Hey Lobsters, welcome to this new edition of ShanghAI.

Here's a conversation I keep having with growth teams running ads into LATAM, Southeast Asia, or the Gulf: they need the same spokesperson pitching the product in eight languages, and they need the lips to actually match the words instead of a dubbed-over voice that looks like a badly translated kung-fu movie. HeyGen nails that experience. It genuinely looks good.

Then you check the invoice. $89 a seat just to get a handful of avatar minutes a month. Want to actually plug it into your ad pipeline via API so you can spin up dozens of variants automatically? Now you're quoted $1,000-1,500 a month, and every founder I talk to in the growth WeChat groups says the same thing: it adds up fast once you're testing creative at any real scale.

Here's the thing nobody tells you: the tech doing the actual work under the hood — animating a face to match new audio, and cloning a voice into another language — isn't some HeyGen secret sauce. Tencent and Alibaba have both put out versions of it for free. Tencent's LivePortrait handles the face animation. Alibaba's CosyVoice 2 handles cloning a voice into a dozen languages in near real-time. Both are open weights, both run fine on a single rented gaming GPU, and neither charges you per minute.

Put them together and you go from HeyGen's seat-based bill to a compute bill you can actually control — and it's small. If your team is pushing out 40-60 localized ad variants a month, we're talking $34 instead of $1,500.

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Let's actually do the math instead of just saying "way cheaper" and moving on.

HeyGen's Team plan is $89 a seat, capped around 15 avatar minutes a month, shared across your whole team. Need it to run automatically, generating variants for every ad test? That pushes you to Enterprise, and the number founders keep quoting me is $1,000-1,500 a month once API access and webhooks are included.

Now here's the DIY version, and I'll be upfront that it's not zero-effort — you're trading a monthly bill for a bit of setup work:

Run the numbers on 50 ad variants a month, roughly 40 seconds each: you land around $22-34 in GPU time, including buffer for things going slightly wrong. No per-minute fee, ever, because both models are free to run.

To be fair to HeyGen: if your team has zero appetite for touching Docker or a render queue, paying for convenience is a legitimate choice. But if you're making real volume of ad creative every month, this pays for the extra setup time within your first billing cycle.

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