HeyGen API pricing explained (2026): video credits, the LiveAvatar split, and the realtime math

If you're evaluating HeyGen's API, the pricing page answers a different question than the one most developers are asking. HeyGen's API prices generated video. If what you're building is a live, conversational avatar — one that answers users in realtime — that product now lives somewhere else entirely, with its own pricing. Here's the full picture as of June 2026, with the per-minute math worked out. (Pricing changes; treat the official pages as the source of truth.)

HeyGen API pricing: the video generation side

HeyGen's self-serve API moved to a prepaid USD wallet — you deposit funds (starting at $5) and pay per second of generated video:

• Photo Avatar (Avatar IV/V): $0.05/sec at 720p/1080p — that's $3.00 per minute of video; $0.0667/sec at 4K
• Digital Twin & Studio Avatar: $0.0667/sec (≈$4.00/min) at 1080p, $0.0833/sec at 4K
• Video Agent: $0.0333/sec (≈$2.00/min); Cinematic Avatar: flat $7.00 per 4–15s clip
• Avatar creation (Digital Twin or Photo Avatar): $1.00 per call

The web plans (Free, Creator $29/mo, Pro from $49/mo, Business $149/mo) use a separate credit system — Avatar IV/V renders burn 20 credits per minute — and are aimed at people making videos in the editor, not calling an API.

The part that surprises people: realtime is a different product

Interactive streaming avatars are no longer part of the main HeyGen API. They've been spun out into LiveAvatar, a separate realtime platform with its own plans and credit system:

• Free: 10 credits/mo, 2-minute sessions, watermarked
• Starter $19/mo: 150 credits, 5-minute session cap, 5 concurrent
• Essential $99/mo: 1,000 credits, 20-minute sessions, 20 concurrent
• Business $475/mo: 5,000 credits, 60-minute sessions, 40 concurrent

The conversion is the part to read twice: in FULL mode (LiveAvatar runs the LLM/TTS/ASR), 1 credit buys 30 seconds of streaming; in LITE mode (you bring your own AI stack), 1 credit buys 1 minute. So Essential's $99 buys roughly 500 realtime minutes in FULL mode (~$0.20/min) or 1,000 in LITE (~$0.10/min, plus whatever your own LLM and TTS cost). Overage runs $0.11–0.12/credit — about $0.22–0.24 per FULL-mode minute.

How our realtime pricing compares

TIC Realtime Avatar prices one thing: minutes on air, anchored at about $5 per hour, rendering stack included. Developer is $49/mo with 600 realtime minutes — ten hours — and $0.085/min overage; Studio is $249/mo with 3,000 minutes ($4.80/hr overage); Scale is $999/mo with 13,000 minutes and $0.07/min ($4.20/hr) overage. Avatar creation costs $1 beyond your plan's included count. A free sandbox includes 5 minutes a month — no deposit, no demo call.

Per realtime minute, that lands at or below LiveAvatar's LITE mode — except you don't have to assemble ASR, LLM, and TTS yourself to get the price. Characters are created from a single image or short video, stay warm in a cache, and the video stream is audio-clocked, so lips track the syllable rather than the sentence.

Where HeyGen is the right answer

Honesty matters in a pricing post: if you're producing videos — marketing clips, localized campaigns, dubbed content — HeyGen is excellent, and its avatar library, voice cloning, and translation pipeline are best-in-class. None of that is what we do. The fork in the road is simple: rendered files versus live presence.

Shipping the realtime path

If the live path is yours: register an avatar from a portrait, call POST /api/v1/realtime/prepare once to warm it, then stream turns with the TypeScript SDK (realtime-avatar). The sandbox's 30 free minutes are enough to measure time-to-first-frame against your own latency budget — which is the number that decides whether a conversation feels live at all.