching figure for Creator. Those two numbers are consistent with each other and with a lineup Synthesia no longer sells. The current cards, $168 and $708, are the newer generation. The FAQ was left so far behind that its Starter figure now beats paying month to month.

The price a chatbot reads is not the price on the card

A stale FAQ would be a small thing if it were only prose. It isn’t. Synthesia ships that FAQ as a FAQPage structured-data block on the same URL, which makes “$264” and “$804” the machine-readable price of the product.

You can watch it happen. On 29 August 2026 I asked a search engine “how much does synthesia cost” and got back, verbatim from the vendor’s own structured data: “For Starter plan users, Synthesia costs $29 per month or $264 if you go with an annual plan. For Creator plan users, Synthesia costs $89/month or $804/year.” Rephrased as “synthesia pricing 2026”, the same search returned “$18/month for Starter (38% off) and $64/month for Creator.”

Here is the catch. On that same day the live card said Starter was $14 a month billed yearly, not $18, and Creator was $59, not $64. Synthesia had just cut its prices, and neither the FAQ nor the search index had caught up. So the machines were serving three different Starter prices, $264, $18 and $29, and the one on the actual page, $14, was not among them.

Google’s structured data guidelines, last updated on 10 July 2026, address this directly. “Don’t mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page,” they say. The example they give is exact: “if the JSON-LD markup describes a performer, the HTML body must describe that same performer.” A second line is blunter still. “Don’t use structured data to deceive or mislead users.”

The enforcement is weaker than the rules sound, and that is the interesting part. Google says a structured data issue “can result in a manual action”. Then it defines the penalty: a page “loses eligibility for appearance as a rich result; it doesn’t affect how the page ranks in Google web search.”

So the worst case is losing a rich result that no longer exists. Google restricted FAQ rich results to government and health sites in August 2023, and stopped showing them in search entirely in May 2026. The markup is still parsed. Nothing pushes a vendor to correct a price that only machines read. A stale number can sit in structured data for months before anybody at the company notices.

I do not think this is deliberate. Somebody updated the cards and forgot the FAQ, the way somebody at every SaaS company forgets something. It is worth naming anyway. More purchase decisions now start with a question typed into an assistant than with a page opened in a browser, and the assistant is being handed a price that is $48 too high. For now, the version of Synthesia pricing that machines repeat is the one the company stopped charging.

What happens to credits you do not spend

Nothing good. The help centre is blunt: “No, credits for usage are reset at the start of the billing period and there is no accumulation of unused credit.” The pricing FAQ repeats it for minutes.

There is also no way to buy more. For self-serve plans, “you can’t top up mid-cycle if you run out, your options are to upgrade your plan or wait for your credits to renew at the start of the next billing period.” Enterprise customers can contact their success manager and buy credits. Everyone else upgrades or stops.

The customer terms settle what a credit is worth if you ever try to get value back out of one. Credits that accrue to an account “will expire following expiration or termination of the applicable Contract, will have no currency or exchange value, and will not be transferable or refundable.” You buy them with money. They do not convert back.

Upgrading has its own rule, and it is the opposite of what I found when I priced a competing tool’s credit system: “Your unused credits from your previous plan do not carry over when you upgrade. Your credit balance resets to your new plan’s full allocation.” So the upgrade wipes what you had and hands you a full new bucket. If you are going to hit the wall, hit it early in the month.

One quiet mercy: credits burn on generation, not on drafting. “Video minutes are only consumed when a video has been generated,” and edits are metered on changed seconds only, so fixing three seconds of a one-minute video costs six credits rather than 120.

What happens to your money and your videos if you leave

This is the section I would read first if I were about to click the annual button.

Refunds are close to non-existent. Synthesia’s refund and billing article, updated on 17 July 2026, says purchases are “non-cancelable and, except where the Contract expressly states otherwise, non-refundable”. A line later it drops the hedge. Purchases are “non-cancelable and non-refundable, even if the subscription wasn’t used.” Studio avatars are excluded once produced and deployed.

