I built my entire video production pipeline around HeyGen's API. Overall I have 179 videos produced so I decided to start to automate. I had 100+ more planned for a professional real estate licensing curriculum I am working on now. I'm writing this because of specific, documented failures that cost me real money and were handled outright BADLY by their service team.
The billing system charges you for failed renders. The API accepts your job, runs compute for several minutes, then returns a failure code after consuming your credits. Not a pre-flight check — mid-render. I confirmed this directly with API logs and screenshots: one render ran for 2.5 minutes before failing, and $22.40 was deducted from my balance with no video delivered. This happened 12 times across two days. Approximately $268 consumed for zero output. My auto-top-up was enabled and fired but too late AND the failed render was still billed against the freshly loaded balance.
The quota monitoring endpoint returns a static number regardless of your actual balance. You cannot check your spend programmatically. Every failure is a blind surprise with no way to prevent it.
Six support agents handled my ticket with no coordination between them. I was told to stay in one thread — that thread went 18 hours with no response. When I escalated I was told to stop opening tickets. The ghosting continued.
When I asked for a sales call to discuss volume pricing — six requests across chat, email, Instagram, and a web form — the answer was: $25,000 minimum upfront annual commitment to qualify for a PHONE CALL and even if I said yes, there was a waiting list. I was an active paying customer in the thousands of dollars (just not willing to pay $25K upfront). That is how they communicate that your account size doesn't matter.
The avatar quality is genuinely good. The API is real. The service is so bad and frustrating that I wish I had started with Synthesia or another provider.
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