Hedra Pricing (2026): Plans, Usage, Benefits

Hedra charges by the second of finished video, which makes its pricing unusually easy to model — and unusually easy to get wrong. Four tiers run from a watermarked free plan to $75/month, and the gap between them is far wider than the sticker prices suggest. One plan even costs more per credit than Hedra's own published rate. Here's the arithmetic.

Hedra pricing at a glance

Hedra has three individual tiers in 2026 plus a free plan: Basic at $15/month (1,500 credits), Creator at $30/month (5,400 credits), and Professional at $75/month (14,400 credits). All three include commercial use. Business buyers get Teams — the same $75 and 14,400 credits as Professional — and a custom-priced Enterprise tier.

What a credit actually buys

Hedra bills per second of output, not per video. For Character-3, that works out to roughly 3 credits per second at 540p, 6 at 720p, and 7.5 at 1080p. A one-minute talking-head video at 720p therefore costs about 360 credits, and a 30-second clip about 180.

This is the single most useful fact about Hedra's pricing, because it makes every plan directly convertible into minutes. Creator's 5,400 credits is 15 minutes of 720p video a month. Professional's 14,400 is 40 minutes. Basic's 1,500 is barely four.

Don't budget in videos. Budget in seconds — Hedra does.

The maximum single generation is 10 minutes. At 720p that one video would consume 3,600 credits — two-thirds of an entire Creator month in a single click. Long-form is where credit balances disappear without warning.

Basic costs more per credit than Hedra's own rate

Hedra publishes per-second pricing on its model pages: 2.5¢ per second at 540p, 5¢ at 720p, and 6.25¢ at 1080p. Divide those by the credits each resolution consumes and they all resolve to the same reference value — about $0.0083 per credit. That figure is the yardstick.

Measured against it, the plans split cleanly. Creator buys credits at $0.0056 — a third below the reference rate. Professional does slightly better at $0.0052. But Basic charges $0.0100 per credit, roughly 20% above Hedra's own published rate. You pay a premium for the privilege of buying the smallest bundle.

The practical takeaway is blunt: Basic is not a cheaper way to use Hedra, it's a more expensive one. Doubling your spend from $15 to $30 gives you 3.6 times the credits, not twice as many. If $15 is genuinely your ceiling, you're better off staying on free until you can justify Creator than paying above list rate for four minutes of video.

The free plan: not quite one video

Hedra's free tier gives roughly 300 credits a month with no card required. At 720p that is 50 seconds of Character-3 video — you cannot generate a single finished one-minute clip. Output is also watermarked and not licensed for commercial use.

Use it as a quality test, not a production run. Generate one 30-second clip with your actual portrait and your actual script. Lip sync and expression quality either hold up at that length or they don't, and 300 credits is exactly enough to find out.

Basic — $15/month

Basic buys 1,500 credits, commercial rights, and the slowest generation queue. That is about four one-minute videos at 720p, or eight at 540p. It is the cheapest way to get an unwatermarked, licensed clip out of Hedra.

Its problem is that four videos a month isn't a content strategy, and the credits cost more per unit than every other route. Basic makes sense for one narrow case: you need occasional licensed avatar clips, a handful a month, and you value the low commitment over the unit economics. For anyone posting weekly, it runs dry in week two.

Creator — $30/month

Creator is the plan most people should buy: 5,400 credits — about 15 minutes of 720p video or 30 at 540p — plus faster generation and commercial use. At $2.00 per finished minute, it's where Hedra's pricing starts making sense against any alternative.

The credit jump is what sells it. Creator gives 3.6x Basic's allowance for 2x the price, which is the largest value step anywhere in the lineup. It's also the tier where generation speed stops being a bottleneck — on Basic you wait, and waiting compounds when you're iterating on takes.

Fifteen one-minute videos a month covers a weekly YouTube upload with room for retakes, or a steady social cadence. For a solo creator building a faceless channel, this is the right size.

