Hedra sells credits, not minutes — and that one design decision is why most people misjudge what it costs. A plan's headline number tells you nothing until you know the burn rate, and the burn rate halves depending on a resolution setting most people never touch.
This guide covers every plan, exactly how credits are consumed, what each tier actually buys you in finished video, and where the real value sits. It also fact-checks a figure that appears in most published Hedra pricing articles and does not survive arithmetic.
Disclosure: this page contains affiliate links. If you sign up through one we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Every figure below is cited from public sources and Hedra's own documentation, and pricing changes — check the live pricing page before committing budget.
Hedra pricing plans
| Plan | Price / month | Credits / month | Watermark | Commercial use |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 100 | Yes | No |
| Basic | $15 | 1,500 | No | Yes |
| Creator | $30 | 5,400 | No | Yes |
| Professional | $75 | 14,400 | No | Yes |
| Teams | $75 | 14,400 | No | Yes |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | No | Yes |
Generation speed rises with the tier — Basic is explicitly the slow queue, Creator is faster, Professional is fastest, and Enterprise adds dedicated inference alongside an account manager, SSO and private deployment options. Creator is also where voice cloning arrives.
The free plan needs no credit card, but its output is watermarked and cannot be used commercially. Treat it as a functional trial rather than a usable tier — 100 credits is well under a minute of video.
How Hedra credits actually work
Credits are consumed per second of generated video, not per generation and not rounded up to the minute. A 10-second clip bills 10 seconds. The rate depends on resolution:
| What you generate | Credit cost |
|---|---|
| Character-3 at 540p | 3 credits / second |
| Character-3 at 720p | 6 credits / second |
| Premium TTS voice | 15 credits / 1,000 characters |
| Live Avatar streaming | $0.05 / minute (dollars, not credits) |
Two things follow immediately. First, 540p is exactly half price — dropping resolution doubles the video you get from the same plan. For social crops, drafts, and anything that ends up in a 9:16 feed, that is free money. Second, Live Avatars are billed in dollars on a separate meter, so a one-hour live session costs about $3.00 regardless of your credit balance. Upscaling to 1080p also costs additional credits on top of the generation.
The formula is simple enough to keep in your head:
credits = seconds x rate (rate: 3 at 540p, 6 at 720p)
seconds = credits / rateWhat each plan actually buys you
Running the plans through that formula gives the numbers that matter:
| Plan | Credits | Minutes at 540p | Minutes at 720p | $ / min at 720p |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 100 | 0.6 | 0.3 | — |
| Basic | 1,500 | 8.3 | 4.2 | $3.60 |
| Creator | 5,400 | 30.0 | 15.0 | $2.00 |
| Professional | 14,400 | 80.0 | 40.0 | $1.88 |
Those are theoretical maximums assuming every generation is a keeper. In practice you will re-roll — expressions land wrong, lip sync drifts on a hard consonant, a take just feels off — and every retry spends credits at the same rate. Budget somewhere around two-thirds of the headline figure for finished, usable video.
Where the value actually is
Look at what a dollar buys on each tier rather than at the sticker price:
| Plan | Credits per $ | $ per credit | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | 100 | $0.01000 | — |
| Creator | 180 | $0.00556 | +80% |
| Professional | 192 | $0.00521 | +7% |
This is the single most useful thing to understand about Hedra's pricing. The jump from Basic to Creator makes your credits 80% more valuable. The jump from Creator to Professional makes them 7% more valuable.
So Basic is poor value on credits alone — you are paying a 80% premium per credit for the privilege of spending less per month. And Professional is not really a credit-economics upgrade; you buy it for the volume ceiling, the fastest queue and Teams access, not for the marginal rate. If you are on Basic and using all of it, moving to Creator is close to a no-brainer. If you are on Creator and not exhausting 5,400 credits, Professional will not save you anything.
The 11-minute problem
Most published Hedra pricing guides state two things in the same article: that Character-3 costs 6 credits per second at 720p, and that the Creator plan yields "approximately 11 minutes" of 720p video per month.
Those cannot both be true.
5,400 credits / 6 credits per second = 900 seconds = 15 minutesFor 11 minutes to be correct, the effective rate would have to be about 8.2 credits per second, not 6. One of the two figures is wrong, and they have been copied between articles often enough that both now circulate as fact.
We cannot resolve it from outside — it may be that some generations carry overhead the published rate omits, or it may simply be an error that propagated. What we can tell you is the method: generate one 30-second clip at 720p and check your credit balance before and after. If it drops by 180, the rate is 6 and your Creator plan holds 15 minutes. If it drops by ~245, the 11-minute figure is the honest one. That single test settles it for your account in under two minutes, and it is worth doing before you build a content calendar on either number.
Annual billing fixes the expiry problem
Monthly credits do not roll over. Whatever you have not spent when the cycle closes is gone, which punishes exactly the lumpy usage most creators actually have — a heavy launch month followed by a quiet one.
Annual billing changes the shape of that entirely. Per Hedra's own documentation, an annual subscription grants all of the year's credits upfront at the time of payment rather than metering them out monthly. A plan that includes 4,000 credits a month delivers all 48,000 immediately. You are then free to spend them however the work actually arrives — all at once, evenly, or concentrated around launches.
