Synthesia

By Minel Gunesoglu, founder. I opened Synthesia's pricing page in a browser in both billing views on 14 August 2026, went through its Customer Terms of Service clause by clause the same day, and set both beside dated reviews that paying customers filed on Capterra, G2, Product Hunt and Hacker News. I generated no video for this page and claim none. First published and last checked 14 August 2026; re-checked monthly.

Synthesia's own pricing FAQ answers the question this page exists for, and the answer is not the one an upgrade implies. "A starter plan provides you with 10 video minutes per month," it reads (synthesia.io/pricing, opened in a browser 14 August 2026). Higher up the same screen, the free Basic card is printed as "10 minutes of video/month". The $29 tier and the $0 tier grant the same monthly allowance, in the vendor's own words, on one page, and the table beneath them states that relationship in a form easy to read past: the free row is given per month and the two paid rows are given per year.

Synthesia is the avatar-video platform sold at synthesia.io by Synthesia Ltd, registered at 20 Triton Street, Regent's Place, London NW1 3BF (read from the pricing page's own footer, 14 August 2026). A script goes in, a stock actor or a personal avatar reads it, and a finished video comes out with no camera, studio or presenter involved. Stock Avatars are the vendor's licensed library of real performers. Personal Avatars are built from footage of a specific person. Studio Avatars are a separately priced product. Those three are licensed differently and cost differently, so this page keeps them apart. One naming caution costs nothing: a long-established piano-teaching application shares the word Synthesia and owns the download and app-store searches for it, so check the address bar reads synthesia.io before reading a price off anything.

Synthesia Pricing in Both Billing Views: What $29 and $89 a Month Actually Buy

Both billing states were opened by hand, and the first thing that falls out is that the toggle barely matters. Each plan card prints both prices at once, "$29/month" beside "$18/mo Billed yearly", and the minute allowances do not change between the two views at all. Usage is not a function of the billing cycle. What the cycle changes is the price of a minute, and the page gives two different answers about what that price is.

Those figures come out of a single browser session on synthesia.io/pricing, 14 August 2026, with both toggle states opened; the cards and the table beneath them were identical in each.

Two pieces of arithmetic sit under that table and neither is on the vendor's page. The first is the credit rate. Basic includes 1,200 credits a month for 10 minutes, Starter 14,500 credits a year for 120 minutes, Creator 44,000 a year for 360. Divide each and the answer is roughly 120 credits a minute on all three, varying by about two per cent across the whole ladder. A higher tier does not buy a cheaper minute. It buys more of them, and it buys features.

The second is the cost of a finished minute, which is the number this decision turns on. On monthly billing, Starter works out at $2.90 a minute and Creator at $2.97, so moving from the $29 plan to the $89 plan does not lower the unit price at all. It raises the ceiling from 10 minutes to 30. The discount lives entirely in the annual cycle, where Starter falls to $1.80 or $2.20 a minute depending on which of the vendor's two annual figures you use, and Creator to $2.13 or $2.23. All six are division from the prices and minute allowances in the table above.

Three limits decide how many of those minutes can actually be spent. Unused minutes expire: "No. If you are under your video credit limit at the end of a billing period, the unused videos do not roll over to the next billing period." Running out does not open a top-up: "If you exceed your limit, your usage will be capped until renewal. To get more video minutes right away, you can upgrade your plan." And no tier sells a single video: "No. Synthesia is based on monthly and yearly subscriptions."

Two mechanics run the other way and are worth knowing before sizing a plan. Minutes are consumed on generation rather than on editing: "For as long as your video is in draft, or you are utilising the play functionality credits will not be consumed." And revisions bill by the difference: "If you edit an existing 1-minute video and change 3 seconds of it, we will only charge you for 3 seconds." For iterative work those two lines matter more than the headline allowance, and neither appears on a plan card.

Does Synthesia's Starter Plan Give More Minutes Than the Free Plan? No, Both Are 10 a Month

The parity is the vendor's own statement twice over, not our inference. The Basic card reads "10 minutes of video/month". The FAQ further down the same page reads "A starter plan provides you with 10 video minutes per month." Between them sits a table printing Basic at "10 minutes of video / month" and Starter at "120 minutes of video / year", which are the same rate in two different units, side by side, in one row.

