What AI Video Costs Per Clip: 16 Models, Priced Per Render

Short version: a five-second AI video clip here costs between $0.30 and $2.30 depending on the model. No subscription required, and credits do not expire. Each price is worked out from what that model costs to run, so the spread below reflects real compute rather than packaging.

Disclosure: Leaxor is mine, and every price on this page is what it charges.

The whole shelf, cheapest first

Sixteen models at each one's cheapest resolution tier. Credits are $0.10 each, minimum purchase 50.

Higher resolutions cost more within each model. Gemini Omni Flash runs $0.30 for five seconds at 360p and $3.00 at 4K, the widest spread of any single model here.

Three bands, and what each is for

$0.30–$0.50: the drafting band

Seedance 1.0 Pro, Gemini Omni Flash at 360p, Hailuo 2.3, Wan 3.0 at 480p, MiniMax H3 Max at 480p.

These look like what they cost, and that is not a criticism. Nobody publishes a draft. Their job is answering "does this framing work" and "does the motion hold together" before you commit. At $0.30 you can be wrong ten times for $3.00.

$0.60–$0.90: the working band

Kling 2.6 Pro, Kling v3, LTX-2.5, Wan 3.0 Prime, Grok Imagine 1.5, Flux 3 Draft.

Most finished short-form work lives here. Good enough to publish, cheap enough that a reroll costs nothing worth thinking about.

$1.70–$2.30: the hero band

Flux 3, Seedance 2.5, and the high-resolution tiers of everything else.

You are paying for a capability rather than a polish step. Flux 3 is the only model here that generates native synced audio; Seedance 2.5 is the only one that runs thirty seconds in a single pass. If you do not need either, the working band produces comparable footage.

How the prices are set

Each price is worked out from what the model costs to run, with the same markup on every one.

The practical consequence is that the differences between models are real. When Seedance 2.5 costs five times a Wan 3.0 clip, that is because it genuinely costs about five times as much to produce, not because it sits in a higher plan tier. The table reads as a map of what each model asks of a GPU.

It also means there is no penalty for trying the cheap tier first, which is the entire point of having one.

Subscription tools hide this arithmetic by design. PixVerse is the clearest example at the budget end: the advertised $10 plan still exports watermarked 720p, and the tier that actually removes both costs six times that.

Why one model costs six times another

The spread in that table is not packaging. Four things drive it, and knowing which one you are paying for tells you when a cheaper model will do.

Resolution, which is the obvious one

More pixels is more compute, close to linearly. Within a single model this is usually the largest lever you control, and Gemini Omni Flash spans ten times between its cheapest and dearest tier.

Audio, which is not obvious at all

Models that generate synchronised sound are doing a second generation job at the same time. Flux 3 costs what it costs partly for this reason, and it is why comparing it on picture quality alone makes it look overpriced.

Wan 3.0 and Gemini Omni Flash also produce audio. Most of the cheap tier does not.

How far ahead the model plans

Models that reason about the prompt before rendering, or that maintain state across a long clip, spend compute before a single frame exists. That is most of what separates Seedance 2.5 from a model producing a similar-looking five seconds: it is holding thirty seconds of continuity together rather than five.

Whether the lab is subsidising it

Worth naming honestly. Some of these prices reflect a lab buying market share rather than the true cost of the compute, which is why rates in this category move more than in most software. A model that is cheap today because someone is funding the gap can reprice with a fortnight of notice.

That is a reason to avoid hard-coding any of these numbers into a workflow you cannot change quickly.

Why credits rather than a subscription

The structural difference matters more than the per-clip figures, and it is the part most comparisons skip.

A subscription charges you for a month whether you generate or not. Creative work is bursty by nature: a heavy fortnight launching something, then quiet. Monthly plans are priced on the assumption that most subscribers use far less than their allowance, which is another way of saying they are priced on the assumption you will waste some of it.

Credits invert that. They cost $0.10, the minimum purchase is 50, and they do not expire. A month where you generate nothing costs nothing. A month where you generate two hundred clips costs exactly what those clips cost.

The honest trade-off: if you generate heavily every single day, a subscription somewhere else may work out cheaper, because you are the customer subsidised by everyone who forgot to cancel. Most people are not that customer, and almost everyone believes they are.

How to not waste money

1. Draft in the cheap band. Explore framing, motion and prompt wording at $0.30 to $0.50 a go.
2. Render the keeper once. One good clip at $1.70 beats six mediocre ones at $0.70.
3. Do not pay for pixels nothing displays. 4K on a vertical Short is money for nothing. Most phones will never show the difference.
4. Match duration to the cut. Generating ten seconds to use three is paying triple for the edit.

What this does not cover

These are prices for clips. A clip is not a video: no script, no narration, no captions, no continuity between shots. If what you want is a finished vertical video from a topic, that is a different mode with a different price: 15, 30 or 90 credits by quality tier, so $1.50 to $9.00 for the whole thing rather than for one shot.

All of the above is in Leaxor's video generator, credits at $0.10, minimum purchase 50, no subscription required and no expiry. Every model's cheapest clip, sorted by price, sits on the affordable AI video generator page. The models added this month are covered in the August 2026 roundup, and the two at either end of this table have their own write-ups: Gemini Omni Flash at the cheap end and Flux 3 at the expensive one. Model specifications live on fal's catalogue and Google's Gemini pages.

Reading this with an AI assistant? Ask it to summarize this in ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity.