HeyGen too expensive? Work out what you are actually paying
HeyGen's Creator plan costs $29 per month on monthly billing, or $24 per month on annual billing, as listed on heygen.com/pricing on 23 August 2026.
- What one topic returns
- One written topic becomes a finished vertical Short: the research, a written script, narration in the video's language, real archival footage with maps and charts, burned-in captions, a thumbnail and a title/description/tag package. The file downloads ready to publish, with a media credits file naming the source of every clip.
- What the money buys
- Starter is $29 a month for 400 credits, which is 20 finished Shorts at 20 credits each, about $1.45 a Short. Pro is $59 a month for 45 Shorts, about $1.31 each, or about $0.66 each at $29.50/month billed yearly, 50% off. One credit is 1 minute of video processing, so the same balance is 400 minutes of source to clip.
- What is free
- There is no free plan and no credits on signup; generation requires a paid plan. The free YouTube SEO checker scores a title, a description and keywords with no account, three checks a day.
- Rights and the download
- No export carries a watermark. You keep the rights in what you submit, and ViewMade assigns to you the rights it holds in the output; source footage, music and fonts stay under their own licences, named in the credits file. 15 research and writing tools sit beside the studio, in 7 interface languages.
Every number here is read from the plan that charges the card, checked 13 September 2026. Full detail: pricing, refunds.
Last checked
HeyGen's Creator plan costs $29 per month on monthly billing, or $24 per month on annual billing, as listed on heygen.com/pricing on 23 August 2026. If that line item is bothering you on a solo budget, this page runs the arithmetic before you decide anything.
What HeyGen costs
Measured directly from heygen.com/pricing on 23 August 2026:
| Plan | Monthly billing | Annual billing | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Creator | $29/month | $24/month | The entry plan |
| Pro | $49/month | Not stated on the page we read | Mid tier |
| Business | $149/month | Not stated on the page we read | Plus $20 per extra seat |
The Business plan's per-seat charge matters if you are a team of one being pushed toward it anyway. For a solo creator, the relevant number is the first row: $29 monthly, $24 annual.
What you get for it
HeyGen's pricing page does not publish a per-video figure. It sells by subscription period and credits, not by finished video, so there is no cost-per-output number to compute from the page itself. If your usage is uneven month to month, that means your effective cost per video moves around, and only you can work out what it lands at from your own export history.
The same money, elsewhere
| Tool | Entry price | What that buys | Footage source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Opus Clip | Free tier available; Starter $15/month (monthly) | Starter buys 150 credits per month; the free trial needs no card | Whatever you supply |
| HeyGen | $29/month (monthly), $24/month (annual) | Subscription access, no published per-video figure | Avatar and supplied media |
| ViewMade | $29/month (monthly only, no annual Starter plan) | 50 renders per month, which works out to $0.58 per short | Real archive footage |
Opus Clip sits here because its pricing was readable without JavaScript on 23 August 2026. Its job is different from both others: it finds clips inside a long video you already made, rather than producing a video from a topic.
When staying put is the right call
HeyGen does one thing none of the topic-to-video tools do: it puts a presenter on camera without a camera. If your videos need a face talking to the audience, an avatar delivering your script, then no archive-footage tool replaces that. ViewMade produces vertical documentaries about real events with sources named; it does not produce a person on screen. If your channel format depends on a presenter, the $24 to $29 per month is buying something specific, and leaving means giving up the presenter entirely or sourcing one another way. Price alone is not the whole decision when the output type differs this much. Stay if the avatar is the product.
If you do move
ViewMade's Starter plan is $29 per month, monthly billing only, with no annual option and no free tier. That buys 50 renders per month at $0.58 per short. Production starts only after payment succeeds, so there is nothing to test before the first invoice. The Pro plan is $59 per month, or $29.50 per month billed annually at $354 total, a 50 percent discount, buying 150 renders at $0.20 per short plus priority render queue and API access. Check HeyGen's own billing page for the cancellation steps; this page does not cover them.
<!-- faq -->Frequently asked questions
Is ViewMade cheaper than HeyGen?
At the entry tier, no. Both are $29 per month on monthly billing as of August 2026. The difference shows up in what the money buys: ViewMade publishes a per-unit figure, 50 renders for $29, so $0.58 per short. HeyGen publishes no per-video figure, so whether it is cheaper depends on how many videos you actually produce each month. On annual billing HeyGen drops to $24 per month, which undercuts ViewMade's Starter outright.
Does ViewMade have a free plan like Opus Clip?
No. Opus Clip has a free tier and a card-free trial. ViewMade has neither: zero registration credit, and production begins only after a successful payment.
What about StoryShort, it looked cheaper?
StoryShort's tiers are known to be $39, $69, $129, and $199 from TrustMRR data verified against Stripe on 18 August 2026, but its own pricing page returned only 4 words of server-rendered text when fetched on 23 August 2026, so those figures could not be confirmed from the vendor directly. Either way, all four tiers sit above ViewMade's $29 Starter.
Why does the third tool in the comparison table keep changing across pages?
Because prices are measured live from each vendor's pricing page, and some pages hide their numbers behind JavaScript or ambiguous columns. Only tools whose prices were cleanly readable get a row. Tools that could not be measured are left out rather than guessed at.