So what does $29 change? The Starter card answers that itself, under a header reading "WHAT YOU GET IN BASIC +": "Download your videos", "AI Video Assistant", "AI Dubbing", "Remove Synthesia logo", 1 editor and 3 guests, 125+ avatars and chat or email support. Every one of those is a capability rather than an allowance.

Read the first and fourth of those the way the page structures them and the free plan looks narrower than a free plan usually does. "Download your videos" appears as something Starter adds on top of Basic, which puts exporting a file above the free tier rather than inside it. "Remove Synthesia logo" sits three lines below, which puts an unmarked file there too. The Basic card states neither restriction in its own words; what it states is nothing, while the card above it claims both features as additions. Anyone planning to evaluate free and walk away with a usable file should settle that on the plan card or with the vendor's support before the month starts.

One more line on the free plan is worth checking against whatever else you have read. On 14 August 2026 the vendor's own page put Basic at 10 minutes a month and 1,200 credits. If you have seen a lower figure quoted for that tier somewhere, check it against synthesia.io/pricing before planning around it, including if you saw it here.

Synthesia's Annual Plan Price, Two Ways on One Page: $216 by the Card, $264 by the FAQ

The pricing page states Synthesia's annual cost twice, and the two statements do not agree on either paid tier.

Both figures in each row were live on the same screen on 14 August 2026, and neither is marked as replacing the other. The $216 and the $768 are multiplication from the card's own monthly-equivalent price; the $264 and the $804 are printed by the vendor as annual totals. This page publishes both rather than picking one, because picking one would mean deciding which of a vendor's two live statements about its own price is correct, and nothing on the page settles that. Before committing to a year, check the checkout screen against both numbers and treat the higher one as the budget.

A third inconsistency on the same page is smaller and easier to trip over. The table gives Starter three personal-avatar slots and Creator five. The FAQ says "One custom personal avatar is included with the annual Starter and Creator plans." Slots and inclusions are not the same object, so the two lines may be describing different things, but the page does not say so, and a monthly subscriber reading the table has no way of knowing the FAQ attaches the included avatar to the annual cycle specifically.

Synthesia Enterprise Pricing: What "Custom" Leaves a Budget Holder to Guess

Enterprise carries no number anywhere on the page. What it carries is a feature column specific enough to plan against even when the price is absent: unlimited video minutes, one-click translation into 80+ languages, 240+ stock avatars, unlimited personal avatars, SAML and SSO, and custom credits. Its billing cycle is fixed rather than chosen, per the FAQ: "For Enterprise customers the billing cycle is annual."

Two things about that column deserve naming before a rollout. Studio Avatars, a $1,000-a-year add-on on every tier below it, are included here, so the top tier absorbs a cost the others itemise. And the column does not name SCORM export or a learning-management integration, which is the pair a training buyer most often assumes sits at the top of the ladder. Get either in writing before signing, because the vendor's own table does not list them.

This page prints no dollar figure for Enterprise. Third-party benchmarking numbers exist and one circulates widely; none was verified at its own source for this review, so none is published here. An unverified figure with a confident decimal point is worse than a stated gap.

Synthesia's Hidden Costs: Studio Avatars at $1,000 a Year, and API Minutes That Are Not Extra

Two line items sit off the headline price, and both live in the table rather than on the plan cards. Studio Avatars are marked "Paid add-on ($1,000/year)" on Basic, Starter and Creator alike. The figure does not scale with the tier, which makes it a much larger proportional decision low down the ladder: a $1,000 add-on beside a subscription of $216 to $264 is roughly four times the plan itself.

API access begins at Creator, and the row that matters is not whether it exists but how it is metered: "Up to 360 minutes of video / year, deducted from the plan's usage limits." API minutes are the same minutes, not additional ones. A Creator subscriber automating generation is spending the 360 a year they already had. The Enterprise column reads differently, listing 360 minutes included with further usage available as a paid add-on.

Synthesia's Commercial Use Licence, Refund Policy and the Indemnity That Runs Both Ways

Nobody writing about this product is reading its contract. Five pages that come back on a search for a Synthesia review were examined at depth for this page, and not one cites the Customer Terms of Service, the indemnification clause, the output-ownership clause or the refund position. All four are public, dated, and readable in about twenty minutes. The document below took effect on 20 July 2026 and was read in full on 14 August 2026 (Customer Terms of Service).

