HeyGen generates professional videos using AI avatars, voice cloning, and multilingual dubbing. You write a script, pick an avatar, and get a finished video — no filming required.
A restricted trial to test if HeyGen's avatars look natural enough for your brand.
Forever free
The true starting line for solo founders wanting watermark-free social content.
For high-output creators who need 4K resolution and more generation time.
Built for marketing agencies and teams; mathematically terrible for a solo founder.
HeyGen claims the $29 Creator plan offers 'Unlimited Videos'. This is highly misleading. Your production is strictly bound by your 600 'Premium Credits'. HeyGen's newest, highly realistic Avatar IV engine costs a massive 20 credits per minute. This means your 'unlimited' plan effectively hard-caps at exactly 30 minutes of high-quality Avatar IV video per month.
AI video generation requires iteration. If the avatar mispronounces a word, the lip-sync glitches, or you spot a typo in the script, you have to fix it and hit render again. HeyGen does not offer free rerenders. Every time you re-process the video, it charges you the full credit amount again. A simple 2-minute video could easily burn 120 credits (6 minutes worth) if it takes three tries to get it right.
Credits strictly do not roll over from month to month. If you are a solo founder who batches content—for example, filming all your ads in one week and then not logging in for a month—you will lose every single unused credit when your billing cycle resets. You are forced to produce consistently or waste your money.
This equates to about 35 minutes of your billable time. If you use it to generate just one or two talking-head YouTube Shorts or TikToks that you would have otherwise spent hours filming and editing, it pays for itself immediately [1.1.2].
This is 1 billable hour. You are paying a $20 premium purely to unlock 4K exports and get 400 extra credits. If you are just making TikToks (where 1080p is standard), stick to the Creator plan and save your money.
Do not buy this. At $149/mo base plus extra seat fees, you are paying for team collaboration features (like SSO and workspace comments) that a solo founder will never use.
| Tool | Starting Price | Description | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
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$29.00/monthly | VidAU generates ready-to-run video ads from a product URL, product images, or a script. | Read Review |
Yes. If you exhaust your monthly allocation, you can buy top-up 'Credit Packs' at $15 for 300 credits. This is often much cheaper than upgrading your entire base subscription to the $49 Pro tier.
No. HeyGen treats its API as a completely separate 'Pay-As-You-Go' product. You cannot use your $29 Creator plan credits to power API automations; you must load a separate wallet starting at $5 to fund API calls.
Avatar III is an older, slightly less realistic generation engine that only costs 3 credits per minute. Avatar IV and V are the ultra-realistic, highly expressive models, but they cost 20 credits per minute. You must do the math on quality vs. quantity before hitting 'Render'.
