Synthesia Pricing in 2026 With Plans and Minute Caps

Synthesia pricing in 2026 runs across four tiers: Basic at $0, Starter at $29/mo (or $18/mo billed yearly), Creator at $89/mo (or $64/mo billed yearly), and a custom-quoted Enterprise plan. The detail most buyers miss is that the allowance depends on how you bill: monthly plans get 10 minutes (Starter) or 30 minutes (Creator) each month, while annual plans get the year up front as a pool of 120 or 360 minutes. Synthesia now also shows the allowance in credits, 1,200 a month on Starter and 3,600 on Creator, and the same credits pay for AI dubbing and generated video assets. Synthesia is a strong buy for corporate training, localization, and internal comms, and a tighter fit than it looks for high-volume paid social testing. Prices below were checked on synthesia.io/pricing in July 2026 and re-checked on 29 September 2026, unchanged. One rule matters more than price for advertisers: Synthesia's Acceptable Use Policy bars stock avatars from paid social ads without written consent.

Synthesia is one of the most established AI video platforms, built around avatars reading a script in a clean, corporate-looking scene. It sells itself to L&D teams, enterprise comms, and anyone who needs the same explainer in 12 languages. That focus shows up in how it prices. Read the plan page quickly and you will misjudge your capacity by a factor of twelve, so it is worth walking the numbers.

How much does Synthesia cost?

Synthesia costs $0 for Basic, $29 a month for Starter ($18 a month if you pay yearly), and $89 a month for Creator ($64 a month billed yearly). Enterprise is custom-quoted with unlimited video minutes. Paying annually saves about 38% on Starter and 28% on Creator, which is the single biggest lever on your bill.

Avatar access scales with the tier too: 9 AI avatars on Basic, 125+ on Starter, 180+ on Creator, and 240+ on Enterprise.

Are Synthesia's video minutes monthly or yearly?

It depends on the billing cycle. On monthly billing, Starter gives 10 video minutes a month and Creator 30, allocated each month. On annual billing, the year arrives as one pool: 120 minutes on Starter and 360 on Creator, which you can spend in a single busy quarter. The Basic plan is metered monthly at 10 minutes. The annual pool is the better deal for campaign work that comes in bursts, and it is the number that decides whether Synthesia fits your workflow.

Do the cost-per-minute math and the tiers get clearer. Starter at $29 a month is $348 a year for 120 minutes, so $2.90 per finished minute. Billed yearly at $18 a month, it is $216 for the same 120 minutes, or $1.80 a minute. Creator at $89 a month is $1,068 a year for 360 minutes, about $2.97 a minute, dropping to roughly $2.13 a minute on the annual rate. Those are reasonable rates for polished, multilingual avatar video. They are expensive rates if what you need is forty rough variations of a 20-second hook.

Is Synthesia free?

Yes, there is a genuinely free Basic plan: $0 a month, 10 video minutes per month, 1,200 credits, one editor seat, nine ready-made avatars, and no credit card required. It is a real evaluation tier rather than a three-video teaser. The catch is that Basic keeps the Synthesia logo on your videos and does not allow downloads, so it is for testing the product, not shipping work.

There is a quietly interesting comparison here. Basic's 10 minutes a month works out to 120 minutes a year, which is exactly Starter's annual allocation. Upgrading from Basic to Starter does not buy you more video minutes at all. It buys you the ability to download files, the removal of the Synthesia logo, 125+ avatars instead of 9, AI Dubbing, the AI Video Assistant, and three guest seats. Worth knowing before you assume $29 a month multiplies your output.

What are Synthesia credits and how do they work?

Credits are Synthesia's metering unit, and for avatar video they map to minutes at 120 credits a minute. The pricing page, re-checked on 29 September 2026, prints both: Starter is 1,200 credits a month on monthly billing or 14,500 a year on annual, and Creator is 3,600 a month or 44,000 a year. The annual figures carry about 100 and 800 credits more than twelve monthly allowances.

What changed is that the same credits now pay for other jobs. Synthesia states that 1,200 credits cover up to 10 minutes of avatar video, or 48 minutes of AI dubbing, or 25 AI-generated video assets. So dubbing costs 25 credits a minute and a generated asset about 48 credits. Every minute of dubbing or every generated B-roll clip comes out of the same pool as your avatar minutes.

For avatar video the ratio still holds steady, which is a point in Synthesia's favor. On some competing platforms, credit burn changes depending on which avatar engine you pick, so a plan's real capacity swings wildly based on quality settings. At Synthesia the variable is only how much dubbing and generated footage you mix in. If you know you need 200 minutes of finished video a year, you know you need Creator, and you can sign the PO without a spreadsheet.

What do you get on each Synthesia plan?

Basic ($0): 10 video minutes a month, 1,200 credits, one editor, nine ready-made avatars, no credit card. Videos carry the Synthesia logo and cannot be downloaded.

Starter ($29/mo, $18/mo yearly): 10 video minutes and 1,200 credits a month, or 120 minutes and 14,500 credits a year on annual billing, one editor plus three guests, 125+ avatars, and 3 Personal Avatars (your own likeness). Adds video downloads, the AI Video Assistant, AI Dubbing, and removes the Synthesia logo. This is the smallest plan you can actually publish from.

