Hedra pricing

About

Hedra is an AI media-generation platform that turns images, audio, and text prompts into video, with a flagship focus on talking-head avatars and lip-synced character video (its in-house models are branded Hedra Avatar / Hedra Omnia / Character-3). Hedra Studio is the consumer web app; a separate API platform (api.hedra.com) exposes the same generation engine to developers. The company markets reach of “over 20 million users” and, on its enterprise page, claims it is “trusted by 20% of the Fortune 500” with “+6 Million Users” and “+50,000 Businesses.”

The product spans four media types — video, image, audio (text-to-speech), and editing — and aggregates both first-party models and a broad catalog of third-party models (Flux, Imagen 4, Nano Banana, Ideogram for images; ElevenLabs and Cartesia for voice; Sora 2, Veo 3/3.1, Kling, Seedance, VEED Fabric for video). All of these are metered through a single credit currency, so users do not buy separate subscriptions per model.

Hedra sells to individual creators, prosumers, and small teams through self-serve plans, and runs a separate sales-led Enterprise motion (the /enterprise page positions “Visual Intelligence” for go-to-market teams producing brand ads, product demos, and training content). Its closest pricing peers in this corpus are other credit-metered AI video/avatar platforms such as HeyGen, Synthesia, and Runway.

Founded in 2023 by CEO Michael Lingelbach, Hedra came out of stealth in June 2024 alongside a $10M seed (Index Ventures, Abstract Ventures, a16z speedrun) and its first model, Character-1. It raised a $32M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Infrastructure fund in May 2025 (Matt Bornstein joined the board), bringing total funding to ~$44M at a reported ~$200M valuation, with ~2.5 million users at the time. The funding round and the launch of its omnimodal Character-3 model bracket the single most important event in Hedra’s pricing story: its mid-2025 switch from minute-metered subscriptions to a credit wallet (see Pricing evolution).

Pricing summary : How Hedra’s credit-based subscription works

Hedra uses a credit-based subscription model with three dimensions:

1. Subscription tier (monthly fee → bundled credit pool): Basic $15/mo (1,500 credits), Creator $30/mo (5,400 credits), Professional $75/mo (14,400 credits), Teams $75/mo (14,400 credits, “For Business”), and Enterprise (custom). Higher tiers also buy faster generation queues and, from Professional up, the ability to purchase extra credit packs.
2. Credit consumption (the meter): every generation deducts credits from your balance. Video is metered per second of output (e.g., Hedra Avatar at 7 credits/second, Hedra Omnia at 15, Veo 3 at 55, Sora 2 Pro at 70). Images are metered per megapixel or per image (Flux Dev 4/megapixel, Flux Pro 7/megapixel, Imagen 4 / Nano Banana 8/image). Text-to-speech is metered per 1,000 characters (ElevenLabs and Cartesia both 15 credits / 1,000 characters).
3. Credit packs + API (top-ups on the same balance): monthly subscription credits reset each cycle and do not roll over, but separately-purchased credit packs do roll over and are consumed only after monthly credits are depleted. The API draws from the same credit balance and supports automatic top-up.

This is a credit-based billing model layered on a flat subscription. What makes this different: Hedra normalizes radically different media types — per-second video, per-megapixel images, per-character speech — into one fungible credit wallet, and splits expiry behavior so plan credits are use-it-or-lose-it while purchased packs persist.

Pricing by product

Hedra Studio (Individual plans)

Hedra for Business

Sales motions across products: PLG / self-serve for Basic, Creator, Professional, and Teams; sales-led for Enterprise.

Per-credit usage rates (the meter inside every plan)

Every generation deducts from the plan’s credit pool at model-specific rates. Video is per-second; images are per-megapixel or per-image; speech is per 1,000 characters.

Video credits are deducted by generated length, billed per second (Hedra’s FAQ: “if you generate a 10 second video with Character-3, you’ll only be charged for 10 seconds of video and not for a full minute”). The full video catalog spans roughly 7–70 credits/second depending on model.

