Tavus custom faces need a paid plan: Sume creates one for $0.95

Tavus's replica documentation says custom face creation is available only on its Starter, Growth and Enterprise plans. It describes Phoenix-4.5 as showing a watermarked preview within minutes, and lists more than 100 stock faces you can use without making your own. I read the page on 2026-10-04.

If you only want to try a talking avatar, you may not want to pick a plan first. Here is what Sume asks for instead.

Creating a Sume avatar

POST /v1/avatar-1.0/generate makes a reusable avatar. The input is one of three types: prompt (a description), props (a profile with ethnicity, sex and an age from 20 to 80) or photo (a public HTTPS image_url). Creation costs a flat $0.95. You pick a handle, which may start with "@" and is stored without it, and every later video uses that handle.

The result comes back as a job. Poll it, or register a webhook.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/avatar-1.0/generate \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"handle":"@maya","input":{"type":"prompt","prompt":"friendly founder in her thirties, studio light"}}'

What it adds up to

Ten avatars cost 10 x $0.95 = $9.50. A 15 second test video with one at standard is 15 x $0.184 = $2.76, so a first end-to-end try can cost under $4. The numbers for a Tavus plan are on Tavus's pricing page, not on the docs I read, so compare those yourself.

Only use photos of people who agreed to it. If the avatar is invented from a prompt, there is no such person to ask.