Synthesia Pricing 2026: Credits, Not Minutes

Vorec Team · 2026-09-18 · 9 min read

Synthesia does not sell you video minutes. On its self-serve plans it sells credits, and every output you might want draws from the same pool — so the "10 minutes of video" on a plan card is not ten minutes plus the dubbing plus the AI assets. It is ten minutes or the dubbing or the assets.

Getting that wrong is the difference between a plan that covers your year and one that runs dry in March.

Everything below was verified on Synthesia's pricing page with both billing states selected, and against Synthesia's own credits documentation, on 18 September 2026. Plans change; check before you buy.

The Short Version

Annual works out at roughly $216/year for Starter and $768/year for Creator, derived from the displayed monthly-equivalent rather than a checkout total.

Seats are worth reading carefully: these are one-editor packages. Starter includes 1 editor plus 3 guests, Creator 1 editor plus 5 guests. Guests are not editors, and no per-seat multiplier is published for self-serve.

Synthesia's own pricing FAQ contradicts its pricing cards. The cards sit under a "New lower prices" banner showing $18 and $64 a month on annual billing, while the FAQ further down the same page still quotes $264 and $804 a year — the older $22 and $67 equivalents. We could not find a dated announcement establishing when the lower prices took effect, so we are not giving one. Price against the cards, and confirm at checkout.

One Pool, Several Ways To Empty It

This is the part that matters, and Synthesia states it plainly if you read the "or":

Every one of those is an alternative, not an addition. Spend the pool on dubbing and the video minutes are gone.

The underlying rate, per Synthesia's credits documentation: a standard video costs 2 credits per second — 120 credits a minute. Note that the advertised maxima do not divide exactly (Creator's 44,000 annual credits at 120/minute is 366.7 minutes against an advertised 360), so treat the plan figures as Synthesia publishes them rather than recomputing them.

Dubbing is much cheaper per minute than video, which is why the dubbing row looks so generous: 25 credits/minute without lip sync and 50 with, on paid self-serve. On Basic it is 120 and 240.

Other rates worth knowing before you plan a budget: API video 75 credits/minute, bulk personalization 90, interactive avatar API 10. Generated assets vary enormously by model — Gemini Omni 48 per asset, Veo 3.1 Fast 48 silent or 60 with audio, Veo 3.1 itself 96 or 192. Images cost credits too (FLUX.2 at 3, Nanobanana at 2, GPT Image 2 at 9), and building an avatar costs 14. "25 assets" does not apply to every model.

What A Minute Actually Costs

If you spent an entire plan's pool on standard video and nothing else:

Two things this table is not. It is allocation arithmetic, not a pay-as-you-go rate — you cannot buy a single minute at $1.80. And it shows that moving up does not buy a cheaper minute: Creator is slightly more per minute than Starter on both billing cycles. You upgrade to Creator for features and headroom, not for unit economics.

What Burns Credits, And What Does Not

Synthesia is unusually clear here, and it is more forgiving than people assume.

Free: drafting and previewing consume nothing. Removing or reordering words, punctuation changes, avatar framing, removing an avatar, changing its look, pronunciation tweaks and voice tone changes add no charge. Duplicating a video is itself free.

Charged: generation. New or replaced words consume their added duration. Adding or replacing an avatar charges the visible duration. Changing voice language or accent charges the changed duration. Generating a duplicate consumes credits even though duplicating it did not.

There is no rollover. The balance resets each billing period. Synthesia documents both manual and automated top-ups, though no public top-up price is published.

Where Features Actually Start

From the detailed comparison table rather than the cards:

Basic has more than you would expect: 9 stock avatars, 160+ languages, screen recorder, auto captions, uploads, PowerPoint import, video embeds, dialogue and voice cloning. What it does not have is MP4 download — embeds and sharing work, but you cannot take an MP4 off Basic.

Starter adds 125+ avatars, 3 personal avatars, MP4 download, branding removal, the assistant, commenting and the Dubbing API.

Creator adds 180+ avatars, 5 personal avatars, the regular Synthesia API, interactive CTAs and branching, bulk personalization, custom fonts, and a branded share page.