The clause that matters most in this category is also the one that reads best, and it deserves stating as plainly as any complaint here. Synthesia's contract carries indemnification in both directions. It has a section headed "Our Indemnification of Customer" as well as one headed "Customer's Indemnification of Us", and of the vendor contracts read for the tool cards on this site, it is the first to run both ways rather than one.

The vendor's half names the risk specific to avatar video. Verbatim: "We will defend Customer from and against any and all third party claims, actions, suits, proceedings, and demands alleging (a) that the Services or Synthesia Content, or the use thereof as permitted hereunder, infringes or misappropriates the intellectual property rights of a third party; or (b) that the use of a Stock Avatar's voice or likeness, as permitted hereunder, violates the applicable actor's right to privacy or publicity" Clause (b) is the one to read twice. The sharpest legal exposure in publishing a synthetic presenter is whether the face and the voice can be claimed by the person they belong to, and clause (b) is the vendor undertaking to defend the customer on exactly that ground, within the scope its own words set.

The customer's half runs in the industry-standard direction: "Customer will defend Synthesia and the members of the Synthesia Extended Family ... from and against any and all third party claims, actions, suits, proceedings, and demands alleging (a) that Customer Data, or use thereof, infringes or misappropriates the intellectual property rights of a third party; or (b) that Customer's use of the Services or Avatars violates the Acceptable Use Policy" Whatever you upload stays your problem. Whatever the platform supplies is, on the face of the document, partly theirs.

Liability is capped. Aggregate liability cannot "EXCEED THE TOTAL AMOUNT PAID BY CUSTOMER HEREUNDER IN THE TWELVE (12) MONTHS PRECEDING THE..." Twelve months of fees is the ceiling on the whole relationship. This page reports what the document says on a stated date. It draws no conclusion about how any clause would be enforced, and makes no claim about why any of it is drafted the way it is. One definitional point lands directly on solo buyers: the Customer Terms define the customer as an organisation and route individuals invited into an account to a separate User Terms of Service, which was not read for this review.

Who Owns a Synthesia Video, and Whether the Free Plan May Be Used Commercially

Ownership on a paid tier sits under a heading in plain English, "What's Yours is Yours", and the clause is narrower than the heading: "As between us on the one hand, and Customer and its Authorized Users on the other, Customer will own all Customer Data, but excluding the components of the Services and Synthesia Content. Subject to the terms and conditions of the Contract, Customer (for itself and all of its Users) grants us and the Synthesia Extended Family a worldwide, non-exclusive, limited term license to access, use, process, copy, distribute, perform, export and display Customer Data, Custom Avatars and any Non-Synthesia Products created or deployed by or for Customer"

Two things hold at once and they are not the contradiction they look like. You own what you put in and what comes out of it as Customer Data. Synthesia keeps a limited-term licence back over the same material, and separately carves its own Services and Content out of what you own, which is what stops a customer owning a Stock Avatar's likeness by having generated with it.

Whether a video made on the free Basic plan may be used commercially is not answered in this contract. The full text was searched for a free-tier commercial permission and there is none: no clause grants it, and no clause withholds it. Nor is the question answered by any of the five pages examined for this review. That is a labelled gap rather than a finding in either direction, and the instruction that follows is short. If a free-tier video is going into paid work, ask the vendor in writing first, because the document a dispute would be decided against is silent.

Synthesia's Refund Policy and How to Cancel a Subscription

Cancelling and getting money back are two different questions, and the vendor answers them in two documents that point in different directions.

Cancelling is easy, and the pricing FAQ says so: "Yes. Simply go to your account settings in Synthesia and cancel your plan." Refunds are the other document's answer, and it is firm. The Payment Terms state that payment obligations are "non-cancelable and, except as expressly stated in the Contract, fees paid are non-refundable." The only route to money back is an exception the Contract itself has to state, and the one identified during research is a pro-rated refund where the customer terminates for cause, which is a breach standard rather than a change of mind. There is no cooling-off window and no dissatisfaction route in the document as read on 14 August 2026.

