On this page (6)
The price on the pricing page is not the price you will pay. Every serious AI video tool charges by compute — "credits" — and the credit cost of a finished clip depends on resolution, length, and how many takes you throw away.
This is not a trick; it is the only way to price GPU time fairly. But it makes budgeting impossible until you measure, and most people do not measure. Here is how.
Why credits instead of minutes
A five-second 4K clip costs many times more compute than a five-second 480p clip. A flat per-minute price would have to be set for the worst case, which would make short previews absurdly expensive.
Credits let vendors price the actual work. The side effect is that you cannot know your bill in advance, because your bill depends on how picky you are.
The three things that drive your real cost
- Resolution and duration. Higher resolution and longer clips consume more, and not linearly.
- Retry rate. Every rejected generation is charged. This is usually the largest hidden cost.
- Which model you picked. Different models carry different compute costs for the same prompt.
How to model it in 20 minutes
Do this before you commit to a plan, not after:
- Pick one representative job — the kind of clip you will actually deliver.
- Generate it five times, counting credits each time, including the ones you reject.
- Divide total credits by the number of clips you would actually ship (probably one or two).
- Multiply by how many clips you deliver in a month.
That number is your real cost. It is routinely three to five times the naive estimate, because step 2 is where the money goes.
Where credit pricing punishes you
- High-volume, low-margin work. Credits do not give volume discounts the way flat-rate tools do.
- Iterative creative work. If your process depends on exploring many variations, you are paying for exploration.
- Unpredictable workloads. Unused credits usually expire monthly, so a quiet month is lost value.
When flat-rate wins
If your output is high-volume and predictable — the same format, the same length, every week — a tool with a flat rate or a generous unlimited tier will beat credit pricing comfortably. Runway's unlimited Relax mode and Synthesia's annual credit bundles are the two places this shows up: you trade speed or flexibility for a number you can put in a budget.
What to do about it
- Set a spend cap if the tool offers one. Most surprises happen in month one.
- Preview cheap, render expensive. Iterate at low resolution, then render final at full quality.
- Track cost per delivered clip for a month. It is the only number worth watching.
- Re-check quarterly. Credit amounts and plan structures change often in this category.