HeyGen LiveAvatar Essential $99 vs Business $475: limits and cost

HeyGen's LiveAvatar help article, read 2026-10-08, lists two plans: Essential at $99 a month with 1,100 credits and a 20-minute session limit, and Business at $475 a month with 6,000 credits and a 60-minute session limit. A credit is 10 US cents and buys 30 seconds of streaming in Full mode or 1 minute in Lite mode, which makes a Full minute $0.20 at list credit price and a Lite minute $0.10.

Sume has no live avatar, so there is no line to compare against these plans. The last section says what Sume offers when the conversation is not actually needed.

The two plans side by side

The page also lists 720p custom avatars on Essential and 1080p on Business, unlimited concurrent sessions on both, and full API access on Business. The minute ranges below are the article's approximations; the right-hand columns are my arithmetic from its credit rule, which comes out slightly higher than the article's ranges.

Cost per streamed minute inside the plans

Dividing the plan price by derived minutes gives what you pay if you use every credit. Essential is $0.18 a Full minute and $0.09 a Lite minute. Business is $0.16 and $0.08. The bigger plan is only about 12 percent cheaper per minute, so the real difference between the plans is the 60-minute session cap, 1080p and API access, not price.

Unused credits still cost the plan price. If you stream 100 minutes in Full mode on Essential, the effective rate is $0.99 a minute.

Where a rendered clip replaces a session

Many live avatar deployments are greeters that say the same thing to everyone. A Sume Avatar 1.0 clip does that job for a fixed price: 20 seconds on Standard is $3.68, on Plus $4.90, on Max $11.00 without a product image. You render once and every visitor sees the same file.

A clip cannot listen. If a visitor must ask something and get an answer, you need the live product. If the visitor only needs a face to say a fixed thing, see the live-or-recorded test before paying for sessions.