Generated video is priced per second because that is how the compute behaves: with us it costs 2 credits for every second you generate, while a complete ad variation assembled from footage you already own costs 1 credit regardless of length. So a 3 second generated clip is 6 credits, 5 seconds is 10 and 10 seconds is 20, against 1 credit for a finished 20 second ad. On the €99 pack a credit works out at about €1.52, which makes a 5 second generated shot roughly the price of ten finished ads.
What does a second of generated video actually cost?
The arithmetic, laid out. Credit prices come from our two self-serve packs: €29 for 15 credits works out at €1.93 a credit, and €99 for 65 credits works out at €1.52 a credit. Credits never expire, so the cheaper pack rate is not a use-it-or-lose-it trade.
| What you are buying | Credits | Cost at 1.93 per credit | Cost at 1.52 per credit |
|---|---|---|---|
| One ad variation from your own footage, any length | 1 | about 1.93 | about 1.52 |
| 2 second generated clip | 4 | about 7.70 | about 6.10 |
| 3 second generated clip | 6 | about 11.60 | about 9.10 |
| 5 second generated clip | 10 | about 19.30 | about 15.20 |
| 8 second generated clip | 16 | about 30.90 | about 24.30 |
| 10 second generated clip | 20 | about 38.60 | about 30.40 |
| A 20 second ad, all generated (two 10 second shots) | 40 | about 77.20 | about 60.80 |
| A 20 second ad from your library, plus one 3 second generated shot | 7 | about 13.50 | about 10.60 |
| Editing, re-exporting, uploading footage | 0 | free | free |
The second-to-last two rows are the ones to look at. Building the same ad entirely out of generated footage costs roughly forty times more than assembling it from your own material, and it is usually the worse ad, for reasons we set out in our piece on whether AI-generated ads perform.
Everything above is our pricing as of September 2026. Our pricing page is authoritative if it and this post ever disagree, and the free plan gives you 5 variations plus one generated video up to 10 seconds with no card, which is enough to check the maths yourself.
Why the ratio is not arbitrary
It would be convenient to say generated seconds cost more because they are more valuable. They are not. They cost more because of what happens on our side.
Assembling a variation is a decision problem followed by a render. A model reads your tagged library, picks shots, writes a script, produces a voiceover and a caption set, and then a deterministic pipeline cuts and encodes the result. Most of the expensive part happened once, when your footage was transcribed and tagged on upload. The per-variation cost is a few model calls, some speech synthesis and an encode, and it does not grow much with duration because a 30 second ad and a 15 second ad use the same machinery.
Generating video synthesises every frame. At 24 or 30 frames a second, ten seconds is 240 to 300 frames that do not exist until a diffusion model makes them, each one conditioned on its neighbours so the result holds together. That work scales close to linearly with duration, which is why generation is billed by the second everywhere in the market and assembly is not. There is no pricing trick available here: the second is the unit because the frame is the unit.
Two consequences worth internalising. First, generated seconds do not get cheaper with volume the way rendered seconds do, so a workflow that leans on generation has a cost floor that never drops. Second, the price is honest signal about where the difficulty is. If a vendor sells unlimited generated video on a flat monthly seat, either the caps are strict, the model is small, or the resolution and duration are limited. Something is paying for those frames. Our credit glossary entry explains how we account for it.
How the market prices the same thing
Pricing shapes differ more than prices do. All figures below were publicly listed in August 2026 and prices in this category move often, so check before you budget.
Subscription tools charge for access and cap usage: Runway at $15 a month, InVideo at $28, HeyGen at $29, Creatify at $39, AdCreative.ai at $39, Plainly at $69, Sovran at $99, Arcads at €100 a month for 10 videos. A flat seat is the better deal if your usage is high and constant, and we will say that plainly: if you are generating video every day, a subscription with generous caps beats paying per second.
Credits suit spiky work. Creative testing is spiky by nature, since you ship a batch, read it, and then go quiet for a fortnight. Paying €29 or €99 once, with credits that do not expire, fits that rhythm better than twelve monthly charges covering the months you did not log in. It fits daily generation badly.
How to spend generated seconds without wasting them
Four rules we actually follow.
Generate short. Two to three seconds, not ten. Quality also degrades with duration in most models, so the long generation is both more expensive and more likely to be unusable. A 3 second clip at 6 credits is a cheap experiment. A 10 second clip at 20 credits is a bet.
Generate what you cannot film. A drone shot over a coastline, a snowstorm, a city at dawn, an abstract texture behind an end card. Do not generate your product, your packaging, hands using the product or anyone's face. Those shots fail in ways viewers notice and they are also the expensive failures, since you pay for the seconds either way.
Reuse the clip. This is the part teams miss. Once a generated clip is in your library it behaves like any other clip, and using it in a fifth variation costs nothing extra beyond that variation's 1 credit. Six generated establishing shots, at 3 seconds each, is 36 credits spent once and then available to every ad you build for the next year. Amortised across 40 variations that is a rounding error.
Fill gaps, do not build ads. The realistic budget shape for a testing month: 40 assembled variations at 1 credit each, plus six 3 second generated clips at 6 credits each, is 76 credits. Flip it around and build four fully generated 20 second ads and you have spent 160 credits for four ads. The text-to-video documentation covers the mechanics of getting a usable clip on the first attempt, which is the other half of cost control.
One thing we do not sell, and it is relevant to cost: there are no AI avatars or synthetic presenters, no static banners, no product-URL import, no product-feed rendering, no predicted performance scores and no direct publishing to Meta or TikTok. If your plan was to replace a presenter shoot with generated seconds, that is not a thing we do.
Frequently asked questions
Why is AI video generation priced per second instead of per video?
Because the compute scales with frames. Every second of generated video is 24 to 30 synthesised frames, each conditioned on its neighbours, so a ten second clip costs roughly five times a two second clip to produce. Assembly from existing footage does not work that way, which is why we charge 1 credit for a whole variation and 2 credits per generated second.
Is a credit-based tool cheaper than a monthly subscription?
It depends entirely on how evenly your usage is spread. Credits win for spiky work, such as a testing batch every fortnight, especially when they do not expire. A monthly seat wins if you generate something most days, and several tools in this category list entry plans between $15 and $69 a month as of August 2026.
How many seconds of generated video does a typical ad need?
In our experience, zero to nine. Most ads need none, and the ones that benefit use two or three peripheral shots of two to three seconds each to cover a gap in the footage library. If an ad needs more generated seconds than that, the honest answer is usually that it needs a shoot.
Can I test generated video without paying?
Yes. Our free plan includes 5 ad variations and one AI-generated video of up to 10 seconds, with no card required and no watermark, which is enough to see whether the output is usable for your product. Generate something with your product in frame as your first test, because that is where generation most often fails.