Synthesia Starter $29 and Pro $89 monthly vs Sume avatar seconds

The short answer

Synthesia's pricing page lists Starter at $29 monthly ($18 on annual billing) and Pro at $89 monthly ($64 annual), and its API requires a paid plan. On Sume Plus at $0.245 per second, $29 buys 118 seconds of avatar video and $89 buys 363 seconds. Source: Synthesia pricing (read 2026-10-04). Plans bundle features, so treat this as a unit conversion.

What Synthesia lists

I read four price points: Starter at $29 monthly and $18 per month annual, and Pro at $89 monthly and $64 per month annual. Allowances and features are on the vendor's page.

The API angle

Because Synthesia's API needs a paid plan, the Starter $29 is the entry cost to automate anything on its side. Sume's entry cost is zero until you generate: an avatar is $0.95 and a clip is its seconds times the tier rate, and the avatar talking video endpoint accepts a script or ordered scenes.

Where the break-even sits

If you only need a handful of short presenter clips a month, per-second billing is the cheaper path. Ten 15-second Plus clips are $36.75, which is above Starter monthly, so a subscription is cheaper once volume passes roughly 8 such clips (8 x $3.675 = $29.40) in a month, assuming the plan covers your length and features.

If you need long videos, remember Sume caps a talking video at 60 seconds. Longer pieces are split into several clips, each billed by its own seconds, and stitched elsewhere.

Annual billing in dollars

On annual billing Starter is $18 a month, or $216 a year, and Pro is $64 a month, or $768 a year. On Sume Plus, $768 buys 3,134 seconds of avatar video. Whether that is more or less than Pro's allowance depends on the plan's own limits, which are on Synthesia's page. Compare the clip count you need per month against what each plan lists before you pay for a year.

Next steps

Compare on your own clip length with the price ladder and check the limits by plan before batching.