TopView AI vs HeyGen vs AdsGen: pricing, credits and cost per video ad

This is the most consequential thing on either pricing page, it is not hidden, and almost nobody reads it correctly the first time.

Scan TopView's cards left to right and the credit numbers read 960, 3,000, 500, 500. The obvious conclusion is that Ultra is the small plan and Business is six times bigger. Now read the line under each number. Pro says "960 credits / year". Business says "3,000 credits / year". Ultra says "500 credits / month". Team says "500 credits / seat / mo".

Converted to a single unit, the ladder inverts completely. Pro gives you 80 credits a month. Business gives you 250. Ultra gives you 500, which is six and a quarter times Pro rather than half of it. Team gives you 500 per seat, so a two seat Team account is 1,000 a month.

The arithmetic confirms it rather than contradicting it. Pro is $16 a month billed annually, so $192 for 960 credits, which is 20.0 cents a credit. Business is $44, so $528 for 3,000, which is 17.6 cents. Ultra is $50, so $600 for 6,000 credits over the year, which is 10.0 cents. Team is $56 a seat, so $672 for 6,000, which is 11.2 cents. The ladder gets cheaper per credit as you climb, exactly as a ladder should, and TopView's own "Cheapest credits for creators" label on Ultra is true. It is only the headline number that misleads.

We have now found this per year against per month unit switch on two unrelated vendors in this category. Whenever a plan card gives you a big allowance next to a small monthly price, read the denominator before the numerator.

HeyGen's pricing page says only that credit usage "can vary based on which AI model is used, video duration, and the complexity of the generation". That reads like a refusal. It is not. The complete table sits in HeyGen's help centre, in an article called How to Use Credits on HeyGen, and it prices every feature the platform sells.

The avatar rates are the ones that matter for advertising, and they split by model and by look type. Avatar III with a video look is 4 credits a minute and with a photo look 7. Avatar IV, the model most people mean when they say HeyGen looks real, is 16 credits a minute with a photo look and 31 with a video look. Avatar V is 48 either way. Custom Expressive Motion adds another 40 credits a minute on top and only works with Avatar IV.

Generated footage is priced differently again, and flatly: a Seedance2 clip is 60 credits at 720p and 150 at 1080p "regardless of length", and a Veo3 clip is 90 credits "per any length". Video translation is 6 credits a minute in speed mode, 10 in precision mode and 4 with no lip sync. An image asset is 2 credits. Training a custom AI model is 60. Upscaling costs 1 credit a second at 1080p and 2 at 4K.

If you are budgeting for HeyGen, that article is the document you need and the pricing page will not send you to it. The technique generalises: when a vendor's pricing page tells you the rate varies, the rate is usually written down in its support docs.

Put the rate card against the plan prices and the number falls out cleanly.

A 30 second ad on Avatar IV with a video look is half of 31 credits, so 15.5. Creator is $29 for 600 credits, which is 4.833 cents a credit, so that ad costs 74.9 cents and the plan carries 38 of them a month. Pay annually at $24 and the same ad is 62 cents. Pro at $49 for 1,000 credits is 4.90 cents a credit, so 76 cents an ad and 64 ads a month. Business at $149 for 1,500 credits is 9.93 cents, so $1.54 an ad.

Drop to Avatar IV with a photo look and it is 8 credits, or 38.7 cents on Creator, with 75 ads in the plan. Drop again to Avatar III with a video look and it is 2 credits, under 10 cents, with 300 ads in the plan. Climb to Avatar V and it is 24 credits, $1.16, with 25 ads. That is a twelve-fold spread inside one subscription, set by two dropdowns.

TopView has no equivalent number, because TopView does not sell avatar minutes. It sells generated footage. Its Team card prints one finished price, "Seedance 2.5 -20% : 720P $3.60/30s", and its plan comparison table benchmarks the same unit. So the honest comparison is not talking ad against talking ad. It is that HeyGen will sell you a spokesperson reading your script for well under a dollar, and TopView will not sell you one at all.

Both vendors resell the Seedance video family, which makes it the only genuinely like for like line on either page, and the result is not the one TopView's marketing implies.