Set the two side by side and the shape of the risk is clear. Cancelling stops the next charge. It does not reach the charge already paid, and on an annual plan that is up to twelve months of service bought and not returnable. None of that is unusual for business software, and the same clause appears in most of the contracts read for this site. What is unusual is finding it beside a self-service cancel button and a FAQ answer that says yes, because a buyer who reads only the FAQ will not know the second half.

Synthesia Stock Avatar Likeness Rights and the Consent a Custom Avatar Needs

Stock Avatars are performances by real people, licensed by the vendor rather than by the customer, and the indemnity clause quoted above is the document acknowledging that the underlying person keeps rights the customer never acquires. What a customer buys is permission to use that likeness "as permitted hereunder", and the defence Synthesia offers is scoped to that permitted use.

Building an avatar of a specific person is gated by identity verification rather than by an upload. The vendor documents an identity-verification step before a personal avatar is built; the comment thread where an unconnected reader described that process could not be captured from here, so it is not quoted. (Hacker News) Recorded here as a consumer-protection fact, and as the reason a personal avatar takes longer to set up than a stock one.

A further disclosure sits at the foot of the pricing page: "This content was generated using artificial intelligence and is labeled in accordance with EU AI Act Article 50 requirements." A vendor labelling its own marketing page under a synthetic-media disclosure rule is a signal about the regime its output lands in, which is worth knowing before a synthetic presenter fronts a regulated communication.

Synthesia Reviews on G2, Capterra and Reddit: the One Complaint That Repeats

Synthesia rates well and the sample is deep. G2's live aggregate on 14 August 2026 was 4.6 out of 5 across 2,786 reviews, read in a rendered browser from the machine-readable rating block the page publishes about itself and cross-checked against the visible header, which agreed (G2). Capterra's listing carried 4.6 across 314 reviews the same day.

That pair is newer than the one in circulation, including the vendor's own. Synthesia's pricing page prints "4.7 from 2,000+ reviews on G2", and the third-party pages covering this product repeat 4.7 as well. The live pair is 4.6 on 2,786: the count has grown by roughly four hundred and the average has moved down a tenth. No conclusion follows from a tenth of a star. What follows is a rule about reading star averages for anything at all, which is that the figure with no date beside it is the older one.

Underneath the aggregate, one complaint repeats with unusual specificity, and it is about content moderation rather than output quality. Three Capterra reviewers on unconnected accounts name the same mechanism across ten months. A health and wellness CEO, in a review titled "Worst Moderation Process Ever" dated 25 November 2024: "They frequently do not approve videos due to" what that reviewer calls the vendor's internal guidelines. A retail owner on 19 June 2025: "Their content moderation system is critically flawed." G2's own published review analysis describes the same friction in terms of waiting rather than refusal, though the review it draws on could not be opened directly from here. (G2 review analysis, published 30 April 2025.)

The most useful corroboration of that pattern is not a review at all. It is on the vendor's own pricing table, which sells moderation speed as a feature: "Regular content moderation time" on Basic, Starter and Creator, and "Priority content moderation time" on Enterprise. The queue is priced. Whatever a buyer concludes about the refusals themselves, the wait is something the vendor already treats as worth paying to shorten.

Two identity checks were done before any of those figures were used, because attributing another company's ratings to a tool is a mistake this desk has made before. G2 and TrustRadius both carry a separate listing for an unrelated market-research product with a near-identical name, and the correct product slug was confirmed on each before a number was read. Capterra's listing sits at a URL whose path names a different product entirely; direct retrieval on 14 August 2026 confirmed the page itself names Synthesia throughout, so the path reads as a legacy listing quirk, and that check is the reason the Capterra figures appear here at all.

Two access gaps belong on the record rather than in a silence. Trustpilot refused every request across four addresses including two regional mirrors, so no Trustpilot figure appears anywhere on this page. And Reddit produced nothing usable across four separate searches, which is a result about access rather than evidence that no discussion exists.

