Starvard
Starvard
One minute of finished video costs $1.30 from one famous model and $24 from another, and both are telling the truth about their prices. This is the map of that strange new market, drawn entirely from the official price lists.
On this page
Chapter 01 · The short version
Finn’s top line
More than 20 models priced below, per finished minute, with sources. No model makes a full minute in one take. Rechecked every couple of days.
Chapter 02 · The plot twist
The biggest fact in AI video this year is a goodbye. OpenAI closed the Sora consumer app on April 26, 2026, and shut the Sora 2 and Sora 2 Pro API down on September 24, 2026, with no replacement named. Any guide still recommending Sora is out of date, including, until today, most of the internet. We keep its last prices in the table below, marked closed, so the record stays honest.
Also new since most guides were written: Google replaced Veo 3 with Veo 3.1, Kuaishou launched Kling 3.0 in February 2026 and Kling 4.0 on October 15, 2026 (no published API price yet, so we print no price for it), Luma moved to Ray3.2, and ByteDance Seedance 1.5 Pro added native sound. This page is rechecked every couple of days precisely because this market will not sit still.
How to read the prices: one minute of finished video, at each model's standard quality tier, from its official API or pay as you go price, before retakes. Subscription shortcuts that beat the API price are in their own table further down.
Chapter 03 · The evidence
Sorted roughly from cheapest to priciest at the standard tier. Gold rows are our picks. Prices checked Oct 25, 2026.
| Model | Per minute | How that price works | Longest clip | Sound |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seedance 1.0 Pro Fast (ByteDance) | $1.30 | $0.0216 per second at 720p via API hosts. 1080p: $2.92 | 10 sec | No |
| HunyuanVideo 1.5 (Tencent, open) | $1.20 to $2.40 | $0.02 per second at 480p, $0.04 at 720p on WaveSpeed. Free if you self host | 10 sec | No |
| LTX-2.3 Fast (Lightricks, open) | $1.80 | $0.03 per second at 720p on the official LTX API. Cheapest verified price with sound | 20 sec | Yes, native |
| Hailuo 2.3 Fast (MiniMax) | $1.90 | $0.19 per 6 second clip at 768p, image to video only | 10 sec | No |
| Wan 2.2 Flash (Alibaba) | $2.16 | $0.036 per second at 720p on Alibaba Model Studio | 5 sec | No |
| PixVerse V5 | $2.40 | $0.20 per 5 second clip at 720p via hosted API | 8 sec | Effects add-on |
| Kling 2.5 Turbo (Kuaishou) | $2.52 | $0.042 per second at 720p via developer API | 10 sec | No |
| Hailuo 02 / 2.3 (MiniMax) | $2.80 | $0.28 per 6 second clip at 768p. 1080p: $4.90 | 10 sec | No |
| Veo 3.1 Lite (Google) | $3.00 | $0.05 per second at 720p on the Gemini API. 1080p: $4.80 | 8 sec | Yes |
| Runway Gen-4 Turbo | $3.00 | 5 credits per second, credits at $0.01. Best editing tools in the field | 10 sec | No |
| Vidu Q2 Pro (ShengShu) | $3.15 | About $0.53 per 10 second clip at 720p via hosted API | 10 sec | Music only |
| Seedance 1.0 Pro (ByteDance) | $3.24 | Token priced on BytePlus. 480p: $1.46, 1080p: $7.34 | 10 sec | No |
| Luma Ray3.2 | $3.60 | $0.30 per 5 second clip at 720p. 1080p: $14.40 | 10 sec | Separate step |
| Kling 3.0 (Kuaishou) | $5.04 | 720p silent via developer API. With native audio: $7.56. 1080p with audio: $10.08 | 15 sec | Yes, native |
| Veo 3.1 Fast (Google) | $6.00 | $0.10 per second at 720p. 4K: $18.00 | 8 sec, extendable | Yes |
| Wan 2.5 (Alibaba) | $6.00 | $0.10 per second at 720p, with audio and auto dubbing | 10 sec | Yes |
| Runway Gen-4.5 | $7.20 | 12 credits per second. Runway's flagship | 10 sec | No |
| Seedance 1.5 Pro (ByteDance) | $6.75 | 1080p with native audio via API hosts. Silent: $3.38 | 12 sec | Yes, native |
| Veo 3.1 Standard (Google) | $24.00 | $0.40 per second. The quality ceiling, priced like it | 8 sec, extendable | Yes |
| Sora 2 (OpenAI) · CLOSED Sep 2026 | $6.00 | Last published API price, historical only. Sora 2 Pro was $18 to $42 | 12 sec | Yes |
| Kling 4.0 (Kuaishou) · NEW Oct 15, 2026 | No price yet | Launched with clips up to 30 seconds claimed. API rate not published, so we print none | 30 sec claimed | Yes claimed |
Per minute equals the per second rate times 60, or the per clip price scaled to 60 seconds. Full sources at the bottom of this page.
