At list prices read on 4 Nov 2026, generated video costs about $0.05 to $0.40 a second, so one 30-second take runs about $1.35 to $12. You’ll throw some takes away, and nobody publishes how many. Credit plans hide all this: on one $55 plan, the same credits buy 36 five-second clips or 560, depending on the model. Work out your dollars per second before you buy.
Why we did the math
In a rough keyword count of about 700 low-star reviews of AI video and posting tools, the most common complaint wasn’t about the videos. It was credits, charges and cancelling. People can’t tell what they’re buying, because a credit means something different on every site and every model. So here’s the same thing in dollars.
The list prices
These are pay-as-you-go prices for developers, which is what the tools themselves pay or something close to it. They’re the clearest public numbers there are. They change often, so treat this as a snapshot.
| Model and seller | Per second | One 30-second take |
|---|---|---|
| PixVerse V6 on fal, 720p, no sound | $0.045 | $1.35 |
| Runway Gen-4 Turbo | $0.05 | $1.50 |
| Runway Gen-4.5 | $0.12 | $3.60 |
| Kling v3 Pro on fal, no sound | $0.112 | $3.36 |
| Kling v3 Pro on fal, with sound | $0.168 | $5.04 |
| Seedance 2.0 Fast on fal, 720p | $0.2419 | $7.26 |
| Veo 3.1 on fal, no sound | $0.20 | $6.00 |
| Veo 3.1 on fal, with sound | $0.40 | $12.00 |
Thirty seconds is our math for comparison. Most of these generate shorter clips that you’d stitch together, so a real 30-second video is several separate shots, each of which can fail on its own.
Talking avatars are priced by the minute. HeyGen’s API lists $0.60 to $0.99 a minute for its older Avatar III engine, $2.31 to $4.83 for Avatar IV and $7.20 for Avatar V, so 30 seconds runs from about $0.30 to $3.60.
The number nobody publishes
None of these prices include the takes you throw away. A hand holds the product wrong, the label turns to mush, the person has six fingers. You pay for those too, and we found no company that publishes how many tries a usable shot takes. We haven’t measured it ourselves either. So the honest way to show it is as a range you can change:
| A 30-second video made with | 1 take each | 2.5 takes each | 4 takes each |
|---|---|---|---|
| PixVerse 720p, no sound | $1.35 | $3.38 | $5.40 |
| Kling v3 Pro, with sound | $5.04 | $12.60 | $20.16 |
| Veo 3.1, with sound | $12.00 | $30.00 | $48.00 |
Compare that with what a creator costs, about $100 to $154 a video by the figures we could find. AI is still far cheaper. It just isn’t the $1 the ads imply, once you want something good.
What credit plans work out to
We took two plans that publish enough to do the math, and read them on 4 Nov 2026. Creatify’s $55 plan, or $38 a month billed yearly, gives 280 credits. Its own table shows what they buy at 720p:
| What you make | How many | Seconds | Dollars a second at $55 | At $38 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seedance 2.0, 5 seconds | 36 | 180 | $0.31 | $0.21 |
| Aurora avatar, 15 seconds | 56 | 840 | $0.07 | $0.05 |
| Boreal, 5 seconds | 560 | 2,800 | $0.02 | $0.01 |
So the “number of videos” on a plan tells you almost nothing until you know which model and how long. On Seedance, that price is close to the pay-as-you-go range above, so we didn’t find the large markup we expected on the one model we could compare. InVideo’s page shows about 30 credits for a Seedance 2.0 Fast video, and 400 credits for $20 a month, or about 13 videos. It didn’t state the length in what we read.
Unused credits are treated differently everywhere too. Creatify’s expire after 2 months. InVideo’s don’t roll over. Captions’ roll over up to three times your monthly amount. And on Creatify, anything that re-runs the AI counts as a new generation and uses credits, while hand edits are free. Look for that sentence on any plan you’re considering.
Work out your own number
- Pick the model you’d really use. A plan’s headline count usually assumes the cheapest one.
- Multiply: videos a month × seconds of AI footage in each × takes × dollars a second.
- Be honest about seconds. Eight videos, all 30 seconds of AI, at 2.5 takes on Kling with sound is 8 × 30 × 2.5 × $0.168, or about $101 a month. Eight videos with one 8-second AI shot each, same settings, is about $27.
- Check what a failed try costs. If the page doesn’t say, ask before you pay.
- Check what happens when you run out: does it stop, or charge you more?
The cheapest AI footage is the footage you don’t generate
That example is the main point. Most short marketing videos don’t need every second generated. If you sell a real thing, your own photos, your screen and a phone are free and look like your business. Keep generated shots for what you can’t film. In our rough count of 39 widely shown ads, judged from poster frames, there wasn’t a single pure motion graphic. Video made by code, with no AI shots, costs much less again: for our own tool we estimate 1 to 3 cents of machine time a video, though nothing has run in the cloud yet to prove that.
One more risk: the model can vanish
OpenAI told developers in March 2026 that its Videos API and Sora 2 models would be removed from the API on 24 Sep 2026. Any tool built only on those had six months to switch, and its videos may have looked different afterwards. So ask a tool which models it uses, and what happens if one goes. Our guess is that today’s prices keep falling and the names keep changing, which is one more reason to buy month to month.
We make Lou by Luven AI, which is why we had to work all this out. Its planned Starter plan, at $59 a month, shows 60 seconds of AI footage with a hard stop, and a failed video isn’t meant to use up a video from your plan, though any AI footage already made stays used. Lou isn’t open, those prices aren’t final and none of it is proven, so run this same math on us when it opens.
How we write these: with AI help, from the sources we link, with dates. Counts marked as ours were made by an AI reader with no second check. If something’s wrong, email everest@luven.ai and we’ll fix it and say so.