Synthesia Billing Complaints: Automatic Annual Renewal and No Self-Service Way to Cancel an Account

A second complaint cluster sits at the edges of the subscription rather than inside the product, and it lines up with the refund clause quoted earlier. A president in the sports industry, on 6 March 2025: "Billing charged me for renewal automatically for a full year that I did not want." A chief technology officer at a medical-device company, on 14 August 2025: "There is also no self-service way to close or delete your account; you must contact support." (Capterra, both read 14 August 2026.) Reports of that clause being applied circulate on review platforms this desk could not open directly, so none is quoted here. That review carries only a relative age stamp on the page as read, so no calendar date is asserted for it here.

Read those three beside the Payment Terms and none is a surprise. They are the clause arriving. The annual cycle renews automatically, the fees are non-refundable, and the cancel button stops the next cycle rather than reversing the last one. What follows is a calendar entry rather than a warning: if you go annual, set a reminder well before the renewal date.

Do Synthesia's Enterprise Customers Rate It Higher? G2's Own Breakout Says 4.52

The assumption a sales conversation invites is that friction concentrates in small, price-sensitive accounts. The published data does not support it. G2's own review analysis breaks out a 1,000-plus-employee segment of 29 reviewers at 4.52 out of 5, below the platform's blended figure for the same product (learn.g2.com, 30 April 2025).

The complaint that crosses that boundary is the moderation one. A lecturer at an education organisation in the 501-to-1,000-employee band filed this on 13 June 2025: "I have big difficulties to develop my own avatar features in Synthesia due to stringent rules that couldn't accept the images..." Six days later, a two-to-ten-person retailer filed the "critically flawed" review quoted above. Same mechanism, opposite ends of the size range, one week apart.

Company size predicts something else instead, which is which workflow a reviewer happened to hit. In the same window a Director of Enablement at a large information-technology services company filed a five-star review, dated 5 June 2025: "The time saved through the automation has allowed me to be more creative in the development of content that resonates with the audience." And a people-operations specialist, on 19 May 2026: "I was able to roll out a professional and polished product to the entire company within a fraction of the time." (Capterra, read 14 August 2026.) Straightforward narration goes well. Custom avatar imagery, and anything the approval system flags, is where the days go.

One more seam shows up in the price list rather than the product, and G2's analysis counts it: 69 of its Synthesia reviews flag pricing friction, and the complaint it quotes is about the step between tiers rather than the entry price. The individual review G2's analysis draws that from could not be opened from here, so it is described rather than quoted. (learn.g2.com, 30 April 2025.) That is the $89-to-custom gap in a customer's own words, and it is the gap the Enterprise column's missing number creates.

How Synthesia Scores 73.2 out of 100, and What Took the Place of the Empty Capability Cell

Nothing on this card sits near anything else on it. The crowd cell reads 91.8 and the price cell reads 55.2, which is 36.6 points apart on the same product on the same day, and the composite does not split the difference. It is the geometric mean of all four: 71.2 times 91.8 times 55.2 times 79.6 is 28,719,364, and the fourth root of that is 73.20, which the card prints as 73.2 out of 100 and 3.7 out of 5. A mean built that way punishes a low cell harder than an average would, and that is the point of using it. A strong rating cannot buy a product out of an expensive price list.

The card fell when it filled, and that is worth stating plainly rather than leaving in the arithmetic. It read 73.9 until 19 August 2026, on three cells. The fourth arrived at 71.2, below the total it joined, and a geometric mean drags toward whatever you add to it, so the published figure dropped seven tenths of a point. Nothing about Synthesia changed on 19 August. What changed is that the site stopped publishing empty rows, and on this product the new reading was not a flattering one, two of its four positions are the market's ordinary answer and one is at the bottom of its scale.

The value cell deserves a sentence of defence, because 55.2 beside a 4.6-star average looks like an error and is not one. That cell reads one thing only: what the cheapest plan lifting the free tier's limits costs per month, on a fixed public scale, with a small allowance for a free tier existing. At $29 a month Synthesia is priced well above the entry point of most tools scored on this site, and the scale says so. It is not a judgement about whether the minutes are worth the money. That judgement belongs to the reader, and the per-minute figures earlier on this page are what it should be made from.

