HeyGen Business: 5 custom avatars and $20 seats vs a Sume API key

HeyGen's pricing page lists the Business plan at $149 a month with 1,500 credits, up to 60-minute videos and 5 custom avatars, plus $20 per seat per month for team members. Sume has no seat model in its API docs. Access is a bearer key with scopes, so a team shares capability by creating keys for each service or person, and spend is controlled per run with a cap. That is a different bill shape: seats scale with people, keys scale with systems.

HeyGen source: pricing, read 2026-10-04. Sume sources: Authentication and Calling a Format.

What the HeyGen Business plan lists

The page also lists Free at $0 with 3 videos a month of up to 1 minute and 1 custom avatar, Creator at $29 with 600 credits, Pro at $49 with 1,000 credits, and Enterprise on custom terms. Business adds the seat price for extra team members.

How a team uses Sume without seats

There are three levers. Keys: one per service, with only the scopes it needs. Spend caps: generation_spend_cap_usd bounds a Format run. Handles: a ready avatar is referenced by its avatar_handle. The Formats docs note that a service-account key cannot create Format runs, so use a workspace key for those.

• One key per pipeline, rotated on a schedule.
• Cap each run, and give batch jobs their own cap.
• Name avatar handles by brand so people know which to use.

Who should pick which

A marketing team of several people who edit videos by hand in a browser is the HeyGen Business shape: seats, a shared library and an editor. A backend that renders thousands of personalised clips is the Sume shape: no editor seats, an API, and costs that follow the number of renders.

Bottom line

Compare the cost of seats times people against per-render costs times volume, using your real numbers. The two models only look alike on a pricing table.