For anyone whose output is seasonal or project-driven, that is a bigger deal than any discount. It converts a use-it-or-lose-it allowance into a genuine budget. Hedra's documentation does not state an expiry on the annual grant; if you are planning to lean on that, confirm it with support before you pay for twelve months.
Annual plans are also commonly advertised at around 20% off. If that holds when you check out, the arithmetic gets interesting: Creator on annual works out near 225 credits per dollar, which is better than Professional on monthly billing at 192. Before you upgrade a tier for a better rate, price the annual option on the tier you are already on.
Credit packs and top-ups
If you run out mid-cycle you can buy a one-time credit pack rather than upgrading. Two details make packs more useful than they first appear:
- Pack credits roll over between billing cycles, unlike your monthly allowance.
- Packs are consumed only after your monthly credits are depleted, so buying one early does not waste your subscription allowance.
That ordering means a pack functions as a genuine reserve. Buying one at the start of a busy quarter is a reasonable hedge; it will simply sit there until you actually need it.
Hedra API pricing
There is no separate API wallet. The developer API draws from the same credit balance as the web app at the same per-second rates, which is a genuine simplification compared with vendors that meter API usage separately and at a premium.
For production use you can configure automatic recharge: set a minimum balance that triggers a top-up and a ceiling to refill to. Worth enabling if anything you build depends on generations completing unattended — the failure mode otherwise is a pipeline that stops silently at zero.
How Hedra compares on price
Normalising to dollars per finished minute of avatar video, using each vendor's entry-level serious tier:
- Hedra — about $2.00/min at 720p on Creator, or roughly $1.00/min at 540p. Professional lands near $1.88 and $0.94.
- Synthesia — Starter at $29/month for 10 minutes is about $2.90/min; Creator at $89 for 30 minutes is about $2.97/min, with overages of $2–$5 per extra minute.
- HeyGen — roughly $1 to $4 per minute depending on the avatar engine; the Avatar V API rate is $0.05/second, or $3.00/min.
- D-ID — cheap at the entry point, with Lite around $5.90/month for roughly 10 minutes, but the API is $5.90/min.
Hedra is competitive on the web app and unusually strong at 540p, where nothing else in this group approaches $1.00 a minute. Its clearest structural advantage is the API sharing the subscription's credit pool — with HeyGen and D-ID, API work is billed on a separate and considerably more expensive meter.
The honest caveat is that these tools are not interchangeable. Synthesia is built around stock corporate presenters and templates; HeyGen leans on digital twins; Hedra's Character-3 is strongest on expressive, emotive performance from a single image plus audio. Pick on the output you need first, then compare price within that shortlist.
Seven ways to stretch your credits
- Draft at 540p, finish at 720p. At half the rate, you can iterate on framing, timing and expression for half the cost and only spend the higher rate on the take you are keeping.
- Fix the audio before you generate. Lip sync follows the audio track, so a bad take in means a bad take out — and a re-generation costs full price. Get the voiceover right first.
- Generate short and cut. Per-second billing means there is no rounding penalty for short clips, so several tight generations cost the same as one long one and give you far more usable material.
- Do not upscale everything. 1080p costs extra on top of generation. Social crops rarely need it.
- Watch the TTS meter. Premium voice runs 15 credits per 1,000 characters. If you already have recorded audio, use it — that meter goes to zero.
- Remember Live Avatars are dollars, not credits. At $0.05 a minute they will not touch your balance, but they will touch your card.
- Price annual before upgrading a tier. As above, annual on your current tier can beat monthly on the next one, and it solves credit expiry at the same time.
Which Hedra plan should you choose?
- Free — evaluation only. Watermarked, non-commercial, and under a minute of video. Enough to see whether Character-3 handles your source image well, which is genuinely the thing to test first.
- Basic ($15) — only if you need commercial rights and a watermark-free file on a genuinely small volume. Otherwise it is the weakest value per credit on the board.
- Creator ($30) — the right default for almost everyone. It is where the credit rate improves sharply, where voice cloning arrives, and 15 minutes of 720p or 30 minutes of 540p covers most individual creators comfortably.
- Professional / Teams ($75) — for volume and speed rather than rate. Take it when you are genuinely exhausting Creator, need the fastest queue, or need multi-seat access.
- Enterprise — when SSO, private deployment, dedicated inference or an SLA are requirements rather than preferences.
The sensible way to decide costs nothing: the free tier needs no card, and one 30-second test generation tells you both whether the output quality works for your source images and what your account's real credit burn is. You can start on Hedra's free plan here, run that test, and pick a tier from your own numbers rather than anyone's published estimate.
If you are assembling a full video rather than just a talking head, it is worth pairing this with a B-roll workflow — our guide to Kling AI prompts for B-roll covers the cutaway footage that goes around an avatar performance.
A note on these figures
AI video pricing moves quickly, and Hedra has changed both plan structure and credit rates before. Everything above reflects publicly reported figures and Hedra's own documentation as of September 2026. The per-minute and per-credit tables are arithmetic on published rates rather than measured invoices — useful for shaping the decision, not as a quote. Given the 11-minute discrepancy documented above, run the 30-second test on your own account before committing to a production budget.