How Much Does AI Video Actually Cost?

The mistake is to read the subscription price and stop there. The plan price is not the unit cost of anything. The unit that matters is the credit, and every model has its own appetite for them, so two people paying $29 a month can produce wildly different amounts of footage: one makes ten clips of a landscape that a cheap model handles well, the other makes three clips of a person, where the expensive model is the one that keeps a face intact. Before comparing plans, work out what one clip costs you today. That single number tells you whether a campaign is affordable long before you commit to it, and it is the only figure that lets you compare a cheap model on an expensive plan with an expensive model on a cheap one.

Start with the price of one credit

Take the Basic plan: $29 for 3000 credits a month. Divide the price by the credits and one credit costs about $0.0097, or just under a cent. That figure is the only conversion you need, because every model is priced in credits and every plan is priced in dollars. Multiply the model's credit cost by $0.0097 and you have the dollar cost of a single run. The arithmetic is worth doing once on paper rather than estimating in your head, because the spread is wider than most people expect: the table runs from 60 credits to 4,000 for the same nominal clip length, which changes what kind of campaign is viable. The numbers are approximate and rounded to the cent; each row names the configuration and duration that price belongs to, because the same model can cost several times more on another setting.

What each plan charges per credit

Paid plans run from $4.90 to $199 a month, and the price per credit falls sharply as you climb. Two details reshuffle the table. First, Starter and Lite add a daily refresh of 10 and 34 credits, which roughly doubles the monthly total if you render something most days, so their effective price per credit is closer to half of the headline figure: Starter goes from $0.0163 to about $0.0082, and Lite from $0.0129 to about $0.0064. Second, credits on paid plans expire after 30 days, which means the daily refresh only pays off if you actually use it, and a large unused balance is worth nothing at the end of the month. Yearly billing cuts the figure again, because the same credits cost less per month, though it also locks you into twelve months of them. The practical reading is that the cheaper monthly plans only beat Basic if you show up daily, while the expensive plans win on volume alone.

A ten-clip campaign with a 30 percent retry rate

Take ten finished clips plus three additional successful renders that you choose to replace: thirteen charged runs, a planning factor of 1.3. Veo 3.1 Fast at 300 credits needs 3,900 credits. At the Basic monthly rate, those consumed credits represent $37.70, or $3.77 per finished clip. Kling 2.1 at 90 credits needs 1,170 credits, representing $11.31 on Basic; Sora 2 standard at 60 credits needs 780 credits, representing $7.54. Veo Quality is a different budget: 3,000 credits per run and 39,000 for this campaign, representing $377.00 at the Basic rate. Keep the modes separate when comparing plans. The Fast campaign represents $34.71 of Advanced credits or $7.76 of Professional credits; the Quality campaign represents $347.10 or $77.61 respectively. These are allocated costs of consumed credits, not amounts you can pay at checkout. Basic supplies 3,000 monthly credits, Advanced 10,000 and Professional 100,000. With no existing balance or top-up, the listed monthly subscription that covers Fast is Advanced at $89; Quality needs Professional at $199. Check the current checkout, remaining balance and credit expiry before buying. Do not assume credits can be borrowed from future months or rolled over. A cheaper rate per credit only saves money if you use enough of the allowance: unused credits still belong to a subscription you paid for.