Enterprise adds 240+ stock avatars, unlimited personal avatars subject to reasonable use, shared workspaces and live collaboration, one-click translation, quizzes, brand kits, SCORM, SSO and voiceover upload.

MP4 export is Full HD 1920×1080. No 4K is promised anywhere on the page.

Three Places The Page Disagrees With Itself

Worth checking in-account rather than trusting any summary:

1. Annual pricing. Cards say $18 and $64; the FAQ on the same page says $264 and $804 a year.
2. Personal avatars. The FAQ says one is included annually; the current detailed table says 3 on Starter and 5 on Creator.
3. "Unlimited" on Enterprise. The table advertises unlimited dubbing, but Synthesia's enterprise credits documentation meters dubbing at 120 credits/minute without lip sync and 240 with, and pauses features at 100% credit use. Enterprise video creation is unlimited; Enterprise is not unlimited everything. Its API allowance is separately 360 minutes/year with paid additional usage.

One more that is easy to miss: Creator's "interactive videos" does not include quizzes — the table puts quizzes on Enterprise. And the Studio Avatar add-on at $1,000/year appears for Starter and Creator only on the yearly table; the monthly table shows it as Enterprise-only.

Billing, And One Thing To Do Before You Cancel

Per Synthesia's billing documentation, renewals are at the same per-unit price. Upgrades are immediate and prorated; downgrades take effect next cycle. Starter and Creator cancel self-serve, while Enterprise order-form customers go through their account team.

Export before you cancel. Synthesia's help documentation states that once your term ends after cancellation, you lose access to your videos. Download anything you want to keep first.

If you are on the legacy Personal plan, it is in maintenance mode — you can keep it while the subscription stays active, but if it lapses you cannot buy it again.

Synthesia moved from minutes to credits on 18 August 2025, per its own announcement. Older articles quoting minute allowances are describing the previous model.

Is Synthesia Worth It?

Yes, if you need a presenter-led video in many languages and you do not want to film anyone. That is what Synthesia is for, and 160+ languages with voice cloning on the free tier is a genuinely strong offer.

Yes, if your volume is predictable. Credits reward planning and punish improvisation, since regeneration costs real money and there is no rollover.

Reconsider if you need 4K. MP4 export is 1080p.

Reconsider if you are producing screen-recorded software tutorials. Synthesia is built around an avatar presenting a script. It has a screen recorder, but the product's centre of gravity is a talking presenter, not a walkthrough of an interface.

How It Compares

Formats differ, so this is orientation rather than like-for-like.

Where Vorec Fits

Synthesia is a strong fit for avatar-led presentations. For a policy explainer, onboarding module or multilingual training piece delivered by a presenter, it is built exactly for that, and it supports 160+ languages.

It is a different job from documenting software. When the subject is the screen, what you need is the workflow captured and explained — not a presenter describing it.

Vorec records your screen: it has its own macOS recorder, and an AI agent can drive that capture through the CLI, recording locally so you review the take before anything is uploaded. It then uses the captured action data — or analyses a recording you upload — to draft narration matched to the workflow and generate the voiceover, so no microphone narration is required. In the editor you can add smooth cursor motion, cursor-follow zoom and click-based auto-zoom, and freeze-sync can hold a frame to give an explanation time to finish. The same capture can also produce a written step-by-step guide with annotatable screenshots, and narration regenerates in supported languages on eligible plans without re-recording.

Plans start at $9/month, with a trial of 200 credits whose exports carry a watermark.

Bottom Line

$216/year for Starter, $768/year for Creator, on annual billing — but budget in credits, not dollars. One pool feeds video, dubbing and AI assets, at 120 credits per video-minute, with no rollover.

Check three things before you buy: that the plan card and the FAQ agree on the price you are being charged, that MP4 at 1080p is enough, and that your monthly volume is predictable — some changes consume additional credits, so check which edits are charged before you plan around revisions.

Related: our Synthesia alternative for screen tutorials.

Documenting software rather than presenting a script? Record with Vorec, or upload a recording you already have, and get a narrated tutorial plus a written guide. Start free.

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