How the API maps to credits

The API platform (api.hedra.com/web-app/public) draws from the same credit balance as the web app — there is no separate API wallet. Developers can configure automatic recharge: a top-up triggers when the balance falls below a chosen minimum and refills to a chosen ceiling, with an optional monthly spending cap (Hedra’s billing FAQ documents minimum thresholds for each value). A public GET /billing/credits endpoint returns the remaining credit balance.

Hidden costs : What credit burn really costs on premium video models

The sticker price is the subscription fee, but the real cost is how fast a given model drains the monthly credit pool. Because rates span 7 credits/second (Hedra Avatar) to 70 credits/second (Sora 2 Pro), the same dollar buys radically different amounts of usable output. This is the classic credit-as-currency abstraction problem: the headline number tells you nothing until you map it to the work you actually do.

Archetype 1 — how many seconds of video each plan buys

The table below converts each tier’s monthly credit pool into seconds of generated video on a cheap first-party model (Hedra Avatar, 7/sec) versus a premium third-party model (Sora 2 Pro, 70/sec). Premium models exhaust the pool roughly 10x faster.

A Basic subscriber experimenting with Sora 2 Pro gets only ~21 seconds of output for the month before the pool is empty — a stark example of why credit systems can produce bill shock when the value metric is invisible at purchase.

Archetype 2 — the rollover-pack top-up cost

Once the monthly pool is gone, the only way to keep generating mid-cycle is a credit pack (purchasable from Creator up). Packs roll over and are spent only after plan credits, so they behave like a persistent reserve rather than a forced monthly buy.

The split-expiry design (plan credits reset, packs persist) softens this: a buyer who over-purchases one month keeps the surplus, which is friendlier than the older minute-overage model that charged a flat $0.50/min with no carryover. See our guide to credit-based pricing models for how this expiry split affects revenue recognition and buyer trust.

Want to estimate your own Hedra bill? Use the Hedra pricing calculator to model your monthly cost based on credit pool, model mix, and seconds of video generated.

Pricing evolution : From per-generation to a unified credit wallet

Hedra’s pricing has been through one of the cleanest model pivots in this corpus: it began life as a minute-metered video subscription and, within roughly two months of its May 2025 Series A, converted wholesale to a credit wallet. The two models price the same underlying product on entirely different value metrics.

Cadence

Tracked range: 2024-11 to 2026-06 (Wayback main-pricing snapshots; 2025-12 onward archived as JS-skeleton client-side errors and excluded).

Notable changes

• 2024-11-17 — Earliest captured pricing (Wayback, read from screenshot): minute-metered subscription. Free $0, Basic $10 (20 min/mo), Creator $25 (1 hr/mo, MOST POPULAR), Professional $50 (2 hr/mo), Enterprise custom. Overage at $0.50/minute. The value metric was minutes of video.
• 2025-03-04 — Minute-metered structure unchanged (Wayback, read from screenshot), captured days before the Character-3 omnimodal model and Hedra Studio launch (Product Hunt 2025-03-07, 143 upvotes).
• 2025-05-15 — $32M Series A led by a16z Infrastructure (Matt Bornstein joins board); total funding $44M; ~2.5M users; ~$200M valuation (Reuters, via TechCrunch).
• 2025-05-17 — Model pivot: Hedra switches from minutes to a credit wallet. Its own announcement: “Creator plans now include 4,000 credits/month - Pro plans include 12,000 credits/month - We’ve also added a new $100 pack with 16,000 credits.” Early rates: 540p = 3 credits/sec, 720p = 6 credits/sec.
• 2025-07-22 — Live Avatars launches (real-time streaming avatars, sub-100ms latency via LiveKit) at $0.05/min, “15x cheaper than existing solutions” — billed separately from the credit subscription.
• 2026-06-04 — Current public pricing captured: Basic $15 / Creator $30 / Professional $75 (1,500 / 5,400 / 14,400 monthly credits), Teams $75 “For Business,” Enterprise custom, now spanning 30+ models with per-model credit rates.

