HeyGen free plan limits vs paying per second on Sume

HeyGen's free plan gives you 3 videos a month, each up to 1 minute long, with one custom avatar, according to its pricing page read on 2026-10-01. That is enough to judge the output, not to run a campaign. Sume has no equivalent free-video quota to point to in its documentation; it bills avatar video per second at published rates, so a one-minute test costs a known amount rather than a slot.

Which model suits you depends on whether your volume is a trickle you can fit into a plan or a spike you cannot.

HeyGen plans from its pricing page

Individual and Business tiers, as listed on the read date.

What per-second billing changes

On Sume, the cost of a single clip is its estimated seconds times the tier rate: $0.184 per second on standard, $0.245 on plus, $0.55 on max for a clip with no product image. A 60-second plus clip is therefore $14.70, and a 20-second one is $4.90. Nothing expires at the end of a month, and nothing is unused because you did not render enough.

The trade is on the other side. A subscription that includes 30-minute videos, 175 languages, a visual editor and team seats is a product for people. Sume's Avatar 1.0 is an API product for software: one script, one avatar handle, a 4 to 60 second window, and a webhook when it is done. If you want to drag scenes around, the free HeyGen plan will teach you more in an afternoon than any API doc.

A fair way to test both

• Write the same 45-second script and render it once on each side.
• Compare lip-sync at the end of sentences and the first frame, not the thumbnail.
• Check where the file lives afterwards. Sume mirrors results to media.sume.com URLs; confirm what the other tool gives you.
• Count the minutes of work, not only the dollars: signing in, choosing, exporting, versus one request.

Limits of this comparison

HeyGen's credit costs per video are not stated on its pricing page, so a cost per finished minute on a paid plan cannot be derived from that page alone. Sume's resolution is 720p and each job is capped at 60 seconds, so a long-form talk has to be cut into several jobs. Both vendors can change prices; the HeyGen figures are as read on the date above.