AI Video API Pricing in 2026: What You Actually Pay Per Second

If you've priced out AI video generation lately, you already know the headline numbers rarely tell the full story. One provider quotes a price per second, another sells credits, a third bundles everything into a flat per-clip fee, and none of them make it easy to compare against each other.

This guide breaks down what the major AI video API providers charge in 2026, converts their pricing into a common unit where possible, and walks through the extra costs that tend to show up after you've already committed to a provider. Prices change often here, so treat the numbers below as a snapshot and confirm current rates on the provider's own pricing page before you budget. If you are still deciding which models are worth paying for at all, start with our roundup of the best AI video generation APIs.

How AI Video API Pricing Actually Works

Video generation pricing tends to follow one of three models.

Per-second pricing charges you for the length of the clip you generate, sometimes at a different rate for each resolution or quality tier. This is the clearest model because the math is simple: rate times duration equals cost.

Per-clip pricing charges a flat fee for a fixed-length generation, usually in preset buckets like 5 seconds or 10 seconds rather than any length you want. Providers that use this model often still vary the price by resolution, mode, or whether audio is included.

Credit-based pricing sits on top of either of the above. You buy a block of credits up front, and each generation deducts a number of credits based on the model, resolution, duration, and features like audio or 4K output. A credit has a dollar value, but that value shifts depending on your plan, since higher tiers usually give you a lower cost per credit.

Resolution and duration move your bill more than anything else. Going from 720p to 1080p can roughly double the cost on some models, and adding audio often adds another 30 to 100 percent on top of the silent price.

Pricing by Provider

Runway (Gen-4 Turbo and Gen-4.5)

Runway's developer API bills in credits at a fixed rate of $0.01 per credit, on a separate credit pool from its consumer subscription plans. Gen-4 Turbo runs 5 credits per second, which works out to $0.05 per second, or about $0.50 for a 10-second clip. Gen-4.5, Runway's flagship model, runs 12 credits per second, or $0.12 per second, so a 10-second clip costs roughly $1.20. Runway also charges per-second rates for its Veo and Seedance integrations, so the API works as a marketplace with Runway's own margin built into each rate. If you are weighing resellers, our rundown of Runway API providers shows who else offers the same models and at what price.

Kling (3.0)

Kling's official API sells prepaid packages rather than a simple pay-as-you-go rate, starting around $9.80 for a small trial package and scaling into much larger blocks for production use. Generation without audio runs roughly 6 to 8 credits per second depending on resolution, 720p versus 1080p, climbing to 9 to 12 credits per second with native audio, plus a small add-on for voice control. One useful detail: failed API generations do not consume credits, which is not always true on the consumer app. Our Kling 3.0 guide covers what each mode actually produces.

Hailuo (2.3)

MiniMax's Hailuo API is billed per second and scales with resolution. Third-party reseller pricing puts 512p generation around $0.01 per second, 768p around $0.04 per second, and 1080p around $0.08 per second. MiniMax also sells prepaid monthly token plans starting at $10 a month for teams that want a predictable bill instead of paying for what they use. Hailuo 2.3 Fast is the discount tier, trading some quality for a noticeably lower per-second rate at the same resolution.

Seedance (2.0)

ByteDance's official Seedance pricing, sold through Volcengine, is quoted per million tokens rather than per second: 46 CNY per million tokens for straight generation and 28 CNY per million tokens for video-input and editing mode. That works out to roughly 1 CNY, about $0.14, per second on a 15-second clip at published rates. Several third-party resellers undercut that by a wide margin, offering 720p generation from around $0.045 to $0.05 per second, so shopping around matters more with Seedance than with most other models.

