You arrive at these five pricing pages with one question: which free plan gives you the most room to try the tool before you pay. There is no single answer, because the five vendors do not meter the same thing. Pika and Runway count credits. Descript and Synthesia count minutes. HeyGen counts finished clips. No vendor here publishes a rate that turns one company's unit into another company's, so ranking them on a shared number is not something the data supports.
Five products, five units
Five tools that make or edit short video each publish a free tier, and each free tier is priced in a different currency: credits, minutes of finished output, or a capped number of clips. The table below lists every allowance exactly as the vendor states it, so the mismatch is visible before any argument about it.
| Tool | Unit | Free tier allowance |
|---|---|---|
| Descript | Minutes of media | 60 minutes (1 hr) / month |
| HeyGen | Clip count | 3 videos per month, up to 1 minute each |
| Pika | Credits | 0 credits per month, packs only |
| Runway | Credits | 125 one-time credits |
| Synthesia | Minutes of video | Usable for up to 10 minutes of video/month |
Every one of those figures is what the vendor's own pricing page stated when we read it, on July 28, 2026 for the four rows that have not changed since and on September 27 for Pika, whose current page lists zero monthly credits with packs only. The source URL and the date are linked from each tool's profile above.
Why no rate carries from one vendor to the next
A credit is not a minute, and neither is a video, because each vendor defines its own unit to fit its own product. Synthesia is the cleanest proof of that: its free plan is metered in minutes and in credits at once, on the same pricing card, and the two figures do not sit at a ratio a reader could reuse elsewhere.
The same Synthesia plan that grants ten minutes of video also grants 1,200 credits a month, on the same Basic plan card, for the same free tier. The card does translate between its own two units, and our Synthesia review reads both figures off it. What the card cannot hand you is a rate you can carry to another vendor's page, because a Synthesia credit is defined by Synthesia, and nothing obliges Pika or Runway to define theirs the same way.
Pika and Runway both call their allowance credits, and the word does not describe the same offer either. Pika's current page lists zero monthly credits on Free, with credit packs for sale. Runway's 125 credits are granted once; once they are spent, the account keeps working but cannot generate anything more. A shared name is not a shared unit, inside one vendor or between two.
HeyGen's allowance is a count with a ceiling rather than a fixed budget: three videos a month, each up to one minute. HeyGen meters by count, so a ten-second clip costs exactly what a one-minute clip costs. Three ten-second clips exhaust the whole month's allowance and leave you with thirty seconds of finished video, against the three minutes the same allowance would have carried at full length. Short clips waste it, so the number on the pricing page is the most a reader can get out of the plan rather than what a reader working in short cuts will actually get. Descript's sixty minutes a month counts media rather than a proxy for it, which is far more legible than a credit. It is still the material you edit rather than the file you export, so it is not the same unit as your finished deliverable either.
What to compare instead
Convert the number on the page into your own deliverable, not into another vendor's unit. The question worth asking is whether a free allowance can produce the specific thing you were asked for, once, at a quality you could actually use, because that is the only comparison a mismatched set of units will still support.
Zero credits a month is an honest answer to a different question. Pika's pricing page lists Free at 0 credits per month with packs only, and the difference is visible next to the other rows: the page sells credit packs rather than a monthly grant. A top-up is a one off purchase on any plan including Free, so the tier can buy output without starting a subscription. That is still paying the moment you produce, which is a different shape from the refilling allowances above it. Ask the same thing of any allowance before counting it as room to evaluate: what does it let you finish, not just start, and at what quality.
This is why our video ranking numbers its seven entries and then tells you to read them as bands rather than as seven meaningful steps: allowances that refill every month, a single grant that does not refill, a tier that lists zero credits with paid packs only, an allowance we could not read from the vendor's own page, and a tier marked not available at all. Read a table like the one above the same way, as a record of what each plan grants, not as a currency you can convert between products.