Nobody Selling AI Video Will Tell You What a Video Costs

Pick two AI video tools and try to work out which is cheaper for the videos you actually make. Not which plan is cheaper. Which video is cheaper.

You will not be able to do it, and the reason is not that you are missing a spreadsheet. It is that none of the three pricing pages we read this afternoon states what a finished video costs.

What the pages actually say

We opened three pricing pages in a real browser on 2026-09-17 and read the rendered tiers. Not a summary, not a blog roundup: the vendor's own page, in a browser, that day.

Pamba(opens in new tab) is the most forthcoming of the three. Free gives 300 one-time credits. Hobby is $16 a month for 1,600 credits; Pro is $100 for 10,000. The page also does something the others do not: it names a rate, "approximately 10 credits per second" for one specific model, Grok Imagine. And it estimates output in videos: on average 3 a month on Hobby, 21 on Pro.

That estimate is the only place any of these pages connects money to finished video, and it rests on an assumption stated in passing: those are 30-second videos on Grok Imagine. Change the length or the model and the number moves.

It is also worth doing the arithmetic. At roughly 10 credits a second, a 30-second video costs about 300 credits, so Hobby's 1,600 credits ought to be five videos. The page says three. We are not going to guess at the gap — rounding, a different default model, some overhead the page does not itemise — but the vendor's own estimate and the vendor's own stated rate do not reconcile on the vendor's own page, and that is the clearest possible illustration of what a credit is.

NemoVideo(opens in new tab) gives Free 100 credits, then Starter and a ladder of Pro tiers reaching 12,000 credits at $249.99 a month list, discounted to $159.99 on the annual toggle. What a credit buys is described qualitatively, by complexity and duration. There is no conversion anywhere on the page. A feature bullet mentions that one model generates up to 30 seconds, which is the closest the page comes to a unit.

Higgsfield(opens in new tab) sells Starter at $19 a month for 270 credits, Plus, and Ultra with credit options up to 9,000. Its rates are per model and so is its resolution: one model at 1080p, another at 4K, another at 2K. There is no single maximum clip length, only per-model credit-and-duration pairs.

Three pages, three credit systems, and one shared property: the credit is the unit being sold, and what it buys is a function of variables the page does not resolve for you.

The row a buyer needs is the one none of the three fills in.

The toggle that changes the price

Two separate automated fetches of NemoVideo's pricing page returned different Starter prices. One said $17.99. The other said $19.99. We have published a competitor's price that turned out to be wrong before, so we did not pick one. We opened the page in a browser.

Both numbers are correct. The page carries a $24.99 list price and a billing-cycle toggle. Annual is selected by default and shows $17.99. Click Monthly and the same tier shows $19.99. Nothing is promotional, nothing is stale, and neither fetch was wrong — each caught one toggle position and reported it as the price.

So the price of a tier depends on which control was selected when you looked at it. Any comparison table built by reading these pages inherits that, invisibly, and no table we have seen carries a column for it.

Neither fetch was wrong. Each saw one toggle position.

Why this is not an accident

It would be easy to read this as vendors hiding the ball. The likelier explanation is duller and harder to fix: they genuinely do not know.

These products are resellers of other people's models. Higgsfield's rates move per model because the underlying model's rates move per model. Pamba names a rate for Grok Imagine specifically, because the rate for a different model is a different number. When your cost of goods is a basket of third-party inference prices that each vendor reprices on its own schedule, a fixed price per finished video is a promise about someone else's roadmap.

Credits are what you sell when you cannot commit to a unit. They float against a cost you do not control, they absorb repricing without a customer-facing announcement, and they let one number on a page cover a dozen models whose real costs differ several-fold.

That is a rational thing for the vendor. It just means the buyer cannot compare, and the buyer is usually told they can.

What a buyer can actually do

Three things work, in descending order of usefulness.

Price your own workload, not the tier. Take the videos you actually intend to ship this month, at the length and model you actually use, and find what that consumes. Pamba is the only one of the three where you can attempt this from the page, and even there you are accepting a 30-second assumption. For the others you are measuring after signup, not before.

Read the page in a browser, and note the toggle. Every number in this post came from a rendered page on a stated date. Automated fetching produced a wrong answer twice on the same page, in both directions, and neither result announced itself as partial. That last property is the dangerous one, and it is the same reason a tool reporting success is not evidence the work happened: a partial answer and a complete one arrive in the same shape.

Treat any comparison table without dates as decorative. That includes ours: the numbers above describe 2026-09-17 and nothing else. A pricing table is a photograph, and these pages change without changelogs.

What we do instead, and what it costs us

We build in this category, so this is not a neutral observation.

Clipwright bills per second of finished video out of a credit pack, which means the unit is fixed even though the word "credit" still appears. You can compute what a run costs before you start it. The cost of that choice is real: it commits us to a rate across models whose own prices move independently, and absorbing that spread is our problem rather than the customer's.

We have also been wrong in the other direction. Our billing rule once charged a customer 900 credits for a video that did not exist, because the rule asked whether we had paid a vendor rather than what the customer received. A legible unit is necessary and not sufficient; you also have to be right about when it applies.

And the pressure behind all of this is the same one driving products to move inference cost onto the customer's own subscription entirely. Credits are one answer to an unstable cost of goods. Handing the bill to the user is another. Both are responses to the same underlying problem, which is that nobody in this category controls what a generation costs them next quarter.

FAQ

Why do AI video tools sell credits instead of videos?

Because their own costs are a basket of third-party model prices that change independently and without notice. A credit is a float: it lets the vendor reprice the underlying models without changing the number on the pricing page, and it lets one plan cover models whose real costs differ several-fold. The trade is that the buyer cannot convert the price into videos.

Can I compare two AI video tools on price?

Not from their pricing pages alone, in the three cases we checked. You can compare monthly plan cost and credit allowance, but neither tells you the cost of a finished video unless the vendor states a credits-per-second rate and you know which model you will use. Of the three pages we read, one stated a rate for a single named model and the other two stated none.

Is the cheapest plan the cheapest option?

Not reliably. A plan's cost per credit and a credit's yield in video are separate variables, and only the first is published. A cheaper plan with a lower-yield model can cost more per finished video than a dearer plan with a higher-yield one.