# HeyGen Credits and Export Limits, Explained Plainly

*How-to — 2026-10-18 — by Mahmoud Zalt*

What a HeyGen credit buys, which features burn them fastest, whether they roll over, and the watermark, resolution and duration limits per plan.

**Short answer.** **One credit buys roughly three seconds of Avatar IV or Avatar V video, and every feature draws from the same monthly pool.** HeyGen's credits article documents different rates per feature, with expressive motion doubling the cost of a scene and translation charged by the minute. Unused credits carry for one extra billing cycle on a monthly plan, and drop to nothing if you cancel down to the free tier.

**About this guide.** This guide is based on publicly available information and HeyGen's own documentation, checked on 17 August 2026. Sistava is not affiliated with HeyGen. Interfaces and pricing change often, so confirm the current steps in their documentation before you rely on them.

Credits are the real ceiling on what you can do in HeyGen. The plan name tells you which features you can reach, but the credit balance tells you how much video you can actually produce this month.

The confusion is that credits are not priced per video. They are priced per second, per minute, per look or per training run depending on which feature you touched, and the same thirty second clip can cost twice as much if you turned one setting on.

So work out your monthly output in seconds before you pick a plan. That single calculation prevents the common outcome of running dry two thirds of the way through a content month.

## What does one HeyGen credit actually buy?

It depends on the feature. HeyGen's credits article lists a single balance shared across Avatar IV and Avatar V, Video Agent, video translation, B-roll generation, Generate Looks and other capabilities, with a different conversion rate for each.

| Feature | Documented rate |
|---|---|
| Avatar IV and Avatar V video | 1 credit equals 3 seconds of video |
| Custom Expressive Motion | Doubles the cost of an Avatar IV scene, so a 30 second scene costs 20 credits instead of 10 |
| Generate Looks | 1 credit equals one look generation |
| AI model training | 60 credits per training run |
| Video translation, standard | 5 credits per minute of video |
| Video translation, precision | Double the standard rate |
| Studio video with Avatar IV via integrations | 20 credits per minute |

The translation numbers appear slightly differently on HeyGen's translation help article, which lists three engines at 2, 5 and 10 credits per minute for audio only, speed and precision respectively. Both are HeyGen's own pages, and both are worth checking against what your account shows before a large job.

## Do HeyGen credits roll over?

Partly, and it depends on how you pay. HeyGen's credits article states that monthly subscribers keep unused credits for one additional billing cycle, up to 60 days in total, while annual subscribers accumulate unused credits across their subscription year.

There is one hard edge. Their documentation is explicit that if you cancel a paid plan and move to Free, unused credits do not roll over. If you have a balance you care about, spend it before you downgrade rather than after.

**One limit that is not about credits at all.** HeyGen's credits article notes a concurrency ceiling: the system will not process 20 videos at the same time. If you are planning a batch run, that matters more than your balance does, because a large queue processes in sequence rather than all at once. Build your schedule around throughput, not just credits.

## What do the plans include?

Credits, export resolution, watermark removal and seats. The figures below were on HeyGen's own pricing page when it was read on 17 August 2026, and pricing pages change, so treat this as a snapshot rather than a standing fact.

| Plan | Monthly price | Credits per month | Export | Watermark |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Not listed | Up to 1080p | Present |
| Creator | $29 | 600 | Up to 1080p | Removed |
| Pro | $49 | 1,000 | Up to 4K | Removed |
| Business | $149 plus $20 per seat | 1,500 | Up to 4K | Removed |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | Flexible | Up to 4K | Removed |

Third-party summaries of the free tier quote different resolution figures than the pricing page lists. When two sources disagree about a competitor's own product, the competitor's own page wins, and your own account settings win over that.

Two other plan-linked limits are worth knowing. Avatar slots are capped per tier, and translation has a per-video duration cap that also moves with your plan.

- **Avatar slots. **HeyGen's Digital Twin FAQ lists one slot on Free, five on Creator and Pro, and ten on Business, with additional slots available as a paid add-on.
- **Rebuilds are rate limited. **The same FAQ limits redoing an avatar, which means deleting it and re-uploading consent and footage, to once per billing cycle.
- **Translation duration caps. **Their translation article documents a 30 minute per-video cap on Creator and Pro, 60 minutes on Business, and no stated duration limit on Enterprise.
- **Source file size. **Videos for translation are documented up to 5GB, in MP4, MOV or WEBM, with a supported duration range of 2 seconds to 10 hours depending on plan.

## How do you budget your own credits?

Count the finished seconds you intend to publish each month, then multiply by your expected redo rate. Almost nobody generates a video once, and the drafts cost the same as the keeper.