There are two narrow exceptions, and they are worth knowing because support will not volunteer them. If you were charged during a period when a confirmed technical fault kept you out of your account, the same article invites you to contact support for a review. And if you cancelled by accident, you have 48 hours to ask for that reversal. Outside those two, the money is spent.

The videos go too. “Once the billing period ends, you lose access to Synthesia and all videos in your account. Export any videos you want to keep before your billing period ends, since you won’t be able to access or download them afterward.”

Read those two together. You cannot get money back for a year you did not use, and if you stop paying, the training library you built goes dark. For a company that has put its onboarding, compliance and product videos into one platform, that is not a billing detail. That is a migration project with a deadline you set the day you cancel. Plan the export before you plan the cancellation.

There are no concessions anywhere else, either. The billing article says Synthesia “doesn’t offer general discounts, student discounts, or different pricing for non-profits or educational institutions.” I have priced a lot of these tools, and a flat refusal across all three categories is rare. Plans that vanish or change under paying customers are the more usual pattern, as happened with the Copilot pricing change and with the free plan Copy.ai withdrew.

The $1,000 avatar, and what else $1,000 a year buys

A Studio avatar, filmed properly rather than recorded on a webcam, is a paid add-on at $1,000 a year, available to annual customers only, taking up to 10 days to produce. It is the only thing you can consume on the platform that carries a dollar price rather than a credit cost, and it sits on top of whatever plan you already pay for.

One filmed avatar costs more than a full year of iSpring Suite, and 69 percent of an Articulate 360 Personal seat. It is almost six times the $168 annual Starter plan it attaches to.

That said, the number is not a Synthesia eccentricity. Colossyan charges exactly the same: its studio custom avatars, “filmed professionally using a green screen, are available as an add-on for $1000 per year.” Two vendors, one price. I have not priced a film crew against it, so treat that as a category rate rather than a verdict on whether filming a person yourself is cheaper.

The exchange rate has already moved twice

Synthesia announced credits on 18 August 2025, in a changelog headed “Introducing credits instead of minutes”. It set the rates, and reassured everyone about balances. “Nothing to do on you side: all minutes were automatically converted to credits based on your current balance.”

Compare that announcement with the help centre article of 29 July 2026 and you can see what a credit did in the eleven months between them.

The headline rate held. Everything around it moved, in both directions, and the plan price never changed. A credit is a currency whose exchange rate the seller sets per feature and has already reset twice, and the only rate advertised is the one that stayed still.

That is the practical risk of buying a year up front. You are fixing your price and leaving the vendor free to reprice the thing the price buys. It is the same exposure I described in how Jasper repriced its plans, except there the visible number moved and here it does not have to.

Whose face is it after you cancel

A personal avatar is a scan of a real person, usually an employee. Synthesia’s public position on this is that “consent requirements for avatars, and identity-based enforcement remain core” to how it handles impersonation. The contract assigns the actual work of getting that consent to you. The customer terms, effective 20 July 2026, require the customer to “ensure that when it authorizes the creation or use of a Custom Avatar using the voice or likeness of an individual, such individual is over the applicable statutory legal age and has provided free and informed consent.”

That distinction is worth holding. The vendor operates the check; the employer carries the liability. Synthesia verifies identity rather than consent, and says so: “The person in your submitted footage and consent video must be the same person. Submissions where the identity cannot be verified will be rejected.” Nothing in that process tests whether the person agreed freely, which is the part the law cares about. On deletion, an account terminated without a specific request has all associated “avatar, video, and voice data” removed “within 90 days of account termination.”

Whether any of that is legally sufficient depends on which state your employee sits in, and the three biggest biometric statutes answer differently.

The acceptable use policy adds one more line worth reading before you build a workflow on this: you may not use any output “as a sole or contributing basis for decisions concerning a person’s employment”. It also asks you to “Use the Services for your organization’s or company’s business needs, rather than for consumer, personal or household purposes”, which is a polite way of telling solo creators they are not the intended customer.

Who has to say the video was made by AI

Synthesia’s own site footer says its pages are “labeled in accordance with EU AI Act Article 50 requirements”. That covers Synthesia’s half. It does not cover yours.