Luma Dream Machine

Luma prices its consumer subscription in three tiers: Plus at $30 a month, Pro at $90 a month, and Ultra at $300 a month. Luma does not publish a flat credit total for each tier, framing usage in relative terms instead, with Pro at roughly four times Plus and Ultra at roughly 15 times. Treat any specific credit figure you see, including the ones here, as approximate and worth confirming on your account dashboard. Video cost rises steeply with resolution and model version. Per-second credit rates for Luma's Ray models have been reported anywhere from about 11 to more than 20 credits per second depending on the model and the source, so this is one to test against your own account rather than budget from a rate you found in a blog post. The separate developer API bills per clip rather than through consumer credits, with 5-second clips reported from around $0.60 up to just over $1 depending on resolution.

Sora API (now retired)

OpenAI's Sora 2 API priced by resolution and tier. Sora 2 standard ran $0.10 per second at 720p, or $0.05 per second on the batch tier, while Sora 2 Pro scaled from $0.30 per second at 720p up to $0.70 per second at 1080p on the standard tier, roughly half that on batch. Those rates are now historical. OpenAI removed the Videos API and every Sora 2 model version on September 24, 2026, following a deprecation notice issued that March, and has not announced a successor. If you still have code pointing at Sora, our list of Sora alternatives covers where other teams moved. Our free AI video generation API guide covers lower-cost ways to test a replacement before you commit to one.

Hidden Costs That Inflate Your Bill

The headline per-second or per-credit rate is rarely the whole story. Audio generation is usually an add-on that can raise the cost by 30 to 100 percent over a silent clip on the same model. Upscaling to 4K or a higher frame rate is normally billed separately, on top of the original generation. Failed generations are the quiet budget killer: some providers refund credits automatically when a job fails, others do not, so check this before you build automatic retries that could burn through your balance. Setting a quality bar up front helps here, and our guide to testing AI-generated video quality explains how to catch bad output early. Storage and bandwidth fees can also creep in if a provider only hosts your output for a limited window (Apiframe, for example, keeps generated files on its CDN for 90 days) and you need to pull large volumes of video out for archiving.

How to Estimate Your Monthly Spend

The formula is simple: clips per month multiplied by average cost per clip equals monthly spend. The hard part is being honest about that average, since it should reflect your real mix of resolutions, durations, and retry rate, not just the cheapest tier you found on a pricing page. Our walkthrough on estimating monthly AI video costs goes through this in more detail.

Here is a rough worked example across three volume tiers, using a mid-range rate of about $0.06 per second, roughly Kling 3.0 standard mode or Luma's 720p Ray tier.

A prototype building 20 test clips a month at 5 seconds each spends about $6 a month, which fits inside most free trial allowances.

A growing app generating 500 clips a month at an average of 6 seconds spends around $180 a month, assuming a low retry rate and no premium resolution.

A production app at scale, generating 10,000 clips a month at 8 seconds on average with a mix of standard and pro modes, can land anywhere from $3,000 to $12,000 a month depending on how much of that volume needs higher resolution or audio.

Those numbers move quickly once you add audio or 4K output, so run the math on your own expected mix before committing to a provider or a plan tier. A pricing calculator for unified AI media generation is a faster way to sanity-check the result.

Cutting Video Generation Costs Without Sacrificing Quality

The biggest saving comes from matching the model to the job instead of defaulting to the most capable one. A social media teaser rarely needs 4K or a flagship model, and a faster, cheaper tier at 720p often looks the same once it is compressed for a feed. Our walkthrough on building a cost-effective AI video ad shows that tradeoff in practice.

Caching and reusing clips helps more than most teams expect, especially for content that does not change often, like product demos or onboarding videos that do not need regenerating every time someone views them.

Batching requests is worth building into your pipeline if your use case can tolerate slightly slower turnaround, since several providers discount batch jobs by a meaningful margin, often close to half the standard rate.

Perhaps the most practical change, if you work across more than one model, is to use a single unified API instead of juggling several provider contracts, minimums, and credit systems. Apiframe gives you one API key and one credit balance across Kling, Hailuo, Seedance, Runway, Luma, Veo, and more, so you can route each job to whichever model is cheapest or best suited to it without opening separate accounts. Our guide to unified AI APIs explains how that routing works. You can see exact per-model, per-second credit costs on Apiframe's pricing page.