HeyGen Business $149 plus $20 a seat for 5 or 10 people vs Sume

For a team of 5 on HeyGen Business, the pricing page's "$149 + $20/seat" works out to $249 a month if the five seats are all billed on top of the base, and $349 for 10 people. Sume does not price people at all. A Sume workspace uses workspace-scoped API keys and a single USD balance, so the number of people who can submit avatar jobs does not change the bill; the number of jobs does.

Read the HeyGen line carefully before you budget. The page text I read does not say whether the base price already includes one or more seats, so treat $249 and $349 as ceilings and confirm in checkout.

Seat arithmetic

HeyGen seats scale linearly on the Business plan. With the page text as written: 3 people is 149 + 3 x 20 = $209, 5 people is 149 + 100 = $249, 10 people is 149 + 200 = $349. The credit pool is 1,500 a month no matter how many seats you add, so the cost per person falls but the cost per video does not.

On Sume the equivalent budget is a number of jobs. Because the avatar price comes from the live catalog and the docs I read do not publish a dollar figure for it, I will not invent one: check GET /v1/catalog and the API pricing page for the job price, then divide your monthly team spend by it.

The length gap matters more than the seat gap

The biggest difference is not seats. HeyGen lists 30-minute videos on Creator and Pro and 60 minutes on Business. Sume accepts a script or scene plan only when the estimated duration is 4 to 60 seconds, and tells you to make longer scripts shorter or split them into several jobs.

If you make short ads or social clips, that is no limitation. If you make a ten-minute training video, you would generate in pieces and join them with Timeline 1.0 at $0.10 per output minute, which is $1.00 for ten minutes of assembly on top of the clip jobs.

• Avatar aspect ratios: 1:1, 3:4, 9:16, 4:3, 16:9; default 9:16.
• Inline captions are accepted only when the estimated duration is 60 seconds or less.
• You can approve a first-frame still before you pay for a full render using avatar video previews.

Who should choose what

A marketing team that wants a person-facing studio with shared libraries and long presenter videos should look at HeyGen Business. A product team that calls an API from several services and mostly makes clips under a minute is better served by a balance with no seats. If your work is both, keep the long-form on HeyGen and automate the short ones.