### Working out what plan you need

1. **Write down your monthly output in seconds** — Not videos, seconds. Four 60 second clips a week is roughly 960 seconds a month, which at the documented rate of 1 credit per 3 seconds is around 320 credits before any redos.
2. **Multiply by your redo rate** — Assume at least two generations per finished video while you are learning the tool, and be honest about whether that drops later. That 320 becomes 640, which is already past the 600 credits the Creator tier lists.
3. **Add anything that is not avatar video** — Translation is charged per minute of source video, look generation is charged per look, and model training is documented at 60 credits per run. These come out of the same pool, not a separate one.
4. **Check the non-credit limits too** — Avatar slots, translation duration caps, export resolution and seats are set by tier, not by balance. A plan with enough credits and too few avatar slots is still the wrong plan.
5. **Preview before you generate** — The voice preview in the editor reads your real script at no credit cost. Using it consistently is the single cheapest way to cut your redo rate, which is the number that actually drives your bill.
6. **Watch your own billing history** — Track what your first month actually consumed against what you predicted, and adjust rather than trusting any published rate card, including the one in this article.

**An independent audit found gaps worth knowing about.** A published paid audit of HeyGen credit usage reported charges that did not always match the rates on the published pages, no per-job cost breakdown across the billing surfaces, and difficulty attributing cost when two jobs ran at the same time. It also noted that Creator users could not buy extra credits mid-cycle and had to upgrade instead. That is one account's experience rather than a universal rule, and it is a good reason to reconcile your own first month against your own prediction.

Metered pricing always ends this way: you spend time forecasting consumption instead of doing the work the tool was bought for. We landed somewhere different at Sistava, where you **[hire an AI Employee](/solutions)** and give it the outcome you want in plain English, rather than budgeting each action in advance. Different model, same lesson: the forecasting is overhead, not output.

## What is the credit budget really funding?

Rendering. Credits pay for pixels and audio, which is the correct thing for a video tool to charge for. What they do not fund is deciding which videos are worth rendering in the first place.

That decision is where most of the waste lives, and it is the part a Sistava **AI Employee**[ handles. You tell it in plain English what you are trying to achieve this month and it plans the content, drafts the scripts, and tells you which ones are worth producing before you spend a credit on them. It sets itself up from that brief, with nothing to wire.](/features)

HeyGen's credit model is reasonable for what it does, and the documentation is more specific about rates than most tools in this space. The work worth doing on your side is the arithmetic, once, before the first invoice.

## FAQ

### How many credits is one minute of HeyGen video?

For Avatar IV and Avatar V, HeyGen's credits article documents 1 credit per 3 seconds, which works out to 20 credits for a minute. Custom Expressive Motion doubles that for an Avatar IV scene, and Studio video generated through integrations is documented separately at 20 credits per minute. Confirm against your account, since rates change.

### Do HeyGen credits roll over each month?

On a monthly plan, HeyGen documents unused credits carrying into one additional billing cycle, up to 60 days in total. Annual subscribers accumulate unused credits across the subscription year. If you cancel a paid plan and move to the free tier, their documentation states unused credits do not roll over.

### How do I remove the HeyGen watermark?

By upgrading to a paid plan. HeyGen's pricing page, read on 17 August 2026, lists a watermark on the free tier and watermark removal on the paid tiers starting with Creator. There is no setting on the free plan that removes it, so budget for a subscription if the video is going anywhere public.

### What resolution can I export from HeyGen?

HeyGen's pricing page, read on 17 August 2026, listed export up to 1080p on the Free and Creator tiers and up to 4K on Pro, Business and Enterprise. Third-party summaries quote different figures for the free tier, so check the pricing page and your own export dialog rather than a secondhand summary.

### How many custom avatars does each HeyGen plan include?

Their Digital Twin FAQ lists one avatar slot on the free plan, five on Creator and Pro, and ten on Business, with extra slots available as a paid add-on. Redoing an existing avatar means deleting it and re-uploading consent and footage, which the same FAQ limits to once per billing cycle.

### Can I generate lots of HeyGen videos at once?

Not simultaneously. HeyGen's credits article notes a concurrency restriction where the system will not process 20 videos at the same time. For a large batch, that throughput limit will shape your schedule more than your credit balance does, so allow time rather than assuming everything renders in parallel.

## Sources

- [HeyGen Help Center, ](https://help.heygen.com/en/articles/15126059-how-to-use-credits-on-heygen)How to Use Credits on HeyGen
- [HeyGen, ](https://www.heygen.com/pricing)Pricing (read 17 August 2026)
- [HeyGen Help Center, ](https://help.heygen.com/en/articles/10029081-how-to-get-started-with-video-translation)How to Get Started with Video Translation
- [HeyGen Help Center, ](https://help.heygen.com/en/articles/9380615-digital-twin-faq)Digital Twin FAQ
- [HeyGen Help Center, ](https://help.heygen.com/en/articles/10324568-personalized-video-an-introduction)Personalized Video: An Introduction
- [Future Stack Reviews, ](https://future-stack-reviews.com/how-to-use-heygen/)How to Use HeyGen Credits: A 439-Credit Paid Audit

**Tags:** heygen, heygen-credits, ai-video-pricing, video-export-limits, ai-video-generation