AI UGC price per ad, tool by tool

Why 30 seconds costs 40 times more on one tool than another

The 40-times gap comes before billing rounding and retries add to either end, and a plan’s monthly price explains little of it. HeyGen Creator, JoggAI Starter, D-ID Pro and Synthesia Starter all list $29 a month.

What that price buys differs 15 times over. HeyGen’s 600 credits make 150 minutes of Avatar III video a month. JoggAI’s 12,000 make about 120 by its Starter card, D-ID Pro gives 15 and Synthesia Starter 10.

Within one tool, the avatar model sets the price. HeyGen’s help centre charges 4 credits a minute for Avatar III with a Video Look, its oldest model, and 48 for Avatar V, its newest. The same 600 credits shrink from 150 minutes to 12.5, and 30 seconds on Avatar V costs $1.16.

Leave Avatar III out and JoggAI’s Starter-card rate, $0.12 for 30 seconds if billed pro rata, is the table’s lowest. Captions’ figure is 33 times that, or 17 times JoggAI’s Free-card rate.

JoggAI and Argil each give two rates for the same video, so their rows are ranges. Argil’s docs also still list plans the live pricing page no longer sells.

Vendor guides quote ranges with no plan behind them. Sparkiz’s cost guide says AI UGC tools “generally run” $3 to $25 per finished video, then prices only its own plans. The first table names the plan behind each figure.

Billing rounding: when a 15-second hook can bill as a minute

Arcads’ credits article (29 April 2026) charges 800 credits per minute per talking actor and says “Length is always rounded up”. It names no rounding unit. Its one rounding example bills 1 minute 45 seconds as 2 minutes, ruling out per-second billing and any step of 15 seconds or less.

Its newer model article (2 July 2026) says “Cost is 1 credit per minute” for the same three models, so the help centre gives two rates. The sums below use 800, the rate with worked examples.

Arcads shows no price list, so its cost stays in credits.

If the step behind that example applies at every length, a 5-second hook bills more than 200 credits. Starter’s 8,000 then cover fewer than 40 such hooks (allowance article). If Arcads bills the started minute, a 15-second hook bills four times its length. Creatify and D-ID bill a 16-second hook as 30 seconds.

Ten 16-second hook variants show what that does to a test. On Arcads, if billed by the started minute, they use 8,000 credits, all of Starter’s monthly allowance. Creatify bills 5 credits per 15 seconds, rounded up (credit usage article), so they use 100 credits, all of Starter at $39 a month. Ten hooks cost what ten 30-second ads would.

The same ten hooks bill 300 seconds on D-ID Pro (pricing FAQ), $9.67 of the plan, and 160 seconds on Synthesia Starter (pricing page), $7.73.

HeyGen’s help centre (17 September 2026) says credit use “may vary based on the feature, model, duration, or generation type selected”. It adds: “When available, HeyGen will show the credit cost in-product before you generate.” If HeyGen billed each started minute, 30 seconds would cost $0.19 on Avatar III and $2.32 on Avatar V.

JoggAI’s pricing page states no rule either: billed by the whole minute, its Starter-card 30 seconds would cost $0.24.

What retries and expiring credits add

Not yet known: how many renders one usable 30-second ad takes on each tool.

Two vendors price a redo. Creatify charges 3 credits per 15 seconds for a revision (credit usage article). On Pro and higher it is free if the script, avatar and voice stay the same.

Synthesia’s pricing FAQ charges only new seconds: “If you edit an existing 1-minute video and change 3 seconds of it, we will only charge you for 3 seconds.”

The video platform invideo made four ads with its agent (write-up updated 15 July 2026) and used 49 of the 103 videos it generated. The company sells that agent, and its ads were cut from many short shots, so the ratio may not carry over to one-take avatar ads.

Unused credits are the second leak. D-ID, Synthesia, Nextify.ai, Maxfusion, Tagshop AI and Arcads’ two smaller plans void them at renewal; HeyGen, Creatify, JoggAI and Captions carry them forward, within limits.

A plan you do not fill costs more per video. Ten 30-second videos a month on D-ID Pro at $29 a month use 5 of its 15 minutes. The other 10 lapse, so each video costs $2.90, three times the table’s figure.

Tools that sell a video count instead of a length

Nextify.ai, CreateUGC, Maxfusion and Tagshop AI state on their pricing pages how many videos a plan makes. None says how long the counted video is, so they stay out of the 30-second table. Divided by their stated counts, the entry plans give $0.58 to $5.80 per video, figures that cannot be set against the rows above.

“Up to” is a ceiling: Nextify says model, avatar, length and resolution all change the credits a video uses.

Wireflow states seconds on its pricing page: about 94 a month on Starter at $24 a month, or $0.26 per second of video, if every credit is used. It does not name the model behind that estimate and says cheaper models give more seconds, so it stays out too.

How much does an AI UGC ad cost per video on your plan?

At list price, with every credit used, $0.10 to $4.00 for 30 seconds (HeyGen, Captions). On your plan, in four steps:

1. Price per credit: the monthly price divided by the credits, minutes or seconds the plan gives.
2. Credits per ad: the help centre’s rate times your ad length after rounding (15-second blocks, whole minutes or seconds).
3. Share used: divide by the share of the month’s credits you will spend before they lapse.
4. Keep rate: divide by the share of renders you keep.

On D-ID Pro, a second costs $0.0322, and a 16-second hook bills 30 seconds, $0.97. Fifteen hooks a month bill 450 of its 900 seconds, half the plan, so each costs $1.93. If you keep one render in two, for example, each usable hook costs $3.87.

The cost per AI ad calculator runs these four steps, billing rounding included. It takes a tool and plan, an ad length, hook variants, the share of takes you keep and the credits you leave unused. Its HeyGen presets price Avatar IV, at 31 credits a minute.

The free AI UGC generators list shows what each free plan withholds.

AI UGC vs human UGC grades the public comparisons of the two and sizes a fair test in your own account.

AI UGC meaning quotes vendor terms on passing an AI actor’s video off as human-made.