The renamed cell is the honest part of the card, and what it stands in for is a fact about this category rather than about this vendor. On the cards where that position does carry a quality number, what it converts is a public leaderboard built from blind votes: people are shown two unlabelled clips made from one prompt, they pick one, and the accumulated picks become a ladder anybody can open and check. Avatar video has no such board. The check was run by name on 1 August 2026 for this category's other tool, on 14 August 2026 for this one and once more on 19 August, and the academic benchmarks that do exist measure open research methods rather than named commercial products. Two substitute measures were drawn up on 14 August 2026 to fill the cell another way, and counting the evidence actually held killed both: what each one needed exists for one tool in this category and not the other. Synthesia has withheld nothing here. Nobody has measured the output, this desk included.

So the position now carries a different question with a different name on it. Delivery envelope asks what a Starter subscriber can walk away with, and it says nothing whatever about how convincing the avatar is. Its four readings are unremarkable except for the last, which is the one worth a buyer's attention: Synthesia publishes a full public API reference, and the plan this page prices cannot use it. "API access is available on Creator and Enterprise plans. If you're on a different plan and want to use the API, contact the Synthesia Support team about upgrading," the help centre states, and the pricing table's own API row reads "(none)" for Basic and "(none)" for Starter, with a value appearing first at Creator (both read 19 August 2026). A reference that exists is not access, and the criterion asks about the tier a buyer actually pays for, so that reading sits at 50.0, the bottom rung short of an outright blank. The same sentence decides this category's other card in the opposite direction, where the API is separately billed rather than shut off, and the two cards are settled by one rule rather than by two judgements. What each row on a card is permitted to mean, and what a renamed row must print beside it, is set out with the rest of the model.

Two of the other three readings do not separate this product from anything. Downloads come out at "Full HD 1080p", the ordinary ceiling, and the Starter download menu offers .mp4, .wav and caption files: usable anywhere, editable nowhere. One vendor contradiction rides along and is recorded rather than resolved: the download article lists ".xliff – Download file for translation" in a menu whose banner names Starter, while Synthesia's own XLIFF article says the feature "is only available to our Enterprise Plan customers." The narrower statement is the one used, which is why the export reading is flat interchange and not editable formats.

All four rows now carry a figure, and the one most buyers would ask about first is still the one nobody has answered. That belongs here, beside the number, not in a footnote at the bottom. What 73.2 measures is what customers report, what the plans cost, what the contract commits to and what the entry plan lets you carry out. None of that is the video itself, and because one of the four is answering a question its heading does not ask, the total is not the four-dimension average this site's model otherwise describes.

Why No Benchmark Measures Synthesia's Video Quality, and What to Do Instead

The absence has a practical consequence, so here is the workaround rather than the complaint. Nothing published anywhere measures whether Synthesia's avatars are better or worse than a rival's, and any page suggesting otherwise is describing an impression. The nearest thing to an independent signal is what unconnected people say when nobody asked them to review anything. Where unconnected readers list AI video tools they have used, this one tends to be placed by category, business and explainer work, rather than ranked on output. The specific thread could not be captured from here and is therefore not quoted. (Hacker News) That agrees with what the product's own review record is full of: training rollouts, internal announcements, explainers.

What replaces a benchmark, for a buyer, is ten free minutes. Generate the actual script you need to ship, in the actual language, with the actual avatar, and watch it back before any money moves. The free tier is enough for that, and the download question above is the only thing to settle first.

Synthesia Alternatives: Who Else Does This Job, and Who Wrote the Review You Are Reading

Anyone pricing this product is usually pricing two others beside it, and only one of those carries a card here. Hedra's own card reaches 68.6 on a thinner evidence base, and exactly one row can be set against its opposite number here. Since 19 August 2026 both products have their delivery envelopes read under one rubric, from documents each vendor publishes about itself, so 71.2 against 78.1 is a genuine comparison of what the two entry plans hand over. Nothing else on the two cards is like-for-like. Hedra's usability rests on 53 reviews against 2,786 here, which is a difference in what could be measured rather than a measured difference between the products. HeyGen is the other name, and it has no card here at all, so this page says nothing about it beyond that buyers shortlist it. Neither sentence puts one product above another, and none of the avatar-generator cards on this site is a recommendation.