Professional — $75/month

Professional adds 14,400 credits (about 40 minutes at 720p), the fastest generation queue, and access to the Teams plan. Per-credit cost bottoms out here at $0.0052, or $1.88 per finished minute.

The unit-cost gain over Creator is small — roughly 6% — so this is a capacity and speed purchase, not a discount. Buy it when you're consistently exhausting Creator, or when turnaround time genuinely costs you money: agency work with client revisions, daily posting, or campaign sprints where a slow queue blocks the whole pipeline.

Resolution is your biggest cost lever

Dropping from 720p to 540p halves your credit burn and doubles every plan's output. Creator goes from 15 minutes a month to 30. That is a bigger swing than any upgrade decision you'll make.

Whether it's the right trade depends entirely on destination. For vertical social video watched on a phone at arm's length, 540p is frequently indistinguishable and buys you twice the content. For a landing-page hero or anything viewed full-screen on desktop, the difference shows. Draft and iterate at 540p, then spend 720p credits only on the take you're actually shipping.

You are also paying for queue position

Unusually, generation speed is an explicit paid axis: Basic is slower, Creator faster, Professional fastest. Most credit-based tools sell you volume; Hedra also sells you priority.

Treat that as a real line item rather than marketing garnish. Avatar video is iterative — you rarely nail delivery on the first take — so queue time multiplies across every retake. If you're producing on a deadline, the speed difference between tiers can matter more than the credit difference.

What a Hedra workflow actually costs

Hedra animates a portrait; it doesn't create one. A realistic budget covers three things: a source portrait, a voice, and the animation itself. Hedra prices only the third.

For the portrait, a generated headshot works as well as a photo — and is often more consistent across a series, which matters when the same presenter has to appear in every video.

For the voice, Hedra can take an audio file you supply, which is where a dedicated voice tool earns its place — see our ElevenLabs pricing breakdown for that side of the stack. And for the scene direction itself, a specific prompt reduces the retakes that quietly drain credits:

Teams and Enterprise

Teams is listed at $75/month for 14,400 credits — identical to Professional, which itself includes Teams plan access. In practice there is no separate mid-market price point; the business tier is the individual top tier with collaboration switched on.

Enterprise is custom-priced and adds dedicated Slack support, an account manager, forward-deployed engineers, private deployments, SSO, management tooling, and legal and security review. That list is a procurement package, not a capability upgrade — the videos are the same.

Which plan should you pick?

Stop at the first line that describes you:

• Testing whether the lip sync holds up — Free. One 30-second clip with your real portrait and script. Expect a watermark.
• Occasional licensed clips, a few a month — Basic at $15. Accept that you're paying above Hedra's list rate for the small bundle.
• Posting weekly in a consistent presenter format — Creator at $30. Fifteen minutes of 720p, faster queue, best value step in the lineup. This is the default answer.
• Daily output, client work, or deadline pressure — Professional at $75. Buy it for the 40 minutes and the fastest queue, not the 6% unit discount.
• A company needing SSO, private deployment, or security review — Enterprise, priced on conversation.

Is Hedra worth the money?

For talking-head video, yes at Creator and above. $2.00 per finished minute against a human presenter, a studio, and an edit is not a close comparison, and Character-3's lip sync remains among the most convincing available. The economics work precisely because you're replacing a production day, not another piece of software.

The caveats are real, though. Basic is priced worse than Hedra's own list rate. The free tier can't finish a single minute. And Hedra only does one job — you still need a portrait and a voice from somewhere else, so the true monthly cost is Hedra plus one or two other subscriptions. Our full Hedra review covers output quality in depth, and Hedra vs OpenArt explains where each tool sits in that stack.

What to do next

Spend the free 300 credits on one 30-second clip using the portrait and script you'd actually publish — not a demo. If the lip sync convinces you, go straight to Creator and skip Basic entirely. Then measure one month of real output in seconds, not videos, and let that number decide whether Professional is warranted.

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