The minutes-to-credits pivot in detail

The shift is the most strategically interesting thing about Hedra’s pricing. Under the minute model, a buyer’s mental math was simple (“$25 buys an hour of video”) but the meter was coarse: every video-minute cost the same regardless of which model rendered it, and overage was a flat $0.50/min. That works when there is essentially one model. Once Character-3 landed and Hedra began aggregating Sora, Veo, Kling, Flux, ElevenLabs and dozens more — each with wildly different inference costs — a flat per-minute price could not absorb a 10x cost spread between a cheap avatar render and a premium Sora clip.

The credit wallet solved exactly that: by pricing each model at its own per-second (or per-megapixel, or per-character) credit rate, Hedra could add expensive frontier models without re-pricing the whole catalog, and keep one subscription across every media type. This is the same aggregator-margin pressure that pushes platforms off flat pricing and toward metered currencies. The tradeoff is buyer legibility: “$30 = 5,400 credits” is far harder to reason about than “$25 = 1 hour,” which is why the hidden-cost burn tables above matter so much for this kind of model.

What’s unique : One credit wallet across video, image, and speech

1. One credit wallet, three meters. Hedra collapses per-second video, per-megapixel/per-image generation, and per-1,000-character speech into a single fungible credit currency, so a user never manages separate balances per media type or per model. A 1-second Hedra Avatar clip (7 credits), a 1-megapixel Flux Dev image (4 credits), and 1,000 characters of ElevenLabs speech (15 credits) all draw from the same pool — the kind of normalized value metric most multi-product platforms struggle to design.

2. Split-expiry credits separate recurring revenue from goodwill. Monthly plan credits are use-it-or-lose-it and reset each cycle, but separately-purchased credit packs roll over indefinitely and are spent only after the monthly pool is exhausted. This split lets Hedra keep predictable subscription revenue (expiring credits) while removing the resentment buyers feel about wasted overage — a deliberate design choice we cover in our credits-vs-entitlements guide.

3. The API shares one balance with the web app. Unlike platforms that run a separate developer wallet, Hedra’s API (api.hedra.com) draws from the same credit balance as Hedra Studio, with configurable automatic recharge (below-balance trigger, ceiling, optional monthly cap). A developer and a creator on the same account never reconcile two meters — a meaningful simplification over the dual-wallet norm.

4. Pricing as an aggregator, not a model-maker. Hedra meters its own first-party models (Avatar, Omnia) alongside 30+ third-party models (Sora 2, Veo 3/3.1, Kling, Seedance, Flux, Imagen 4, ElevenLabs, Cartesia) through the same credit rates. The credit abstraction is what makes this aggregation possible: it lets Hedra add a frontier model at its own per-second rate without re-pricing the catalog — the structural reason it abandoned flat minute-pricing in May 2025.

5. A real-time tier priced outside the wallet. Live Avatars (launched July 2025) is billed at a flat $0.05/min of streaming, separate from the credit subscription — a deliberate carve-out for a fundamentally different cost structure (continuous streaming via LiveKit) that would have distorted the credit economy if folded in.

Strengths & weaknesses

Billing UX : Credit meter, in-app plan toggle, and API auto-recharge

• Live credit meter — the current credit balance is always visible in the app (top-right on mobile, lower-left on desktop), and clicking it opens Upgrade Plan / Buy more (credit pack) options.
• Monthly vs. annual toggle — a toggle above the plan options at hedra.com/app/subscription switches between monthly and annual billing; the public /pricing page shows only monthly. Plan changes take effect at the start of the next billing cycle.
• Credit packs (Buy more) — one-time credit-pack purchases are available immediately (no wait for the next cycle), roll over between billing cycles, and are consumed only after monthly plan credits are depleted.
• API auto-recharge — under Profile → API, “Modify” configures an automatic top-up: a below-balance trigger, a recharge ceiling, and an optional monthly spending cap (each field carries a documented minimum).
• Generation history & credit refunds — a billing/usage page (hedra.com/app/settings/billing) lists all generations, debits, and refunds.
• Annual credit front-loading — annual subscribers receive all 12 months of credits upfront at purchase (e.g., a 4,000-credit/month plan delivers 48,000 credits immediately), to spend at any pace across the year.