Article 50 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 splits the duty in two. Paragraph 2 belongs to the provider. Systems “generating synthetic audio, image, video or text content, shall ensure that the outputs of the AI system are marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated.” That is Synthesia’s job, and its footer says it is doing it.

Paragraph 4 belongs to the deployer. That means you, the company publishing the video. Anyone deploying a system that generates content “constituting a deep fake, shall disclose that the content has been artificially generated or manipulated.” Nothing in the subscription does that for you.

Paragraph 1 is the one nobody talks about, and it bites hardest on the newest thing Synthesia sells. Providers must ensure that systems “intended to interact directly with natural persons” tell those people they are talking to an AI. Roleplay Sessions, sold on the same pricing page as conversational practice with an avatar that scores your answers, is exactly such a system.

The regulation applies from 2 August 2026. If you are an EU business making training videos with a synthetic presenter, the disclosure obligation is yours, not the vendor’s, and buying the plan does not buy compliance.

What the pages ranking above this one get wrong

I opened and measured the seven third-party pages ranking for Synthesia pricing on 29 August 2026, rather than trusting anyone’s summary of them.

None of the seven prints the credit-to-minute rate. Not one. Guidde comes closest and is the longest page in the field at 5,746 words, mentioning credits 25 times without ever pricing one. Layer3labs manages 1,673 words on Synthesia pricing without using the word credit at all. The field average is 3,071 words.

One page of the seven, Arcade, notices that the free and paid plans share a cap. One page, Knowlify, is still repeating the stale $264 and $804 from the vendor’s FAQ. And a Capterra result ranks for “synthesia pricing” from a URL whose product slug belongs to a different product entirely, which is where the persistent myth that the free plan gives three minutes appears to come from.

Five of the seven are published by companies selling adjacent software, which is not a scandal but is worth knowing. The field is held by competitors for a neighbouring budget rather than by reviewers. That pattern repeats across this category, and it is the same reason so many alternatives lists price products nobody sells any more.

Leonardo, the same trick in a different unit

Synthesia sells minutes measured in credits. Leonardo.Ai sells images measured in tokens, and the same distance between the word on the page and the thing you actually buy runs through all of it.

Its pricing page carries a toggle labelled “Pay Yearly, Up to 20% off”. I switched it and watched the numbers roll down for a full twenty seconds before settling: Essential from $12 to $10, Premium from $30 to $24, Ultimate from $60 to $48. That is 20 percent off the two top solo tiers and about 17 percent off Essential, so the “up to 20%” holds up. The gap between Leonardo and Synthesia is not the discount. It is the unit.

The free tier is more interesting, and worse. Leonardo grants 150 tokens a day against a Token Bank of 150, so the bank physically cannot hold more than a single day’s grant and nothing rolls over. Paid tiers get a bank of exactly three times their monthly allowance. Every price on the page is marked “ex. tax.”

The real cost of the free plan is not the tokens. Leonardo’s own commercial-use guidance, published in November 2025, says that “as a free user, the images and videos you generate are public, and, as between you and Leonardo.Ai, Leonardo.Ai owns the assets. Because they are public, other users can also see and use them.” Paid subscribers get the opposite: “you have full ownership of your assets.”

You can still sell what you make on the free plan. You just do not own it, and neither does anyone else who copies it. The paid feature here is not privacy, it is ownership, and $12 a month is the price of owning your own output. That is a different kind of hidden cost from the ones I found in AI music generators, where the meter is on output rather than rights.

Where the meter stops working

Every option above charges per unit of generated video. These do not, and they are where you go if the meter itself is the problem.

