What a Minute of AI Video Really Costs in 2026

AI video pricing is built so you can't compare it easily. One app sells credits, another sells compute units, and an API charges by the second. Almost none of them tell you what a finished, publishable minute costs. This post works that out for a few common routes, using published prices and showing the arithmetic. The figures are as of September 2026, at the time of writing.

The formula

Every credit system comes down to the same four numbers:

Cost per usable minute = (dollars per credit) × (credits per second) × 60 × (attempts per keeper)

• Dollars per credit is the plan price divided by the credits it includes. It falls on bigger plans. It assumes you use every credit, which most people don't.
• Credits per second depends on the model and the resolution. The same app can charge ten times more for one model than for another.
• 60 turns seconds into a minute.
• Attempts per keeper is how many generations you make for each clip you actually use. Nobody publishes this number, and it is where most budgets go wrong.

For the tables below we assume three attempts per keeper. That is an illustration, not a measurement. Simple shots with good references may land first time. Shots with hands, text, product labels or dialogue can take five or more attempts. Change the multiplier to match your own hit rate.

Raw prices, before retries

Start with prices per generated second that vendors publish directly.

Google Veo 3.1 through the Gemini API is the cleanest reference, because the price is per second with audio included:

• Standard: $0.40/s at 720p or 1080p, $0.60/s at 4K. One minute at 1080p = 60 × $0.40 = $24.00. At 4K, $36.00.
• Fast: $0.12/s at 1080p = $7.20 a minute.
• Lite: $0.05/s at 720p = $3.00 a minute, and $0.08/s at 1080p = $4.80.

Lightricks' LTX API charges $0.09/s at 720p, $0.15/s at 1080p, $0.19/s at 2K and $0.37/s at 4K. That is $5.40, $9.00, $11.40 and $22.20 a minute.

These are the floors. You pay only for what you generate, with no monthly credits to waste. You still pay for every failed attempt.

Subscription apps: turning credits into dollars

Here is the same sum for apps that publish both plan prices and per-model credit costs.

Runway. Standard is $15 a month for 625 credits, or $0.024 per credit. Pro is $35 for 2,250 credits ($0.0156). Max is $95 for 9,500 credits ($0.010). Gen-4.5 costs 60 credits per 5 seconds, which is 12 credits a second, or 720 credits a minute.

• Standard: 720 × $0.024 = $17.28 a minute
• Pro: 720 × $0.0156 = $11.20 a minute
• Max: 720 × $0.010 = $7.20 a minute

Veo 3.1 inside Runway costs 320 credits per 8-second clip (40 credits a second, 2,400 a minute). On Max that is $24.00 a minute, the same as Google's own API. On Pro it is $37.33.

Luma. Plus is $30 for 10,000 credits ($0.003 per credit), and Ultra is $300 for 150,000 ($0.002). Luma's pricing page lists credits per second for each model:

• Ray3.2 at 1080p: 400 credits per 5 s = 80/s = 4,800 a minute = $14.40 on Plus, $9.60 on Ultra
• Ray3.2 at 720p: 100 per 5 s = 20/s = 1,200 a minute = $3.60 on Plus
• Kling 3.0 at 720p: 30/s = 1,800 a minute = $5.40 on Plus
• MiniMax H3 at 2K: 46/s = 2,760 a minute = $8.28 on Plus
• Seedance 2.5 at 1080p: 191/s = 11,460 a minute = $34.38 on Plus
• Veo 3.1 with audio: 280/s = 16,800 a minute = $50.40 on Plus, $33.60 on Ultra

Two things stand out. First, the model you pick inside one app changes the price 14-fold, from $3.60 to $50.40 a minute. Second, a raw minute of Veo with audio needs more credits than the whole Plus plan includes. 10,000 credits buy about 36 seconds.

Pika. Creator is $35 for 3,150 credits ($0.0111 per credit). A 5-second 720p Seedance 2.5 clip costs 122 credits (24.4/s), so a minute is 1,464 credits, or $16.27. Wan 3.0 costs 33 credits for the same clip (6.6/s), so a minute is 396 credits, or $4.40. Top-up packs sell 60 credits per dollar, which makes the Seedance minute $24.40 once your plan credits run out.

invideo AI. Pro is $30 for 1,000 credits ($0.03 per credit). A 5-second Seedance 2.0 Fast clip costs about 30 credits (6/s), so a minute is about 360 credits, or $10.80.

Hailuo AI. On the $14.99 Standard plan, MiniMax H3 at 2K works out to about $0.10 a second, according to our listing's figures. A minute costs about $6.00.

The table: one usable minute

The subscription rows assume you use every credit you pay for. If you use half your monthly credits, double those numbers.

The hidden multipliers

Retries. The table's last cost column triples the raw price. Treat that as a middle-of-the-road guess for social clips. It is optimistic for dialogue, product close-ups and anything that must match a brand guide. Cheap draft modes help here. Generate drafts at a low resolution or on a Lite, Fast or Turbo model, then render only the winner at full quality. On Luma, Ray3.2 in Draft mode costs 20 credits per 5 seconds, against 400 at 1080p. Ten drafts cost half of one final render.

