How much does AI video cost? Per-second rates, credits, and subscriptions
AI video costs anywhere from cents per generated second at raw API rates to a serious monthly bill on the largest consumer subscription plans — the verified numbers are below — and the honest answer to "how much" depends on which of three pricing models you are buying into: per-second metering, credit systems, or tiered subscriptions. The number on the pricing page is rarely the number you pay, because retries, resolution, and credit expiry all move the real cost. This guide walks through the anatomy of each model with verified examples, then publishes our own numbers in full, since a cost guide that hides its own prices would be a strange thing to write.
Why AI video costs real money at all
Every second of AI video is produced by expensive hardware running for real time — and unlike text or a single image, video multiplies that work across every frame. Doubling the resolution or the clip length roughly doubles the compute, which is why every serious tool meters video harder than anything else it sells, and why single generations stay short across the whole market.
This has one blunt corollary: there is no unlimited free AI video generation anywhere, and anything marketed that way is rate-limited, quality-capped, or headed for a repricing. The tools differ in how honestly they translate compute into a price, not in whether they do.
Model one: per-second pricing
The clearest view of what AI video actually costs is API pricing, where vendors bill by the generated second with no subscription wrapped around it. OpenAI's published API rates put its standard video model at $0.10 per second at 720p, with the pro tier running $0.30 to $0.70 per second depending on resolution, as of August 2026 (developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing).
Do the arithmetic and the shape of the market appears. A single 10-second clip at 720p is about $1.00 at the standard rate — and $7.00 at the pro tier's 1080p rate. A 60-second finished video assembled from clips, at a realistic three-to-one ratio of generated footage to kept footage, means 180 generated seconds: roughly $18 at the cheap end, over $120 at the premium end. Per-second pricing is the most transparent model in the industry, and it is also the reason no one can afford to give video away.
Two things follow from those numbers. First, resolution is the biggest price lever there is — the same clip can cost seven times more depending on output size, which is why drafting low and re-rendering keepers matters so much (our resolution guide covers when each tier is actually worth paying for). Second, you pay for attempts, not keepers. A generation that comes out wrong cost exactly as much as one that came out right.
Model two: credit systems
Most consumer tools wrap those per-second costs in credits: you buy a monthly pool, and each generation deducts a published (or unpublished) amount. The mechanics vary more than the marketing suggests, so here are three verified examples.
Runway sells Standard at $12 per month billed annually with 625 monthly credits, Pro at $28 with 2,250, and Max at $76 with 9,500, as of August 2026 (runway.com/pricing). Its current flagship model costs 60 credits per 5-second clip — 12 credits per second — so the Standard plan's 625 credits buy roughly 52 seconds of flagship video a month. The catch worth knowing: on Standard and Pro, unused credits do not roll over; they reset at the billing date. Only Max rolls credits forward, and only for one month. If Runway's mechanics are what sent you here, we compared the exits in Runway alternatives.
Pika starts at $8 per month billed yearly for 80 credits, with Standard at $28 for 700 and Pro at $76 for 2,300, as of August 2026 (pika.art/pricing). Text-to-video runs from 12 credits at 360p up to 80 credits at 1080p — the resolution multiplier again — and watermark-free downloads are a paid-plan feature.
Luma prices its Plus plan at $30 per month for 10,000 credits ($25 billed yearly), as of August 2026 (lumalabs.ai/dream-machine/pricing). Two policies stand out: failed generations refund their credits automatically — genuinely user-friendly — but unused credits expire at the end of each billing cycle. A quiet month burns allowance you already paid for.
Fair is fair: none of these vendors is hiding the ball, and all three publish more than the industry average. But comparing them on the headline price alone is exactly the mistake the headline price invites. The full checklist for reading a credit system — expiry, disclosure, what one "generation" includes, rollover — is in our AI credits guide.
Model three: the subscription tier ladder
The third model prices access rather than usage: pay more, unlock higher resolution, longer clips, faster queues, or watermark removal. In practice almost every tool blends this with credits — the tier sets your pool size and your feature ceiling, the credits meter what you draw from it. The blend is where budgets go wrong, because two plans with the same sticker price can deliver wildly different amounts of finished video once you multiply out credits per second, resolution caps, and expiry.
