HeyGen Credits and Export Limits, Explained Plainly

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Sources

• HeyGen Help Center, How to Use Credits on HeyGen
• HeyGen, Pricing (read 17 August 2026)
• HeyGen Help Center, How to Get Started with Video Translation
• HeyGen Help Center, Digital Twin FAQ
• HeyGen Help Center, Personalized Video: An Introduction
• Future Stack Reviews, How to Use HeyGen Credits: A 439-Credit Paid Audit