The more useful thing this section can hand over is a check to run on everything else you read about this product. Of five pages examined at depth for this review, two are published by companies selling directly competing avatar tools. One, dated 25 July 2024, gives its own product the featured first slot inside its own "Best Synthesia Alternatives" section and closes by inviting the reader to try it; its title says 2025 while the page is dated 2024, and the prices it quotes no longer match the vendor's live monthly rates. The other, dated 22 April 2025, opens with a first-person evaluation claim in its headline and closes with a call to try the publisher's own product; its author biography discloses past use of Synthesia as a credential and does not disclose present employment at a direct competitor. Neither page carries a disclosure that its publisher sells a rival. The point is not that either page is wrong about anything. The point is that a reader deciding on price should know who paid for the page.

Freshness is the second check and it is easier to run. The best of the five, updated 1 July 2026, is the only one stating its price basis correctly in both billing views. It also predates the Customer Terms of Service quoted throughout this page by nineteen days, and cites no contract at all. Read on 14 August 2026, three of those five pages make a first-person evaluation claim. This desk is not permitted to make that claim and does not make it, which sharpens the difference rather than softening it: every number on this page comes from a document you can open yourself.

One completeness note, stated rather than skipped. Security and compliance certifications are covered in detail by at least one other page about this product. Nothing about them was captured for this review, so this page makes no claim about them in either direction, and anyone whose purchase turns on them should verify them with the vendor directly.

Is Synthesia Worth It? Who Should Pay $29, and Who Should Stay on the Free Plan

Everything below is dated 14 August 2026, and it splits three ways because three different buyers arrive at this price list with three different problems.

For a solo creator making a handful of short explainers, the honest advice is to stay on Basic longer than feels natural, and to upgrade for a named capability rather than for volume. Ten minutes a month is the same allowance on both sides of the $29 line. What Starter adds is the ability to take the file away, remove the vendor's logo from it, dub it, and reach 125 avatars instead of nine. If none of those four is what is stopping you today, the upgrade buys nothing you are short of. If you do upgrade, go annual only after checking the checkout figure against both the $216 and the $264 published above, and put the renewal date in your calendar the same afternoon.

The reader who has already lost money to a renewal should stop at four dated facts, because between them they settle the question. Fees are non-cancelable and non-refundable under Terms effective 20 July 2026. The cancel button stops the next cycle and does not reach the last one. Two Capterra reviewers, in March and August 2025, describe an unwanted annual renewal and the absence of a self-service way to close an account. And unused minutes expire monthly rather than banking. None of that is exotic for business software, and all four are worse on an annual plan than a monthly one.

For a team lead buying on behalf of an organisation, the contract is the reason to look at this vendor seriously and the moderation record is the reason to pilot before committing. Two-way indemnification with a clause naming Stock Avatar likeness is the strongest commercial-terms position in any avatar contract read for this site, and in a category whose central risk is a face and a voice, that is not a small thing. Against it, the approval queue is real, it is named independently by reviewers from two-person accounts up to 501-to-1,000-employee ones, and the vendor's own table sells a faster queue as an Enterprise feature. Put your two most sensitive scripts through the free tier first and see whether they come back approved.

Three cases close the question in the other direction. If the deliverable needs more than ten finished minutes and the budget stops at Starter, that plan does not raise the ceiling and paying for it will not help. If the decision is resting on a 4.7-star average, including the one printed on the vendor's own pricing page, put it down: the live figure on 14 August 2026 was 4.6 across 2,786 reviews, and a star average with no date beside it is older than it looks. And 73.2 is not a verdict on the videos. It stands on a customer record, a published price list, a signed contract and a download menu, each opened on a stated day, and no product in this category, this one included, has had its output measured by anybody.

Written by Minel Gunesoglu, founder of Vouch. The three captures behind this page each carry a URL, a retrieval date and a checksum · LinkedIn profile · the standing rules this desk publishes under. Synthesia data collected 14 August 2026: the pricing page in both billing views, the Customer Terms of Service effective 20 July 2026, and G2's live aggregate. Every price, minute figure and quoted clause above carries a date, either of the reading or of the document's own effective date, and all of them are re-checked monthly. Disclosure: no affiliate relationship exists with Synthesia, so every vendor link here is a plain link; where affiliate links appear elsewhere on this site they are marked, and a paid submission buys review speed only, never a listing and never a score.