Synthesia Studio Avatar costs $1,000 a year: what $1,000 makes on Sume

Short answer

The Synthesia pricing page lists Studio Avatar creation at $1,000 per year, available on annual plans only. Sume charges a flat $0.95 to create an avatar, so $1,000 / $0.95 = 1,052 avatar creations, rounded down. These are different things: a Studio Avatar is a custom avatar product, and a Sume avatar is a reusable handle made from a prompt, a profile or an image. Use the number to size a decision, not to claim equivalence.

The two prices

Sume avatar creation is a flat fee per avatar, regardless of the input type. The fee covers the avatar only. Videos you make with it are billed per second.

What $1,000 buys in avatars

Divide by $0.95 to see how many avatars. Then ask how many you actually need. A brand with one spokesperson needs one. An agency with 25 clients may want 25 or 50.

How a Sume avatar is made

There are three inputs. A prompt describes the avatar in text. A profile gives structured traits such as sex, age and ethnicity, which the API calls props. An image uses a reference photo through an HTTPS URL. The request carries a top-level avatar_handle, and Sume stores the handle without a leading @. You then poll the job and use the returned handle to generate videos.

• Prompt: text only.
• Profile (props): structured traits.
• Image (photo): a public HTTPS image URL, checked before submit.

What the price does not say

A $0.95 avatar and a $1,000 Studio Avatar are not the same quality of product, and the Synthesia page describes the Studio Avatar only by its price and billing. We cannot say what is included beyond that. If your plan depends on a studio-recorded custom avatar, ask the vendor. If you need many presenters cheaply for tests, personas or localized versions, creating avatars at $0.95 each is easy to budget. Check likeness rights for anyone real before you use their photo.

Think about how many avatars you will really keep. Each avatar is a reusable handle, so one presenter can star in any number of videos; you pay again only when you want a different face. A realistic setup for a small brand is one or two avatars, which costs $0.95 or $1.90 in total, and the real spend is in video seconds. For example, ten 30-second clips at plus cost 300 x $0.245 = $73.50. The avatar fee barely moves that number.

The Synthesia page also notes the Studio Avatar fee applies to annual plans only, so it adds to a commitment you may already be making. If you are comparing total cost for a year, include it in the Synthesia column and include per-second video in the Sume column.