Twenty-nine dollars a month buys you 1,250 credits at Synthesia and 600 credits at HeyGen. Same price, twice the credits. That looks like an answer.
It is not an answer, because a Synthesia credit and a HeyGen credit are not the same thing, and neither pricing page tells you what either one is worth. You are comparing two numbers denominated in different currencies, with no exchange rate published for either.
We checked eight image, video and voice tools on 13 October 2026. Between them they meter in credits, tokens, GPU minutes, media hours and plain video minutes. Two of the eight publish what their unit converts to. The rest leave you to find out after you have paid.
Six tools, six different units
Here is what each one actually sells, in its own words.
- Synthesia sells credits. Starter is $29 a month, explicitly “billed monthly”, for 1,250 credits. Pro is $89 for 6,000.
- HeyGen also sells credits, but smaller ones. Creator is $29 for 600. Pro starts at $49 for 1,000 and scales to 100,000. Business is $149 for the first seat with 1,500 credits pooled across the workspace.
- Leonardo AI sells “fast tokens”. Essential is $12 for 8,500, Premium $30 for 25,000, Ultimate $60 for 60,000.
- ElevenLabs sells credits in much larger denominations. Starter is $6 for 30,000, Creator $22 for 121,000, Pro $99 for 600,000.
- Descript sells two things at once: media hours and AI credits. Hobbyist is $24 a month and includes 10 media hours and 400 AI credits.
- Midjourney does not sell credits at all. It sells GPU time. Basic is $10 a month for 3.3 fast hours, Standard $30 for 15 hours, Pro $60 for 30, Mega $120 for 60.
Six products, six units, and no way to convert between them. The number on the pricing page is not comparable to the number on the next pricing page, and nothing on either page admits that.
Two of them tell you the exchange rate
Runway is the clearest of the eight. Standard is $15 a month billed monthly and includes 625 credits, and Runway itself translates that figure: roughly 52 seconds of Gen-4.5, 104 seconds of Gen-4 Turbo, or 78 images at 1080p.
Read that again, because it is the most useful sentence on any of these pricing pages. Fifteen dollars buys you under a minute of their best video model. Not an hour. Not ten minutes. Fifty-two seconds.
Midjourney is the other one that shows its working, and it can do so because its unit is time rather than an invented token. A standard image costs about 0.8 minutes of GPU time, an HD image about 1.3 minutes, and a batch of four HD videos about 26 minutes. Turbo mode costs double. So Basic’s 3.3 fast hours is roughly 240 standard images, or about seven batches of HD video.
Those two numbers are not flattering to either company. Publishing them anyway is the point. Once you can see the conversion, you can work out whether the plan covers your month. On the other six, you cannot, and that is a choice those vendors have made.
The free tiers use a different unit again
If you were hoping to find the exchange rate by testing the free plan, note that several vendors change the unit when you stop paying.
HeyGen’s free plan does not use credits at all. It carries a separate free video quota instead, which means whatever you learn on the free tier teaches you nothing about what a credit buys on Creator.
Synthesia’s free Basic plan gives 500 credits a month and caps you at up to 10 minutes of video, with Synthesia branding left on everything. Two limits, and whichever binds first is the one that stops you.
Runway’s free tier gives 125 credits once. They do not expire, but they also never refresh. It is a sample, not a tier.
Leonardo’s free tier meters by the day rather than the month: 150 fast tokens a day, with a token bank of 150.
ElevenLabs gives 10,000 credits a month free, but the binding constraint there is not the number. The free plan “does not include a commercial license and cannot be used for any commercial purpose”, and anything you publish from it must credit ElevenLabs in the title. We covered which tools let you keep what you make in the best AI tools for images, video and voice.
Watch for the second meter
Two of these tools run two meters at once, and you can exhaust either.
Descript’s Hobbyist plan includes 10 media hours and 400 AI credits. Media hours cover the footage you bring. AI credits cover what the AI does to it. A month of heavy editing on short clips burns one; a month of light editing on long recordings burns the other.
Synthesia’s free tier does the same with credits and minutes, as above.
Leonardo adds a different wrinkle: a “token bank” worth three times your monthly allowance. That sounds generous, and it is, but it also means the headline number understates what you have and the bank is the figure that governs a busy month.
Midjourney has the opposite problem. Unused fast time does not roll over. Its Relax mode is unlimited, which sounds like a safety net, but it queues for up to 30 minutes and is not available on Basic at all.
What the published prices leave out
Three gaps worth knowing before you plan a budget.
HeyGen publishes no annual prices for any tier. It does note that annual subscribers receive their credits in monthly instalments rather than as one lump, which matters if your workload is seasonal. It also serves region-specific pricing pages, so the figures you see may not be the figures we saw.
Leonardo advertises a yearly option saving up to 20 percent but displays no annual figures at all, so the saving cannot be checked from the pricing page.
Synthesia renamed its middle tier from Creator to Pro on 1 October 2026 and added Pro 2x, 4x, 6x and 8x tiers scaling to 48,000 credits. The prices for those new tiers are shown in-app by region rather than on the pricing page.
These are all variations on patterns we catalogued in eight ways AI pricing pages mislead you.
The tool with no meter at all
Worth noting for contrast: ComfyUI has no credits, no tokens and no cap. The software is free, GPL-3.0, and the pricing page says plainly that “Comfy Desktop itself is free”. You supply the GPU, which is the real cost and an honest one.
There is a separate paid Comfy Cloud service from the same organisation at $20 a month billed monthly, with five free runs to start. That is a different product sharing a name, which is its own kind of confusion.
What to do before you subscribe
- Look for the conversion, not the allowance. If the vendor does not say what one credit produces, the allowance is not information.
- Price your actual output, not your plan. Decide how many minutes of video or images a month you need, then work backwards. Runway’s own figures are a useful reality check on what video costs anywhere.
- Check whether the free tier uses the same unit. On HeyGen it does not, so the trial will not teach you the thing you need to know.
- Count the meters. Descript has two. Synthesia’s free tier has two. Running out of either stops you.
- Ask whether unused allowance rolls over. Midjourney’s does not. Leonardo banks three months of it. That difference is worth more than a few dollars on the headline.
What we cannot tell you
We have not generated a month of video on each of these tools and measured the drain. Everything above is read from the vendors’ own pricing pages, help centres and documentation, and dated on each tool’s entry. The figures were checked on 13 October 2026, and several of these pages change more often than that.
What we can tell you is which vendors make the arithmetic possible and which do not. Runway and Midjourney publish enough for you to work out what you are buying before you pay. On the others you will find out in week three, and by then you have already subscribed. That asymmetry is the product of a choice, not a technical limitation, and it is reasonable to weigh it when you pick.