Clip-length rounding. Models generate fixed lengths. Veo's base clip is 8 seconds, so a 60-second sequence needs eight clips, which is 64 seconds you pay for. Seedance 2.5 generates up to 30 seconds per pass, and Kling and MiniMax H3 up to 15. The shorter the base clip, the more joins, and every join is another place a shot can fail.

Resolution. Higher resolution always costs more, and how much varies. On Veo's API, 4K is 50% more than 1080p. On the LTX API it is about 2.5 times more. On Luma, Kling 3.0 goes from 30 credits a second at 720p to 147 at 4K, almost five times as much. Most social video is watched on phones at 1080p or lower. Upscaling a good 1080p clip is often cheaper than generating in 4K.

Plan caps. A cheap per-credit rate means nothing if the plan runs out. Runway Standard's 625 credits buy about 52 seconds of Gen-4.5 a month. With three attempts per keeper, that is about 17 usable seconds. Max buys about 13 minutes of raw Gen-4.5 (9,500 ÷ 12 = 791 seconds), or about 4.4 usable minutes. Credits reset monthly on most plans. Runway Max rolls unused credits over for one month.

Audio. Veo's API price includes audio. On Luma, Veo 3.1 costs 140 credits a second without audio and 280 with it, so sound doubles the cost. Luma's own Ray3.2 has no native audio, so you add a separate voice or music tool, which is another bill.

Watermarks and licences are part of the price

A free tier that watermarks output, or bars commercial use, has an effective price of zero only for practice. For anything you publish commercially, the real entry price is the cheapest plan that gives you clean, licensed files:

• Pika: Starter ($10) has no commercial licence. The real entry price is Creator at $35.
• LTX Studio: Free and Lite ($15) are personal-use only. The commercial licence starts at Standard, $35.
• Kling AI: the free Basic tier is watermarked and non-commercial. All paid tiers, from $10, include commercial use and remove the watermark.
• Hailuo AI: free output is watermarked. Paid plans list watermark removal and commercial rights.
• Google Flow: reports say a visible Veo mark stays on Flow videos below the AI Ultra tier. Google does not publish per-clip credit costs on the Flow page.
• Runway: paid plans remove the watermark. Runway's pricing page does not spell out commercial terms, so read its Terms of Use.

Invisible watermarks such as Google's SynthID stay in the file on every tier. That is not a problem for publishing. It does mean platforms may detect and label the clip as AI-made. Our commercial use and watermarks guide covers the rest.

When we can't give you a number

Some popular routes are missing from the table because the vendor doesn't publish enough to calculate them.

• Kling AI's own app publishes plan prices: $10 for 660 credits, falling from $1.06 per 100 credits on Standard to $0.49 on Ultra. It does not publish credits per second for Kling 3.0 on the pricing page.
• Higgsfield says its $15 Starter plan (200 credits) covers about 11 Seedance 2.0 Fast videos, but it doesn't give their length.
• Google Flow lists plan credits but not the cost per clip.
• Vidu and the Seedance apps show prices only after sign-in, or not at all.

For these, use the method rather than a guess. Generate five test clips at your target length and resolution. Note the credits deducted, divide by total seconds to get credits per second, and apply the formula above. It takes ten minutes, and it is the only number worth budgeting on.

What this means for your budget

• Pick the model before the app. The same Veo minute costs $24 on Google's API or Runway Max and $50.40 on Luma Plus. Check the model map to see every app that offers a model, then compare prices.
• Draft cheap, render once. Use Lite, Fast, Turbo or Draft modes until the shot works.
• Budget on usable minutes. Multiply raw cost by your real attempts per keeper. Track the rate for a month.
• Price in the licence. The cheapest commercial tier is your real entry price, not the free plan or the first paid plan.
• Match plan size to volume. Larger plans cut the cost per credit by half or more, but only if you use the credits before they reset.
• Recheck quarterly. Credit costs change without notice, and our pricing page is updated as vendors change theirs.

Runway Freemium

AI video studio with Gen-4.5, Aleph editing and third-party models like Veo and Kling

Free plan, paid from $15/mo

🔥 Save 20% with yearly billing (Standard $12/mo, Pro $28/mo, Max $76/mo)

8.7 Visit ↗

Luma (Dream Machine) Paid

Luma's Ray3 video studio, now also running Veo, Kling, Seedance and GPT Image

Paid from $30/mo

🔥 Save up to 20% with yearly billing (Plus $25/mo)

8.0 Visit ↗

Pika Freemium

Video, image and sound apps built on Pika 2.5 plus Seedance, Wan and MiniMax

Free plan, paid from $10/mo

🔥 Save 20% with yearly billing (Starter $8/mo, Creator $28/mo)

7.4 Visit ↗

Read the official docs for…

• Veo per-second prices by tier and resolution: Gemini API pricing
• Runway plans, credits and Gen-4.5 credit costs: Runway pricing
• Per-model credits per second for Ray, Veo, Kling, Seedance and MiniMax: Luma pricing
• Pika plans, credit top-ups and commercial licence tiers: Pika pricing