TopView prints $3.60 for a 30 second Seedance 2.5 clip at 720p, and that figure already has a limited time 20 percent discount applied. HeyGen charges 60 credits for a Seedance2 clip at 720p. On Creator at 4.833 cents a credit that is $2.90, and on Creator billed annually it is $2.40. HeyGen is the cheaper of the two on the model TopView chose to advertise itself with.

The structural difference is larger than the price gap. HeyGen's 60 credits buy that clip "regardless of length". TopView bills by the second. At 30 seconds the gap is 70 cents. At 60 seconds HeyGen is still $2.90 and TopView has charged you for the second thirty seconds as well. At 1080p the ranking flips back, because HeyGen's 1080p Seedance2 rate is 150 credits, or $7.25 on Creator.

Two caveats, stated plainly. TopView names version 2.5 and HeyGen names Seedance2 without a point release, so these may not be identical model builds. And TopView's $3.60 carries a countdown timer, so it is a promotional figure rather than a list price. Neither caveat changes the shape: one vendor bills the clip, the other bills the seconds.

This is the strangest number we have found on either page, and it is verifiable in one division.

Business is $149 a month for 1,500 credits. That is 9.93 cents a credit. When a Business account runs out, HeyGen's own help centre says additional credits "cost $0.05 per credit" and are sold "in blocks of 100 credits for $5". Five cents.

So on the Business plan the credits you buy after you run out cost roughly half what the credits in your subscription cost. The marginal credit is cheaper than the average one. Everywhere else in this category the relationship runs the other way, and by some distance: Predis charges 2.42 cents for top-up credits against 1.23 in its Rise plan, nearly double.

The practical read is uncomfortable for the Business tier. If what you need is credits rather than SAML, SCORM, LMS integrations, five custom digital twins and workspace collaboration, Business is the worst per credit deal HeyGen sells, and a Pro tier plus nothing beats it. Pro at $49 buys 1,000 credits at 4.90 cents, and Pro scales all the way to 100,000 credits at $4,300, which is 4.30 cents. Business exists for the governance features, not for the allowance, and the top-up price says so out loud.

Credit permanence is the least discussed line item in AI video pricing and it decides how much of what you buy you actually use, because advertising output is lumpy. You make nothing for three weeks and then twelve variants the day before a launch.

HeyGen rolls credits over, and states the rules exactly: "Monthly subscribers' unused credits roll over for one more month. Annual subscribers' credits accumulate until their annual renewal date." So an annual HeyGen subscriber who generates nothing in January has 1,200 credits in February. There is one hard stop: "Credits do not carry over after cancellation."

TopView does not roll over. The line under its plan table is unambiguous, "Credits reset at the beginning of each billing cycle", and the Ultra card repeats it on the credit figure itself with the words "Expire monthly".

But TopView does something HeyGen does not, and on its two cheapest plans it is genuinely better. Pro and Business both say "All credits upfront". Buy Pro annually and all 960 credits are in your account on day one, spendable in the first week if you want them. HeyGen's annual subscriber gets 600 a month and has to wait eleven months to have the same total available. So if your year is one big launch and eleven quiet months, TopView Pro is built for you and TopView Ultra, the plan the page badges BEST VALUE, is the worst plan on the page for you because it is the only one whose credits expire every 30 days.

Read the feature lists at the bottom of each TopView card and there is an inversion that is easy to miss because it is a single word longer on two cards than the others.

Pro says "Access to API". Business says "Access to API". Ultra says "API access (not with plan credits)", prefixed with a minus sign. Team says the same. So the $16 plan can spend its credits programmatically and the $50 plan cannot.

That is not necessarily unfair, because Ultra and Team are sold on unlimited generation windows rather than on credits, and an unlimited window is exactly the thing a vendor cannot expose to an API without losing money. It is the same fence Higgsfield puts around its unlimited models, which do not work through MCP or CLI. But it does mean a buyer who upgrades from Pro to Ultra for more credits will find their integration stops working, which is a bad afternoon.

