Compiled by Amit KumarWhat is Synthesia?
Synthesia is an AI video platform from Synthesia Technologies, a London company. You write a script, pick a presenter, and it renders a video of that presenter saying your words.
There are three ways in: a stock avatar from Synthesia's library, a personal avatar trained on footage of you, or AI dubbing that re-voices a video you already have and re-times the lips to match.
It launched on Product Hunt on 17 September 2020 and finished #1 of the day, #1 of the week and #2 of the month. Its Expressive AI Avatars release took #1 of the day again on 3 May 2024. On Product Hunt it now carries a 3.9 rating from 24 reviews — the lowest score of the ten Product Hunt tools in this batch, and worth knowing before you commit to an annual plan.
Everything on this page comes from Synthesia's own pricing page and knowledge base, read on 24 September 2026, and from its Product Hunt listing.
Is Synthesia free?
Yes. The Basic plan costs nothing, needs no card, and gives 1,200 credits a month — 10 minutes of finished video.
Free videos carry a Synthesia watermark, and the avatar library is cut to 9 of the 240-odd Synthesia offers.
- Allowance: 1,200 credits a month. At Synthesia's published rate of 2 credits a second, that is exactly 10 minutes of video.
- Spend it how you like: the same 1,200 credits buy 10 minutes of video, 10 minutes of AI dubbing, or 25 AI-generated assets. Those are Synthesia's own conversions.
- Avatars: 9. No personal avatar.
- Seats: 1 editor, no guests.
- Languages: 160+, the same as the paid self-serve plans.
- Support: AI chat only.
Ten minutes a month is enough to judge whether the avatars clear your bar. It is not enough to run a channel, and the watermark rules out client work.
How much does Synthesia cost?
On 24 September 2026 Starter cost $29 a month, or $18 a month billed yearly. Creator cost $89 a month, or $64 a month billed yearly. Basic is $0 and Enterprise is quoted by sales.
| Plan | Monthly | Billed yearly | Credits | Video a month | Avatars and seats |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $0 | $0 | 1,200 a month | 10 minutes, watermarked | 9 avatars, 1 editor |
| Starter | $29 | $18 | 1,200 a month, or 14,500 a year | 10 minutes | 125+ avatars, 1 editor + 3 guests |
| Creator | $89 | $64 | 3,600 a month, or 44,000 a year | 30 minutes | 180+ avatars, 5 personal, 1 editor + 5 guests |
| Enterprise | Sales | Sales | Custom | Unlimited minutes | 240+ stock, unlimited personal |
Per finished minute, that is $2.90 on Starter monthly, $1.80 on Starter yearly, $2.97 on Creator monthly and $2.13 on Creator yearly (our arithmetic: plan price divided by the minutes the credits buy).
Read that row again, because it runs against the usual pattern. On most tools the bigger plan lowers the unit price. On Synthesia it raises it: Creator costs more per minute than Starter on both billing terms. Moving up buys avatars, personal avatars and guest seats — not cheaper video.
The thing the pricing page does not spell out
Synthesia's knowledge base allocates Starter 1,200 credits a month on monthly billing — the identical allowance to the free Basic plan.
The pricing page quotes Starter as "14,500 credits/year", which reads like a bigger number than Basic's "1,200 credits/month". Annualised, Basic is 14,400. The two are within 100 credits of each other, or under a minute of video.
So on Starter you are not buying more video than the free plan gives you. You are buying the removal of the watermark, 125+ avatars instead of 9, and three guest seats. Those may well be worth $18 a month. Just go in knowing that is the trade, because the plan table does not present it that way.
How do Synthesia credits work?
Every second of video costs 2 credits, so a one-minute video costs 120 credits. Other features bill at their own rates.
From Synthesia's knowledge base, checked 24 September 2026:
| What you are doing | Credits |
|---|---|
| Video generation | 2 a second (120 a minute) |
| AI dubbing with lip sync | 50 a minute |
| AI dubbing without lip sync | 25 a minute |
| Bulk personalization | 90 a minute |
| API | 75 a minute |
| Interactive Avatar API | 10 a minute |
| Avatar Builder | 14 an avatar |
| AI images | 3 to 9 each, by model |
| Video assets | 18 to 192, by model |
Credits do not roll over. Synthesia's wording: "credits for usage are reset at the start of the billing period and there is no accumulation of unused credit."
Two consequences worth planning around. Dubbing is much cheaper than generating — re-voicing a minute of existing footage without lip sync costs a fifth of generating a minute from a script, so if you already have video, dubbing stretches the same plan a long way. And because nothing accumulates, a month you skip is a month you paid for and lost.