Log scale in your head: the gap between the cheapest and Veo 3.1 Standard is 18 to 1.
the spread between the cheapest verified minute in this report, $1.30 from Seedance Pro Fast, and the most expensive, $24 from Veo 3.1 Standard. Same job title. Same sixty seconds.
Chapter 04 · The other way to pay
If you make video every week, a subscription with a big credit allotment usually beats the API, as long as you actually use the whole allotment. These are effective per minute prices at the cheapest cost per credit, using all of it on one model.
| Model and plan | Effective per minute | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Veo 3.1 Lite in Google Flow, AI Pro $19.99/mo | $1.50 | 1,000 Flow credits a month, Lite costs 10 credits per clip. Fast: $3.00, Quality: $15.00 |
| Luma Ray3.2, Ultra annual | $2.00 | 720p from 5 second clips. The plan itself is $250/mo billed annually, so this only pays at volume |
| Runway Gen-4 Turbo, Max annual | $2.40 | Gen-4 and Gen-4.5 on the same plan: $5.76 |
| Kling 3.0, large plans | $3.46 | 720p silent. 1080p with audio: $6.91. Plus the daily free credits on top |
| Pika 2.5, Standard annual | $2.74 est. | Estimate: Pika rebuilt its plans and the old credit table may not apply. Verify before you rely on it |
Chapter 05 · Pay nothing
Three strong models give their weights away. Self hosted, a minute costs you electricity and nothing else. All three fit on a 24 GB graphics card of the RTX 4090 class at their lighter settings.
Apache 2.0, the most permissive licence here. Hosted instead: about $3.60 a minute at 720p on RunPod. Silent, 5 second clips, huge community of free tools around it.
The first open family with native synced sound, clips up to 20 seconds, and the cheapest hosted with-sound price we verified: $1.80 a minute on its own API. Free commercial use under $10M revenue per its community licence summary.
Open weights, runs in as little as 14 GB of VRAM with offloading. Hosted on WaveSpeed at $1.20 a minute (480p) to $2.40 (720p). Tencent community licence, not Apache, so read it before commercial work.
No model in this report sells you a minute. They sell you seconds, credits and tokens, and hope you never do the conversion. We did the conversion.
Chapter 06 · The verdict
Free credits every single day, no card, phone or web, friendly interface, and clips up to 15 seconds so you stitch less. Free videos are watermarked and non commercial, which is fine while you learn. When you outgrow free, Standard is about $9 a month. Start here.
Dialogue and sound come out of the same generation, so there is no separate audio step to learn. On Google AI Pro, Lite works out near $1.50 a minute. The catch is 8 second clips and a Quality tier that burns credits fast.
At $1.30 a minute silent, nothing mainstream and verified comes close. It is API only, so this is the pick once you, or your agent, can call an API. Add your own sound in editing.
Gen-4 Turbo at $3.00 a minute buys the best control and editing suite in the field. Silent, but professionals add sound themselves anyway.
What we use at the Studio: Seedance, through Dreamina, is the house video engine for Starvard's own character videos, chosen for exactly the reason in pick 03: strong motion at a price that survives making a lot of clips. The loudness and retake lessons we learned the hard way are in our AI Film course.
Method
Sources
Google Veo 3.1: Gemini API pricing, ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing; Vertex AI pricing, cloud.google.com. Flow credit rates via Google AI plan pages.
Runway: API pricing guide, docs.dev.runwayml.com/guides/pricing; plans at runwayml.com/pricing (credits at $0.01).
Kling: developer pricing at kling.ai/dev/pricing, cross checked against current plan reporting. Kling 4.0 launch coverage, Oct 2026.
Seedance: BytePlus ModelArk guide and pricing; Seedance 1.0 Pro Fast rates via Segmind; 1.5 Pro rates via Hedra's model catalog, Sep 25, 2026.
MiniMax Hailuo: official platform pricing, platform.minimax.io/docs/pricing/overview.
Luma Ray3.2: lumalabs.ai/api and Luma API pricing docs; plan credit rates at lumalabs.ai/pricing.
Alibaba Wan: Model Studio pricing, alibabacloud.com/help/en/model-studio/model-pricing.
LTX: official API pricing at ltx.io/model/api/pricing; fal.ai listings.
PixVerse and Vidu: WaveSpeed API docs for V5 and Q2 Pro.
Sora closure: OpenAI developer docs for sora-2 and sora-2-pro (discontinuation dates), developers.openai.com.
AI Agents on a Budget: the global guide. Thirteen assistants ranked for people who do not live in the US.
AI Film at Starvard: the free course that teaches making films with these models.
Starvard Research rechecks its living reports every couple of days. Bookmark this page, not a screenshot of it.
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