Synthesia Pricing in 2026: Every Plan, the Annual Minute Cap, and Who It Fits

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 paid video minutes are allocated per year, not per month: Starter includes 120 video minutes per year and Creator includes 360, which averages out to 10 and 30 minutes a month. Credits track the same math at roughly 120 credits per minute of finished video. 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.

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?

On the paid plans they are yearly. Starter's 120 video minutes and Creator's 360 are annual allocations, not monthly ones. Averaged out, that is 10 minutes a month on Starter and 30 minutes a month on Creator. Only the Basic plan is metered monthly, at 10 minutes per month. This is the number that decides whether Synthesia fits your workflow, and it is easy to read past.

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 internal metering unit, and they map almost exactly to video minutes at a rate of about 120 credits per minute. Basic's 1,200 credits cover its 10 monthly minutes. Starter's 14,500 credits cover roughly 120 minutes. Creator's 44,000 cover roughly 360. So in practice, credits and minutes tell you the same story.

That consistency is actually 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. Synthesia's ratio holds steady, which makes budgeting predictable. 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): 120 video minutes a year, 14,500 credits, one editor plus three guests, 125+ avatars. 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): 360 video minutes a year, 44,000 credits, one editor plus five guests, 180+ avatars. Adds 5 Personal Avatars (your own likeness), API access, multiple avatars in a single scene, interactive videos, and priority support. The API and personal avatars are the real reasons 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 annual minute cap is the constraint that decides it. A 30-second ad is half a minute, so Starter's 120 annual minutes is about 240 clips a year, and only if you spend zero minutes on anything else. 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.

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. For how the whole category prices, see the full AI UGC ad generator pricing guide.

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 personal avatars, and a custom quote for unlimited minutes. Translate the plan page before you buy: the paid minutes are annual, credits run about 120 per minute, 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 annual minute cap against your real creative refresh rate first.

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