Strategic wins : Decisions that strengthened Hedra’s pricing

1. Unified credit currency removes per-model purchase friction

Metering every model — first-party and third-party — through one credit wallet means users never have to reason about which subscription covers which model, lowering the activation barrier for trying premium video models. It also let Hedra scale from one model to 30+ without touching its tier prices, the structural advantage of a usage-based value metric over per-feature packaging.

2. Per-second video billing aligns cost to actual output

Charging by generated second (a 10-second clip costs 10 seconds, not a rounded minute) keeps short-form iteration cheap and matches the burst-heavy way creators actually test prompts. This is a cleaner alignment than the old minute-rounding model and reflects the granular metering trend across AI media tools.

3. Rollover credit packs protect top-up spend

Letting purchased packs persist indefinitely (while monthly credits reset) removes the resentment of wasted overage purchases and makes buying extra credits feel low-risk. The split-expiry design preserves recurring revenue without punishing the heaviest, most valuable users.

4. Repricing in lockstep with the Series A narrative

Hedra timed its move to credits to the May 2025 a16z round, framing it as “passing that value directly to you” (more credits per dollar as Character-3 got cheaper to run). Bundling a pricing change inside a funding/efficiency story is a textbook way to reprice without backlash — and it worked: the change drew no material community pushback (no HN thread >50 points; no Reddit thread >2,000 upvotes located).

Areas to improve : Where Hedra’s pricing creates friction

1. Surface annual pricing on the public page

Annual dollar prices are only visible behind an in-app toggle, forcing prospects to sign in before comparing annual savings. Showing annual prices (and the front-loaded credit math) on /pricing would aid evaluation.

2. Differentiate Teams from Professional

Teams and Professional are both $75/mo with the same 14,400-credit allotment, blurring the upgrade rationale. Adding seat management, shared credit pools, or a higher allotment to Teams would clarify the business tier.

3. Publish credit-burn estimates per model

Because premium video models (Sora 2 Pro at 70 credits/second) drain a plan’s pool rapidly, an upfront “this generation will cost ~N credits / X seconds of plan” estimate would reduce bill shock for new users — exactly the gap the credit-burn tables above try to fill.

Key takeaways

1. Fungible credits can unify wildly different meters. Hedra proves a single currency can span per-second video, per-megapixel images, and per-character speech without separate balances — see our credit-based pricing guide.
2. A credit abstraction is what lets you become an aggregator. Flat per-minute pricing could not survive a 10x cost spread across 30+ models; per-model credit rates let Hedra add frontier models without re-pricing tiers. Flat pricing dies as AI model costs diverge.
3. Reprice during a funding/efficiency moment, not in isolation. Hedra moved from minutes to credits days after its Series A, framed as passing efficiency savings to users — and absorbed no material backlash.
4. Split expiry buys you both recurring revenue and goodwill. Expiring plan credits protect MRR; rolling-over purchased packs remove overage resentment. Most teams pick one; Hedra ran both. More in credits vs entitlements.
5. Carve out structurally different products from the main meter. Live Avatars’ continuous streaming costs nothing like batch generation, so Hedra priced it separately ($0.05/min) rather than distorting the credit economy — a discipline many platforms skip.

UBP implications

1. Split-expiry credit design balances predictability and retention. Letting plan credits expire while purchased packs roll over preserves recurring revenue while reducing buyer resentment about wasted top-ups — a pattern worth copying for any usage-based product.
2. The value metric must survive your cost structure changing. Hedra’s minute-metric broke the moment inference costs diverged across models; a credit metric that maps to per-model cost is far more durable as a catalog grows. Choose the metric that tracks your marginal cost.
3. Legibility is the tax you pay for flexibility. Credits let you price anything, but “$30 = 5,400 credits” is opaque versus “$25 = 1 hour.” Teams adopting credits should invest in calculators and per-action estimates to win back the clarity they traded away — the gap our pricing calculators exist to close.

Sources

• Hedra pricing page (accessed 2026-06-04)
• Hedra credits & billing FAQ (how credits work) (accessed 2026-06-04)
• Hedra annual subscription credits docs (accessed 2026-06-04)
• Hedra change plan / buy credits docs (accessed 2026-06-04)
• Hedra video model guide (per-second credit rates) (accessed 2026-06-04)
• Hedra enterprise page (accessed 2026-06-04)

Bottom line

Hedra prices a sprawling multi-model media platform through one deceptively simple lever: a monthly credit wallet that meters per-second video, per-image generation, and per-character speech alike, with use-it-or-lose-it plan credits and rollover packs sitting on the same API-shared balance.

Want to compare Hedra against other AI-media pricing? Browse the pricing blueprint.

Pricing timeline : Major events on a vertical axis

Each milestone below corresponds to a public pricing change, product launch, or material adjustment. Major events use a filled marker; minor adjustments use a faded one.

Multi-model studio: Basic $15 / Creator $30 / Professional $75 (per-model credit rates)

Jun 2026

Current public pricing captured: Basic $15/mo (1,500 credits), Creator $30/mo (5,400 credits, marked POPULAR), Professional $75/mo (14,400 credits, BEST VALUE), Teams $75/mo (For Business), and a custom Enterprise tier. The credit wallet now spans 30+ first- and third-party models with per-model rates (per-second video, per-megapixel/image, per-1,000-character speech). All prices billed monthly; annual billing via an in-app toggle. Wayback snapshots from 2025-12 onward archived only as JS-skeleton client-side errors, so this entry is sourced from the live capture. Source: https://www.hedra.com/pricing

Switch to credit-based wallet (post-Series A): Creator 4,000 / Pro 12,000 credits + $100 pack

May 2025

Following the $32M a16z-led Series A (announced 2025-05-15), Hedra moved from minute-metering to a credit wallet. Hedra's own announcement (X, 2025-05-17): 'Creator plans now include 4,000 credits/month - Pro plans include 12,000 credits/month - We've also added a new $100 pack with 16,000 credits.' Early credit rates: 540p = 3 credits/sec, 720p = 6 credits/sec; plan credits reset monthly, purchased packs roll over. This is the major model inflection. Corroborated by techcrunch.com/2025/05/15 and multiple reviews. Source: https://x.com/hedra_labs/status/1924885813067915331

Minute-metered tiers unchanged through Character-3 launch

Mar 2025

Wayback 2025-03-04 (read from screenshot) shows the identical $0/$10/$25/$50 minute-metered structure as Nov 2024, captured days before the Character-3 / Hedra Studio launch (Product Hunt launch 2025-03-07, 143 upvotes). Pricing model was still video-minutes with $0.50/min overage at this point. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20250304201031/https://www.hedra.com/pricing

Minute-metered subscription: Free $0 / Basic $10 / Creator $25 / Professional $50

Nov 2024

Earliest captured pricing (Wayback 2024-11-17, read from screenshot): a four-tier minute-of-video subscription — Free $0 (5 videos/day, no commercial use), Basic $10/mo (20 min video/mo), Creator $25/mo (1 hr/mo, MOST POPULAR), Professional $50/mo (2 hr/mo), plus a custom Enterprise tier. Overage billed at $0.50/minute of additional video. The meter was video-minutes, not credits. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20241117024735/https://www.hedra.com/pricing