Price per second

How it works

Video generation models are usually priced per second of output video, with higher rates for higher resolution and sometimes extra for generated audio. A clip's cost is roughly its length times the per-second rate for the chosen settings.

Models cap the length of a single generation, and longer videos are built by chaining or extending clips, each billed. Some providers price by resolution, others by quality setting or model variant.

Costs climb quickly during iteration. Drafting at lower resolution and rendering the final version at full quality is usually cheaper, and budgets should cover all seconds generated, not just those published.

Worked example

Illustrative: at $0.50 per second at 1080p, an 8-second clip costs $4. If it takes 5 generations to get one usable clip, each published clip costs $20, and 100 published clips cost $2,000.

Common mistakes

• 1Budgeting for published seconds and not for drafts and rejected takes.
• 2Drafting at full resolution with audio when a cheaper setting would do for review.
• 3Assuming one generation can reach the target length when the model caps clip duration.