Question 1

How much does a realtime AI avatar API cost?

Accepted Answer

On Realtime Avatar you pay for seconds on air, and the rendering, the language model and the voice are all included in that one rate. Starter is $9 a month for 120 minutes and Developer is $24 a month for 600 minutes. Beyond a plan's allowance, overage runs $0.08 to $0.095 a minute — about $4.80 to $5.70 an hour of live avatar. Sandbox is free and needs no card: 480 credits once per account, or 8 realtime minutes.

Question 2

What is a credit?

Accepted Answer

One credit is one second of a character being on air. A plan is a monthly pot of them rather than a set of separate allowances, so the same balance pays for the minutes you talk and for generating portraits, idle clips and avatars. That is why there is no choice to make between building a character and using it.

Question 3

What happens when I use up my included minutes?

Accepted Answer

Calls keep working and the extra time is billed as overage at your plan's rate — $0.08 to $0.095 a minute depending on plan, with the cheaper rate on the larger plans. Sessions are not cut off mid-conversation, and every session returns its own record of start time, billable seconds and credits charged, so overage can be reconciled or re-billed to your own end users.

Question 4

What does creating an avatar cost?

Accepted Answer

Creating a character is billed separately from talking to it: $3 per avatar beyond the number your plan includes, its generated resting loop included. Generation is charged at the model vendor's own list price with no margin added, and it comes out of the same credit pot as your realtime minutes.

Question 5

Is there a free tier for a realtime avatar API?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Sandbox is free, needs no card, and grants 480 credits once per account (8 realtime minutes), enough to build your first avatar and still hold a conversation with it. It is a real key against the real platform rather than a recorded demo, so time-to-first-frame measured there is the number you would get in production.

Question 6

Why is this priced per second instead of in credit packs?

Accepted Answer

Because a credit pack hides the rate. Platforms that sell packs convert credits to streaming time at their own ratio, so the same "1,000 credits" can mean twice as many minutes on one service as another and the comparison has to be redone by hand. Here one credit is one second, which makes the per-hour rate arithmetic rather than a lookup. When comparing any two realtime avatar APIs, normalise both to dollars per hour before deciding.

Credits, spent however you build.

Sandbox

Starter

Developer

Studio

Scale

One balance. Every way the character costs money.

Start on the free tier. Upgrade when the calls do.

What a live minute actually costs.