Creator ($89/mo, $64/mo yearly): 30 video minutes and 3,600 credits a month, or 360 minutes and 44,000 credits a year on annual billing, one editor plus five guests, 180+ avatars. Raises Personal Avatars from 3 to 5 and adds API access, multiple avatars in a single scene, interactive videos, and priority support. API access is Creator and above, and it is the real reason to move up.

Enterprise (custom): Unlimited video minutes, 240+ avatars, unlimited personal avatars, SAML/SSO, live collaboration, Brand Kits, SCORM export for LMS platforms, and a dedicated customer success manager. SCORM export alone tells you who this tier is designed for.

What is Synthesia genuinely best for?

Corporate training, L&D, onboarding, compliance video, product documentation, and localization. That is not a backhanded compliment, it is the job Synthesia does better than almost anything else. If you need one course module delivered in English, German, Japanese, and Spanish with a consistent presenter and an LMS-compatible export, Synthesia will save you a video agency's worth of budget and weeks of scheduling. The Enterprise feature set (SCORM, SSO, Brand Kits, unlimited minutes) is aimed squarely at that buyer, and it earns its quote.

It also handles the one-video-many-places problem reasonably well. Teams often produce a single master explainer and then need it as a LinkedIn post, a Shorts clip, a newsletter embed, and a help-center video, and once the master exists you can reshape it for every channel without booking another recording session.

Is Synthesia worth it for video ads?

For paid social ad testing specifically, the minute cap is the constraint that decides it. A 30-second ad is half a minute, so Starter's 10 minutes a month is about 20 clips, and only if you spend no credits on dubbing or generated footage. Creator's 360 minutes is roughly 720 thirty-second clips a year. On paper that sounds like plenty. In practice, ad testing burns through renders on rejected hooks, and 240 clips across twelve months is about 20 a month.

The bigger question is format. Creative fatigue on Meta and TikTok means you are refreshing constantly, and the ads that survive are creator-style: a written hook in the first two seconds, a specific angle, burned-in captions, native 9:16 framing, and a face that reads as a real person rather than a presenter. Synthesia gives you a clean avatar reading your script. You still write the hook, choose the angle, cut the vertical, and add the captions. That is the gap between a video tool and an ad tool, and it is why the creator-style format tends to win on a paid-social feed. The evidence on whether the AI version actually performs is collected in do AI UGC ads work.

If ads are the actual job, it is worth comparing tools built around the ad workflow. Our Synthesia alternative comparison covers where each option fits, and the roundup of the best AI UGC ad generators lines the field up on price and output quality. HeyGen is the closest like-for-like on the avatar side, and its tiers are broken down in our HeyGen pricing guide. The two platforms start at the same $29 but meter you completely differently, monthly credits against annual minutes, which we put side by side in HeyGen vs Synthesia. For how the whole category prices, see the full AI UGC ad generator pricing guide.

Can you use Synthesia stock avatars in paid ads?

Not on a self-serve plan without permission, and this matters more to an advertiser than any line on the pricing page. Synthesia's Acceptable Use Policy lists as prohibited "Incorporating a Stock Avatar in content for 'promoted', 'boosted', or 'paid' advertising on any social media platform or similar media, absent written express consent from Synthesia". Endorsement-style use of stock avatars, where the avatar appears to vouch for your product, is allowed only on Enterprise. So a Starter or Creator subscriber who boosts a Synthesia video on Meta or runs it as a TikTok ad with one of the 125+ stock presenters is outside the policy unless Synthesia has agreed in writing. Custom avatars of a real person who has consented, such as your founder or a hired presenter, are allowed, which is the workable route for ads on the lower tiers.

Two contract points belong next to that. Under Synthesia's Customer Terms (effective 20 July 2026), fees are non-refundable, and a renewal you forgot to cancel is not refunded either, so an annual plan bought for an ad campaign that the policy then rules out is money you will not get back. Contracts with US customers are governed by California law. We go through the policy, the terms and what users report in our Synthesia review.

The bottom line on Synthesia pricing

Synthesia costs $0 to evaluate, $18 to $29 a month for a publishable single-user plan, $64 to $89 a month for API access and more personal avatars, and a custom quote for unlimited minutes. Translate the plan page before you buy: monthly plans get 10 or 30 minutes a month, annual plans get the year as one pool, credits run 120 per avatar minute and also pay for dubbing, and Starter's 120 minutes a year is the same total the free Basic plan gives you across twelve months. For training, localization, and internal comms, it is one of the safest AI video purchases you can make. For a high-volume paid social testing program, price the minute cap against your real creative refresh rate first, and remember that stock avatars cannot run as paid social ads without Synthesia's written consent.

These figures were checked on Synthesia's pricing page in July 2026 and re-checked on 29 September 2026. AI video tools reprice and restructure their tiers often, so confirm the current numbers before you commit to an annual contract.

If you are cross-shopping, the same treatment applied to neighbouring tools is in our breakdowns of Captions AI pricing and Higgsfield pricing, and the closest head-to-head to this one is HeyGen vs Synthesia.