# HeyGen — AI avatar video platform with voice cloning, translation into 175+ languages, API and MCP server.

> Source: AgentsIndex — https://agentsindex.ai/heygen (structured, researched, re-verified)
> Facts last verified: 2026-10-19 · 2 facts changed

HeyGen is an AI video platform that turns a script or a single prompt into presenter video, using stock avatars or one trained on your own face and voice. It clones voices, translates footage, and exposes the same pipeline through an API and MCP server.

| Fact | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Website | https://heygen.com |
| Price | free, then from $29/month billed monthly, $24/month billed annually |
| Free tier | Yes |

Free plan at $0/mo: 3 videos per month, videos up to 1 minute, standard processing, 1 custom video avatar, up to 3 photo avatars, 30+ languages, 500+ stock avatars, no watermark removal, no 1080p or 4K export, and output licensed for personal and internal evaluation only.

## What it costs to start

**Free tier** · Yes — A standing $0 plan gives three videos a month at one minute each with watermarking, and its output is licensed for personal and internal evaluation only, not commercial use.

> User Output generated under a Free Plan may not be sold, sublicensed, redistributed, monetized, or used in connection with commercial activities, advertising, client work, revenue-generating product or any other services.
> — https://www.heygen.com/terms · Section 4, License to your Content

**Self-serve signup** · Partly — Free, Creator, Pro and Business all carry published prices and card checkout links, while Enterprise is the only tier that routes through a sales conversation.

> Creator $29 / mo Generative AI video creation for solo creators. Provides access to advanced features like the AI video generator and AI voice over.
> — https://www.heygen.com/pricing · For Individuals plan cards, Creator card with Get started checkout link

**Cancel any time** · Partly — Subscriptions can be canceled from the account at any time with no stated fee, but nothing already paid is refunded and access simply runs to the end of the paid period.

> You may cancel your Recurring Subscription through your account at any time, but if you cancel your Recurring Subscription before the end of the current subscription period, we will not refund any charges already paid to us.
> — https://www.heygen.com/terms · Section 7, Subscriptions

## What it works with

**Public API** · Yes — A documented public v3 REST API covers video creation, templates, voice cloning, translation and batching, authenticated with a key header against api.heygen.com, with its own playground and pricing.

> **Base URL** `https://api.heygen.com` · **Auth header** `X-Api-Key: <your-key>`
> — https://developers.heygen.com/docs/quick-start · Your first video section, Info callout

**MCP server** · Yes — HeyGen runs a hosted remote MCP server at mcp.heygen.com with OAuth sign-in and roughly eighty tools, available on every plan and billed from the plan's own credits.

> Add HeyGen as a connector in your AI agent and start generating videos in a few clicks — no API key and nothing to install. Usage draws on your existing HeyGen plan's credits.
> — https://developers.heygen.com/mcp/overview · Overview, opening paragraph

## What it does on its own

**Acts on its own** · Yes — Video Agent takes one prompt and runs scripting, avatar choice, scene composition and rendering to a finished file with no approval between steps, and its fire-and-forget mode is documented as such.

> One-shot video generation from a prompt — agent handles scripting, avatar selection, scene composition, and rendering. Supports generate (fire-and-forget) and chat (multi-turn) modes.
> — https://developers.heygen.com/mcp/overview · What You Can Do, Video Agent tool table, create_video_agent row

**Limits on what it may do** · Partly — Agent access is gated by a one-time OAuth approval and by domain whitelisting on the hosted MCP endpoint, but no per-tool allow list or spend ceiling for an agent is documented anywhere.

> For security, HeyGen Remote MCP uses domain whitelisting. If your agent runs on a domain that isn't already whitelisted, you'll need to request access before it can connect.
> — https://developers.heygen.com/mcp/overview · Connect Your Own Agent section

**No code needed** · Yes — The whole studio is driven by typing a script or a prompt in a browser editor, and the vendor frames setup as writing a document rather than configuring anything.

