Nobody prices generation the same way, and the unit is chosen to be hard to compare. Here is how to work out what a job will actually cost before you commit to it.
- There are four pricing models and they are not comparable by looking. Credits, per-second, per-image, and flat subscription.
- Credits are deliberately opaque. A credit is worth whatever the vendor says this month, and the same job can cost different amounts on different settings.
- Video is priced by duration, so cost scales with your patience — and re-rolls are the real budget, not the final clip.
- Count attempts, not outputs. The honest unit is "cost per usable result", which is several generations, not one.
- Subscriptions hide the marginal cost, which is fine until you scale and discover the ceiling.
- No prices on this page. They change monthly and a number here would be wrong before it was useful — the method is the point.
Think of a taxi. One firm charges by the mile, one by the minute, one sells you a book of tickets, and one offers all-you-can-ride for a monthly fee. None of the prices can be compared until you know how far you are going and how often you get stuck in traffic.
Generation is the same, and "traffic" is how many attempts it takes to get one you can use.
The four ways you get charged
Why credits are the hard one
A credit has no fixed meaning. The same word covers different amounts of compute across vendors, and often across features within one vendor. The number you are buying is not the number you are spending.
Two things make it harder. Settings change the burn rate — higher resolution, longer duration, more reasoning, or a "pro" mode can multiply the cost of a single action. And credits often expire, monthly or on cancellation, so unused balance is not saved money.
The only reliable move is to measure it yourself. Run one real job, note the balance before and after, and divide. That number is worth more than any published table, because it is your workflow at your settings.
The unit everyone gets wrong
Vendors quote cost per generation. The number you need is cost per usable result, and those differ by the number of attempts.
If it takes six generations to get one you would show a client, your real cost is six times the sticker. This is why a "cheaper" model can be more expensive — a model at half the price that needs three times the attempts costs you more, and burns more of your time, which is the larger cost anyway.
So the metric to track is your hit rate. Count attempts per keeper for a week. That single ratio tells you more about which tool to use than any price comparison.
Cost per generation is the vendor's number. Cost per keeper is yours — and it is the only one that predicts a project budget.
Video is where budgets go
Duration pricing changes how you should work
When you pay by the second, every re-roll costs the full length again. A twelve-second clip that takes five attempts costs sixty seconds of generation to deliver twelve.
Two habits follow directly, and they are also better filmmaking:
Test short, then commit long. Get the composition, motion and identity right on the shortest duration the model allows, and only then generate at full length. You are paying to iterate on a proxy rather than the finished thing.
Cut instead of extending. Three short shots are usually cheaper, more reliable and better paced than one long one — and long generations drift more, so you are paying extra for the harder problem. See why your generation came out wrong on drift.
The costs that are not on the pricing page
That third row is the one that ends projects. Confirm the commercial terms of the specific plan before you price a job on it — who owns what you generate covers how those clauses are written and what they actually grant.
Estimating a real job
Five minutes, and it is the difference between a quote and a guess.
Deliberate. Generation pricing changes monthly, credit values are redefined, plans are renamed and free tiers appear and vanish. A table of numbers on a static page becomes wrong quickly and then misleads with authority.
What does not change is the arithmetic: cost per keeper equals cost per generation times attempts per keeper, plus post, plus the tier that actually permits your use. Take those to the vendor's own current pricing page and the answer will be right on the day you need it. Checked 31 August 2026.
The through-line: you are not buying images, you are buying attempts. Price the attempts and the budget stops surprising you.