What quietly changes the real price
Across all three models, four mechanics move the actual cost more than the advertised rate does:
- Expiry. Credits that reset monthly punish uneven workloads, and nobody generates the same amount every month. This is the single biggest difference in real-world value between plans.
- The retry tax. AI generation is probabilistic; budgeting one generation per finished clip is fiction. A two-or-three-attempts-per-keeper ratio is normal, so your effective price per usable second is a multiple of the listed one.
- Resolution multipliers. As the numbers above show, 1080p routinely costs four to seven times what 360p does. Drafting at low resolution and re-rendering only the keeper is the highest-leverage cost habit in AI video.
- Paying twice for the same clip. Some tools charge once to generate and again to upscale, or gate watermark removal behind a higher tier — meaning the export you can actually publish costs more than the generation did. Our watermark guide maps which tools charge for clean exports and which do not.
Our own numbers, in full
PrismPoster meters video the same way the market does — credits, priced by resolution and length — so here is the complete table, the same one shown on the generate button before you run anything:
| Clip (4-second base) | Credits |
|---|---|
| 360p | 20 |
| 720p | 50 |
| 1080p | 125 |
| 4K | 250 |
Clips run 4 to 10 seconds in 16:9 or 9:16, from text or from an image, with extra seconds billed on top of the base. The plans are €19, €49, and €99 per month for 1,300, 3,000, and 7,000 monthly credits respectively — and the wallet is shared across all six studios, so the same credits also buy images (12 each), full songs (15 each), and everything in between (full exchange rate lives in the help center, and the pricing page carries the plan table).
Measured against the four mechanics above: credits never expire, on any plan, so a light month is not a wasted month. Every cost is published before signup and shown on the button before you spend. Exports carry no visible watermark at any tier — C2PA content credentials are embedded as provenance metadata instead — so there is no second fee to make a clip publishable. The honest limit runs the other way: 4K is genuinely expensive compute here as everywhere, which is why the 360p draft rate exists, and why we recommend the draft-then-upgrade workflow rather than pretending premium resolution is cheap. How our video output stacks up against the tools priced above is a different question — the 2026 video generator comparison takes that one on directly.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does it cost to generate one AI video?
At verified August 2026 rates, a single 5-to-10-second clip runs from well under $1 at 360p draft quality to around $7 at premium 1080p API rates. A finished 60-second video assembled from clips typically costs $10 to $50 in metered generation once retries are counted, depending on resolution and the tool's rates.
Why is AI video so much more expensive than AI images?
A video is effectively hundreds of images that must stay consistent with each other, generated in one run on high-end hardware. Every added second and every step up in resolution multiplies the compute, so vendors meter video hardest because it costs them the most to produce.
Is there any unlimited free AI video generator?
No. Free tiers exist — including ours — but they are metered grants, not unlimited access, because every generation costs the provider real compute money. Anything marketed as unlimited is rate-limited, resolution-capped, or priced to change.
How can I lower my AI video costs?
Draft at the lowest resolution your tool offers, iterate there, and re-render only the final keeper at high resolution — the resolution multiplier is the biggest lever in every pricing model. Also check credit expiry before subscribing: a plan whose credits roll over is worth more than a nominally cheaper one that resets monthly.
What does AI video cost on PrismPoster?
A base clip costs 20 credits at 360p, 50 at 720p, 125 at 1080p, and 250 at 4K, with longer clips billed per extra second. Plans run €19 to €99 per month, and credits never expire on any plan.
Run the numbers on a real budget
The cheapest way to understand AI video pricing is to spend a small, known amount and count what it produced. A free account comes with a one-time grant of 200 credits — no card, video generation included, no expiry — which is enough to draft several clips at 360p, re-render a keeper at higher resolution, and see exactly where the money goes before any of it is yours. Check the math in this post against the pricing page while you are at it; a cost guide should survive contact with its own product.
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