> The text-based editor makes AI video generation as easy as writing a document. Control tone, delivery, gestures, and emotion in one seamless platform built for human-first storytelling.
> — https://www.heygen.com/ · AI Studio section, body paragraph

## What happens to your data

**No training on your data** · Partly — Enterprise data is held out of model training by default, while everyone else is in by default and has to email the privacy team to opt out, and the terms separately grant a training license over uploaded content.

> Enterprise customers' data is excluded from AI model training by default. Non-enterprise customers may opt out at any time by contacting [email protected].
> — https://www.heygen.com/security · Security Controls, AI Model Training section

**Retention you control** · Partly — Deletion on request is targeted within 72 hours and backups purge 60 days after deletion, but no customer-configurable retention window or switch is published for the standard plans.

> After you delete the information or the account, it is kept in the backups for the purpose of disaster recovery for 60 days and then automatically and permanently erased.
> — https://www.heygen.com/privacy · Section 8, How Long Do We Store Your Information?

**Data stays in your region** · No — There is a single region and no choice of it: all customer data sits in the United States, with European transfers handled by the Data Privacy Framework and standard contractual clauses instead of local storage.

> All HeyGen customer data is stored in the United States on AWS infrastructure. For customers subject to data residency requirements, HeyGen is certified for the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (DPF)
> — https://www.heygen.com/security · Security Controls, Data Residency section

**Self-hosted** · No — The service runs only on HeyGen's own AWS estate in the United States, and no on-premises, private-cloud or virtual-private-cloud deployment is offered on any tier including Enterprise.

> HeyGen's services are hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the United States. Our cloud infrastructure is configured with restricted access controls, ensuring that data storage and processing remain secure and auditable.
> — https://www.heygen.com/security · HeyGen Platform Controls, Public Cloud Infrastructure section

**Open source** · No — The platform is proprietary and the terms forbid decompiling or reverse engineering it, so no part of the product a buyer uses is published under an open license.

> Duplicate, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble or decode the Services (including any underlying idea or algorithm), or attempt to do any of the same;
> — https://www.heygen.com/terms · Section 2, License to Use the Services, prohibited uses list

**Take your data out** · Yes — Finished videos download directly and the API returns file URLs, while contract termination carries a commitment to hand back all customer data in a common format.

> Upon termination of a customer's contract, HeyGen is committed to assisting in the return of all customer data in a commonly used format, as detailed in the contract terms.
> — https://www.heygen.com/security · Security Controls, Return of Customer Data section

## Whether a company can buy it

**Security audits** · Yes — SOC 2 Type II certification is claimed with annual third-party penetration testing, and reports are released to customers on request through a security portal.

> We are SOC 2 Type II certified, reflecting our ongoing commitment to robust cybersecurity practices. Annual penetration testing is conducted by an independent third-party security firm
> — https://www.heygen.com/security · HeyGen Platform Controls, Audits section

**Single sign-on** · Partly — SAML single sign-on starts at the Business tier and is absent from Free, Creator and Pro, with SCIM provisioning held back for Enterprise only.

> SAML/ SSO
> — https://www.heygen.com/pricing · Compare pricing plans table, Privacy & Security group, SAML/SSO row: crosses on Free, Creator and Pro, checks on Business and Enterprise

**Audit log** · Partly — User and administrative activity is logged and surfaced to customers, but the comparison table marks the audit log as an Enterprise feature with every self-serve tier crossed out.

> HeyGen maintains audit logs of user activity and administrative actions, giving enterprise customers visibility into how their accounts and data are being accessed and managed.
> — https://www.heygen.com/security · Security Controls, Security Logs section

## Which models it runs on

**Its own model** · Yes — HeyGen trains and serves its own avatar, voice and video models, publishes a research report on the Avatar V training pipeline, and exposes them by name in the API as heygen-video-1 and HeyGen Voice.