• Run it locally. SadTalker, Wav2Lip, LivePortrait, EchoMimic and Hallo are open-source talking-head and lip-sync models under permissive licences, and they cost electricity plus a graphics card with roughly 12 to 24 GB of VRAM. Wav2Lip is effectively unmaintained and shows artefacts around the mouth. None matches Synthesia for multi-avatar scenes or one-click rendering, and the face never leaves your machine.
• Build the pipeline. Pair a voice API with a hosted or open lip-sync model and you pay for compute rather than minutes. Synthesia’s own API sits oddly in this group, since it is the cheapest way to spend a Synthesia plan.
• Use what you already own. PowerPoint’s Cameo, Google Slides recording and Camtasia all produce a competent internal training video at zero incremental cost for a company that already licenses them. For a five-minute policy update, this is frequently the correct answer and nobody selling AI video will tell you so.
• Point a camera at a person. An avatar buys you translation, consistency and the ability to update a script without reshooting. If you are making one video, none of that is worth $1,000 for a filmed likeness.

Each of those costs something other than money: your own hardware, your own engineering time, or a worse-looking video. That is the honest trade, and it is the same one I set out when checking a single subscription tool against its own claims. The meter is a convenience you rent.

Among the direct competitors, the numbers are unflattering to Synthesia at the entry tier. At $29 a month, Elai.io gives 15 minutes against Synthesia’s 10 at $19. Colossyan’s free tier, confusingly also called Starter, gives 20 minutes a month, which is double what Synthesia’s paid Starter allows. Colossyan Professional costs $59 a month on annual billing. That is $708 a year for 360 minutes, the exact price of Synthesia Creator for the same 360 minutes, except Colossyan includes five SCORM exports a month where Synthesia locks SCORM behind a tier with no published price. Colossyan also lets Professional customers buy add-on minutes, which Synthesia self-serve does not.

The category Synthesia quietly moved into

Look at what the pricing page actually sells at the top tier: SCORM export, an academy, certifications, interactive quizzes, branching, and scored Roleplay Sessions. Those are not the features of a video generator. They are the features of a corporate learning authoring tool.

That matters for anyone comparing options, because the honest comparison set changes. Articulate 360 costs $1,449 a year for a personal seat and $1,749 on Teams. iSpring runs $720, $970 or $1,290 a year per author depending on the edition. Those are flat per-seat licences with no rendering meter, and they publish their enterprise prices, which Synthesia does not.

What Synthesia has that they do not is the avatar and 160-plus languages of voice. What they have that Synthesia does not is unlimited output for a known annual number. If your requirement is a hundred short localised clips, Synthesia wins on production. If you need complete transcription and timeline video editing rather than avatar generation, our breakdown of Descript pricing in 2026 shows how its credit allowances and media minutes compare. If it is a long branching compliance course that you will revise for three years, the authoring suite is cheaper and more predictable. Deciding which of those you are is more useful than comparing $19 against $59.

This is why Synthesia pricing is hard to compare against anything: the plans are priced like a media tool and the top tier is sold like an authoring suite. A vendor moving between categories while its price page stays put is a familiar pattern. It played out the same way when I mapped who owns what in the writing-tool market.

Who this is for, and who should not pay

• Stay on Basic if you need under 10 minutes a month and can live with the logo. The paid Starter plan gives you no more video, so the only question is whether downloads and logo removal are worth $168 a year to you.
• Take Starter annual if you need clean, downloadable, branded video under 120 minutes a year. At $1.39 a minute it is the cheapest minute Synthesia charges for, Basic aside.
• Take Creator for the seats, the five personal avatars, the API and interactive video. Do not take it expecting cheaper minutes, because it costs 17 percent more per minute than Starter.
• Talk to sales only if you need SCORM, one-click translation, SSO or unlimited minutes. Those four are the real Enterprise gate, and there is no published price behind it. Note what that means for volume: Creator stops at 30 minutes a month, self-serve plans cannot top up, so above 30 minutes there is no Synthesia product you can simply buy.
• Look elsewhere if you are a solo creator, since the acceptable use policy says the service is for business rather than personal use, or if you need more than about 30 minutes a month, where Colossyan and Elai currently give more video for the same money.

Whichever you pick, export your videos before the billing period ends. That instruction is the vendor’s, not mine. The same question applies to writing tools. I asked it in what a Grammarly subscription really buys, and the answer turned on the same kind of counter.

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