HeyGen handles this differently and, on balance, better. API access is priced on a separate page, so it is not confused with subscription credits at all. Separately, HeyGen now lets its HubSpot, Clay, Zapier, Make and n8n integrations spend ordinary plan credits: "you do not need API credits", and a Studio video made through an integration with an Avatar IV photo look costs the same 16 credits a minute it costs in the app. For most marketing automation that removes the need for the API entirely.

Unlimited is the word TopView leads with, and it deserves a careful reading rather than a cynical one, because unusually the unlimited here is genuine. It is just fenced by three things at once: model, resolution and calendar.

On Ultra and Team the headline is a 60 day unlimited window covering Seedance 2.5 and Seedance 2.0 at 720p, with Seedance 2.5 further capped at 30 seconds a clip. Sitting behind it is a 365 day unlimited window on Seedance 2.0 Mini, Seedance 2.0 Fast, Wan 3.0 at 720p, MiniMax H3 at 768p and GPT Image 2 at 1K. Pro gets a different set: 365 days on Nano Banana 2, Nano Banana Pro and Seedream 5.0. Business adds a 7 day window on Kling 2.6, Kling O1 Video Edit, Kling Motion Control and Seedance 1.0 Pro Fast.

For a vertical ad at 720p and 30 seconds, which is the standard spec for Meta and TikTok, the Ultra window is a real match rather than a technicality. Inside those 60 days a 30 second 720p Seedance 2.5 ad costs no credits at all, which makes Ultra the cheapest way to run a high volume creative test in this comparison by a distance. After day 60 you are back to 500 credits a month at 10 cents each.

HeyGen has no equivalent. Every feature, avatar or generated clip or translation, draws on the same balance, all the time. That is less exciting and much easier to forecast, which is the trade in one sentence.

Lay the two feature lists side by side and the overlap is close to zero, which is the clearest sign that these are adjacent products rather than direct competitors.

HeyGen's compare table is dominated by things a marketing department needs to govern video: SAML and SSO, SCIM user provisioning, multi factor authentication, audit logs, password protected URLs, granular content access controls, role controls, video draft collaboration, and an entire Learning and Development block covering interactive quizzes, video branching, link embedding and SCORM export for LMS platforms. Then 175 languages and dialects, 700 stock video avatars, voice cloning and custom digital twins.

TopView's cards are dominated by generation capacity: concurrent task counts of 4, 8, 12 and 30, ten unlimited and free generation models, MCP access, a 59 percent off extra credit pack, real time co-editing of canvas and storyline, a shared asset library and Brand Kit, and credit usage controls for a team. Its Business plan describes itself as "Made for films, short series and bulk creation".

Nothing in HeyGen's table is about which model rendered the footage. Nothing in TopView's is about a spokesperson, a language, or governance. If the deliverable is a person credibly recommending your product, HeyGen is the tool and TopView cannot do it. If the deliverable is a large volume of generated scenes, TopView is the tool and HeyGen will charge you 60 to 150 credits a clip for it.

Choose HeyGen if you want a spokesperson ad and a unit cost you can defend in a budget meeting. Creator at $29 is the strongest entry point in this comparison: 600 credits, 38 talking ads a month at Avatar IV video look quality, 75 cents each, rollover into the following month, watermark removal, 175 languages and a 30 minute duration cap. Pay annually and it is $24 and 62 cents an ad. Skip Business unless you actually need SSO, SCORM or five digital twins, because its credits cost twice what Pro's do and twice what its own top-ups do.

Choose TopView if you generate footage rather than spokespeople, and choose the plan that matches your rhythm rather than the one wearing the badge. Ultra at $50 is the right answer for a high volume creative test, because a 30 second 720p Seedance 2.5 ad costs nothing inside its 60 day window and 10 cents a credit after it. Pro at $16 is the right answer for a single launch, because all 960 credits land on day one and Ultra's expire every month. Do not buy Ultra or Team if you need the API to spend your plan credits, because those two plans specifically cannot.

Choose AdsGen if the thing you actually want is ads rather than footage or avatars. Paste a product URL and you get back a batch of vertical, captioned, creator style ads with the angle and the hook already written, counted in finished ads rather than credits, so the cost per creative is known before you subscribe and no model dropdown, unlimited window or expiry date can move it.