> Avatar V: Scaling video-reference avatar generation. Built on a five-stage AI training pipeline that captures not just how you look, but how you move, gesture, and express yourself.
> — https://www.heygen.com/ · HeyGen Research section heading and subheading

**You pick the model** · Partly — You pick the engine from a short vendor-curated set, Avatar III, IV or V for video and Starfish, HeyGen Voice or ElevenLabs for speech, and the full advanced model set only opens on the Pro tier.

> Creates an avatar video: a HeyGen avatar or an image speaks your script or audio with lip-sync. Choose Avatar III, IV or V with `engine` (Avatar IV by default).
> — https://developers.heygen.com/mcp/overview · Videos tool table, create_video row

## Changed since our last check

- **Limits on what it may do**: now Partly. It was Yes when we checked on 2026-10-18.
- **Take your data out**: now Yes. It was Partly when we checked on 2026-10-18.

## The product is an avatar video factory with three front doors

HeyGen generates video of a presenter who never stood in front of a camera. You either pick one of the stock avatars, [500+ on the free plan and 700+ on paid](https://www.heygen.com/pricing), or train a custom one from your own footage or a single photo, then give it a script and it speaks with lip-sync the vendor describes as phoneme-level across [175+ languages and dialects](https://www.heygen.com/).

There are three ways in, and they matter for who should buy it. AI Studio is a text-based editor where the script is the interface: you type, and tone, gesture and pacing follow the words. Video Agent goes further and takes a single prompt to a finished multi-scene video, with the motion elements left editable afterwards. Video Translation is a separate path that takes existing footage or a YouTube link and re-voices it in another language with the original speaker's cloned voice.

Video Agent is what makes this an agent rather than a tool: its documented mode is [fire-and-forget](https://developers.heygen.com/mcp/overview), with scripting, avatar selection, scene composition and rendering all happening without a checkpoint.

## A plan fee plus a credit meter, and the meter is what to model

The self-serve ladder runs Free at $0, Creator at $29, Pro at $49 and Business at $149 a month, with Enterprise quoted by sales. Paying yearly drops those to $24, $41 and $119 a month, billed as $288, $488 and $1,428 up front. The vendor states the yearly totals but prints no savings percentage anywhere on the [pricing page](https://www.heygen.com/pricing).

What each plan actually buys is credits: 600 on Creator, 1,000 on Pro, 1,500 on Business. How many credits a given video consumes is not published, which is the single biggest gap in the rate card. Pro's "Customizable monthly usage" means you can buy a larger pool than the default.

There are meters beside the plan meter. The API has its own credits and its own [pricing page](https://app.heygen.com/developers/api?modal=pricing) behind the app. The docs note that an API key is charged 1 API credit per avatar look while an OAuth or MCP call takes the method's standard price from workspace credits, and that OAuth requests including MCP are rounded up per request "so their effective cost can be higher". Individual jobs can carry their own rate: filler word removal is documented at $0.30 per source minute with a one-minute minimum. Exceeding the plan volume moves you to a la carte rates under [section 7(b) of the terms](https://www.heygen.com/terms).

Two price facts a buyer meets late: seats on Business cost $20 each per month on top of the $149, and the free plan's output is licensed for "personal, non-commercial, and internal evaluation purposes" only, so a free account cannot legally be used to make a client video even though it will render one.

## The API and the MCP server are first-class, not an afterthought

The v3 REST API at `api.heygen.com` covers video creation, templates with variables, instant and professional voice cloning, text to speech, translation, lipsync, AI clipping and batches of up to 100 jobs. Completion arrives either by polling or by [signed webhooks](https://developers.heygen.com/docs/webhooks): HMAC-SHA256 over the raw body, a 10-second window to answer with a 2xx, and retries with exponential backoff for up to 24 hours. A one-off `callback_url` on the create call works when a persistent endpoint is overkill.

