Pricing guide
How much does AI video generation actually cost?
Ask a pricing page what an AI video costs and you get a monthly number. Ask after a real project and you get a different answer: the price of every take you rendered on the way to the one you kept.
This guide explains what actually drives the cost of a generated clip, why subscription credit systems make it hard to see, and how to budget a video project honestly — whatever tool you use.
We write it as a vendor with a stake: Ciyo bills video per clip with the price shown up front, so making costs legible is our pitch. The mechanics below apply everywhere.
What actually drives the price of a clip
Four dials set the provider cost of every generated clip: which model renders it, the resolution, the duration, and whether it generates audio. Providers price along exactly those dials — some per second of output, some per clip at a given resolution, some per duration step.
The spread is wide. A short 480p draft on an efficiency model costs a few cents; a 1080p or 4K clip on a flagship model costs dollars. Published enterprise rates make the ceiling concrete: Google's Veo has been publicly priced around fifty cents per second — thirty dollars per minute — at the API level.
The subscription math
Consumer tools mostly sell this through plans: advertised entry points around $8 to $30 per month, metered in credits, with the strongest video models often reserved for higher tiers. The monthly price is not the cost — the cost is the plan divided by the clips your allowance actually let you finish.
Credits complicate that division on purpose or not: a clip's credit price varies by model, length, and resolution, allowances reset on renewal, and an unused month is money spent on nothing. Two users on the same plan can pay wildly different effective prices per finished clip.
The pay-per-clip math
The alternative is to price the clip itself. On Ciyo, one credit is worth one US cent, a $10 one-time pack adds 1,000 credits, and the exact credit cost for your chosen model, duration, and resolution appears before you render. Failed renders refund automatically, and credits never expire.
The effective price per finished clip is then just the sum of the takes you rendered — visible while you work, not reconstructed from a statement. Quiet months cost nothing, which matters in video more than anywhere, because video work is lumpy.
One video is never one render
The largest error in every AI video budget is counting clips instead of takes. Real work means re-rolling: a prompt adjustment, a different seed image, a longer duration, a model comparison. Three to ten takes per kept clip is normal.
So whatever the tool, budget takes. A ten-clip deliverable at five takes each is fifty renders — and that number is what either drains a subscription allowance mid-month or shows up transparently on a per-clip balance.
How to spend less: iterate in stills
Images cost cents; video costs dollars. The cheapest AI video workflow gets the frame right first: explore composition, styling, and lighting as still images, then animate only the frames worth animating through image-to-video.
Draft cheap, finish sharp, in video too: render exploration takes at 480p or 720p on a fast variant, and spend 1080p or 4K only on the takes you keep. On Ciyo the stills, the drafts, and the finals share one canvas and one balance, so the whole ladder is visible as you climb it.
How to read any tool's real price
Five checks reveal any video tool's true cost. Convert credits to currency — divide the plan price by the credits it grants. Price one concrete clip — your model, your resolution, your duration — in those credits. Check whether unused credits expire. Check which models your tier actually unlocks. Check what happens when a render fails.
If a pricing page makes those five answers hard to find, that is itself information. A tool confident in its prices puts them next to the button.
See the price before you render
Open the canvas, pick a video model, and read your first clip's exact cost before you commit a credit. No plan, no reset date — just the clips you choose to make.