Upgrading mid-cycle does not bank what you had, either: Synthesia says unused credits from the previous plan do not carry over, and the balance resets to the new plan's full amount.
How does Synthesia work?
You give it source material, pick a presenter, and it renders. In Synthesia's own words, you can generate a video "from a script, PowerPoint, document, link, or prompt — combining AI avatars, voices, motion graphics, and generated media."
That list matters more than it looks. Most of the work in corporate video is not writing a script from nothing, it is turning something that already exists — a deck, a policy PDF, a help page — into something watchable. Synthesia takes all four as a starting point, which is why it lands with training teams rather than with video editors.
The three kinds of presenter
- Stock avatars. 240+ of them at the top of the range, 9 on the free plan, 125+ on Starter, 180+ on Creator. No setup; pick one and type.
- Custom avatars, which Synthesia calls "a digital twin of yourself". Five are included on Creator and they are unlimited on Enterprise. The Avatar Builder route bills 14 credits an avatar.
- AI-generated avatars, presenters that do not correspond to a real person.
Once a video exists you can re-brand it, add interactivity, and export — or push the same script through AI dubbing to produce the other language versions.
What Synthesia says about consent and safety
Synthesia describes its controls as "consent-based avatars, content moderation, and a public red-team test conducted with Humane Intelligence and NIST". Consent-based means you cannot make an avatar of someone who has not agreed to it, which is the relevant guardrail when the product is synthetic presenters.
That is Synthesia's own description of its process, not an independent audit finding. If your organisation needs an assurance report rather than a policy statement, that is an Enterprise conversation.
Synthesia vs HeyGen
They solve the same problem and split on scope: Synthesia is built around corporate training and internal comms, HeyGen around marketing, social and translation volume.
The difference shows up in the free tiers. Synthesia gives 10 watermarked minutes a month with no cap on the number of videos. HeyGen gives up to three watermarked videos a month, each capped at one minute, and its terms restrict free output to personal, non-commercial evaluation.
It also shows up at the bottom of the paid range. Synthesia's cheapest paid plan is $18 a month billed yearly for 10 minutes; HeyGen's starts at $24 billed yearly and runs on a credit pool you can spend on higher-end avatar engines. If your work is a handful of polished training modules, Synthesia's structure fits. If it is many short pieces, or translating a back catalogue, HeyGen's does.
One caution on both: neither publishes a straightforward price per minute, and both sell the plan rather than the output. Work out what a finished minute costs you before you sign an annual term.
Who Synthesia suits, and who it does not
It suits an L&D or internal-comms team that turns documents into video on a schedule, needs 160+ languages from one script, and cares more about consistency and approvals than about cinematic quality. The guest seats on Starter and Creator exist precisely so a subject-matter expert can review without a paid seat.
It does not suit anyone who needs a lot of finished video cheaply. At $1.80 to $2.97 a minute, an hour of output costs between roughly $108 and $178 by our arithmetic, before anyone edits anything. Nor does it suit work where the presenter has to carry real emotion; a synthetic presenter reading a script is what it is, and no plan changes that.
And if you are weighing the annual term, weigh the Product Hunt score with it. A 3.9 from 24 reviews is the softest reception in this batch, against 5.0 from 315 for Fathom and 4.9 from 160 for Raycast.
What to use instead of Synthesia, and for which job
HeyGen — for marketing volume and translation. Its credits can be spent across higher-end avatar engines, and it is shaped for many short pieces rather than a few long modules. Its free plan is tighter: up to three one-minute watermarked videos a month, restricted to non-commercial evaluation.
Descript — when a real person is on camera. If the presenter is you rather than a synthetic avatar, Descript edits video by editing the transcript, which is a different and often better answer to the same problem.
Vozo AI — for lip-synced translation specifically. If dubbing existing footage is the whole job and you do not need avatar generation at all, a dedicated tool avoids paying for the generation side.
Stay on the free plan if you publish under ten minutes a month and can live with the watermark. It is the same credit allowance Starter gets.
Sources
Every figure on this page was read from the pages below on 24 September 2026.
- Synthesia pricing — plan prices, credit allowances, avatar counts, seats and the 140+ / 160+ language discrepancy
- Synthesia knowledge base: credits on self-serve plans — the 2-credits-a-second rate, per-feature rates, the no-rollover rule and the per-plan monthly allocations
- Synthesia knowledge base: what is Synthesia — supported inputs, avatar types, the watermark on the Basic plan, and the consent and red-team statement
- Synthesia on Product Hunt — launch date, daily/weekly/monthly rankings, rating and review count