More unusual is the hosted MCP server at `mcp.heygen.com/mcp/v1/`. It needs no API key and nothing installed: the client authenticates by OAuth and the agent then calls roughly eighty tools covering nearly the whole API surface. The vendor states it is [available on all HeyGen plans](https://developers.heygen.com/mcp/overview) and bills from the plan's existing credits rather than a separate developer account, with one documented exception, that free-tier MCP access cannot call the avatar-looks endpoint.

Two practical constraints sit on that server. It uses domain whitelisting, so a custom agent on an unlisted domain has to request access first. And the v1 and v2 endpoints are supported only until 31 October 2026, so anything built on the older API has a migration ahead of it.

## Security is documented, and the enterprise controls sit high up

HeyGen publishes an unusually specific [security page](https://www.heygen.com/security): SOC 2 Type II certification, annual third-party penetration testing with reports released on request, AES-256 at rest and TLS 1.2 or higher in transit, Cloudflare DDoS protection, a SIEM, and a named Data Protection Officer based in Europe. Compliance claims extend to GDPR, CCPA, the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and the EU AI Act, with a subprocessor list on a separate security portal.

The gating is where buyers should look twice. Multi-factor authentication is on every tier, but SAML single sign-on begins at Business, and SCIM provisioning, enforced team-member 2FA and the audit log are all marked Enterprise-only in the plan comparison table. A company that needs an audit trail is therefore a sales conversation, not a checkout.

No uptime commitment is published. The security page claims redundant systems and automatic failover, but no percentage appears anywhere on the site.

## The vendor's own pages disagree about model training

The security page is clear that enterprise data is held out of training by default and that everyone else can opt out by emailing the privacy team, and that subprocessors are contractually barred from training on customer data.

The terms of service, accepted by every user, read differently. By uploading content you grant HeyGen a licence to use it "to operate, improve, promote and provide the Services and to develop new services and products, including to train or otherwise improve or modify our artificial intelligence and machine learning models", and that grant is described as "royalty-free, transferable, sublicensable, worldwide and irrevocable" and is stated to survive termination. The [privacy policy](https://www.heygen.com/privacy) sits between the two, listing model training as a legitimate-interest purpose with opt-out by email.

So the opt-out is real and documented, but it is an opt-out from a default that the contract words broadly, and it is exercised by email rather than a setting. For a buyer uploading a founder's face and voice, that is the paragraph to put in front of counsel. The biometric angle is explicit too: the privacy policy says some features "require us to process parts of faces or bodies within a video or photo, and this may include face imagery".

## Where it fits, and where it does not

It fits a marketing, enablement or L&D team that needs the same message as video in many languages and does not want a studio booking for each one. The translation path, the brand glossary, SCORM export and LMS integrations on Business all point at that buyer, and so do the n8n, Make, HubSpot and Zapier integrations listed on the same tier.

It fits a developer differently, as a rendering backend: batch endpoints, templates with declared variables and webhooks are the shape of per-viewer personalized video at volume.

It does not fit anyone who needs the data to stay outside the United States: there is one region and no choice of it. It does not fit a self-hosting requirement, since nothing runs on customer infrastructure on any tier. It does not fit a buyer who needs an audit log or SCIM below Enterprise. And it does not fit a budget that must be fixed in advance, because the credit cost of a video is not published and several surcharges sit outside the plan meter.

The operator is HeyGen Technology, Inc. of 12130 Millennium Drive, Suite 300, Los Angeles, and the arbitration clause names Los Angeles County, California. Its claims of 1,000,000+ users, a Forbes AI 50 place and 4.8 of 5 on G2 rest on its own pages.

## What changed

- 2026-10-24 — Categories
- 2026-10-19 — Free tier · What it does
- 2026-10-18 — Free tier · Price · What it does

## Keeping it current

These facts are re-checked against HeyGen's own pages and updated when they change. If you represent HeyGen, sign in and update the listing from your dashboard at https://agentsindex.ai/dashboard. The operations this site accepts from an agent are listed at https://agentsindex.ai/.well-known/agents.json — that catalog needs no key to read, and each entry states its own auth.