AI Video Generator Pricing Compared (2026): Every Plan, Verified and Dated

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Every AI video plan, verified and dated

Nine tools, every published tier, checked against each vendor’s own pricing page on 22 August 2026. Where a vendor geo-blocks or localises its pricing page we used a United States side snapshot from the Internet Archive and dated it to the snapshot, not to today. Where we could not read a page at all we say so rather than guess.

Tool	Free plan	Entry paid plan	Mid tier	Top published tier
Runway	$0, 125 one time credits	$15/mo, or $12 billed yearly, 625 credits	$35/mo, or $28 yearly, 2,250 credits	$95/mo, or $76 yearly, 9,500 credits
Pika	$0, 80 credits a month	$10/mo, 700 credits	$35/mo, 2,300 credits	$95/mo, 6,000 credits
Vidu	$0, 10 references a month	$10/mo, 800 credits	$35/mo, 4,000 credits	$99/mo, 8,000 credits
Kling AI	None published	$10/mo, $8.80 after the promo, 660 credits	$37/mo, $32.56 ongoing, 3,000 credits	$180/mo, $159.99 ongoing, 26,000 credits
HeyGen	$0, 3 videos a month	$29/mo, 600 credits	$49/mo, 1,000 credits	Business plans, quote only
Luma AI	None. Withdrawn early 2026	$30/mo, or $25 yearly, 10,000 credits	$90/mo, or $75 yearly, 40,000 credits	$300/mo, or $250 yearly, 150,000 credits
Vivideo	Free plan exists, allowance not published	$2/week, billed yearly at $99	$4/week, billed yearly at $199	Enterprise, quote only
Veo 3 (Gemini)	Not published	Google One AI at US$10/mo	US$40/mo	US$100/mo
CapCut	Not verifiable	Not verifiable	Not verifiable	Not verifiable

Every figure above came off the vendor’s own page. None of it came from another roundup, and that matters more than it sounds, because most of the numbers circulating for this category are copies of copies.

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What a free plan actually gets you

Free is doing a lot of work in this category. Here is what the three real free plans give you, and what they cost you in practice.

If you only want the free options ranked rather than the whole price landscape, that is a separate piece: best free AI image to video tools.

Tool	Free allowance	What that buys	Resolution ceiling	Watermark
Pika	80 video credits a month	About 6 clips. Image to video at 480p for 5 seconds costs 12 credits	480p only on free	None, even on free
Vidu	10 references a month	Reference generations only, not the 200 a day figure quoted elsewhere	Not published for free	Not published
Runway	125 credits, one time	Roughly 10 seconds of Gen-4.5, then nothing	Not published for free	Removed on paid plans
HeyGen	3 videos a month, up to 1 minute each	Three finished avatar videos	720p on free, 1080p from $29	Yes on free

Runway’s is the one most likely to catch you out. The 125 credits are described on the page as one time credits to explore. They do not refill. On Runway’s own conversion, 625 credits is about 52 seconds of Gen-4.5, so 125 credits is roughly 10 seconds of finished video, once, ever. It is a demo, and Runway is honest about calling it that. Plenty of articles are not.

Vidu’s free plan is worth a separate warning, because the number attached to Vidu everywhere is 200 videos a day. That number is real, but it belongs to the Ultimate plan at $99 a month, where it appears as Free Off-Peak Mode. The actual free plan gives 10 references a month. We nearly published the wrong version of this ourselves.

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The credit problem

Every vendor here except HeyGen prices in credits, and no two credits are the same size. That is not an accident. Credits make cross-vendor comparison almost impossible unless you do the conversion yourself, and almost nobody does.

Luma publishes the clearest cost table of the group, and it shows how wide the spread gets inside a single plan. On Ray3.2 image to video:

Setting	Cost	Clips on the 10,000 credit Plus plan
Draft, 5 seconds	20 credits	500
540p, 5 seconds	50 credits	200
720p, 5 seconds	100 credits	100
1080p, 5 seconds	400 credits	25
1080p, 10 seconds	1,200 credits	8

The same $30 plan is either 500 clips or 8 clips depending on settings you choose after you have paid. That is a 60 to 1 spread, and it is why the phrase how many videos do I get has no honest single answer in this category.

Kling is the only vendor here that publishes an explicit unit price, which makes it the easiest to reason about: 100 credits costs $1.06 on Standard, $0.87 on Pro and $0.81 on Premier. Buying a bigger plan lowers the unit cost by about 24% from entry to Premier. That is a real discount and Kling deserves credit for showing it plainly.

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Three pricing structures that mislead

Kling’s first month. The membership page leads with $6.99, then says 30% off first month, then says the ongoing rate is $8.80. The $6.99 is a one time promotional price. Anyone quoting Kling at $6.99 a month is quoting a number that is true exactly once.

Vivideo’s weekly framing. Vivideo’s Pro plan is advertised as $2 a week. Directly underneath, in smaller text, it says billed yearly at $99. You are not paying $2 a week, you are paying $99 up front for twelve months. The Max plan is the same shape at $4 a week and $199 billed yearly. Weekly pricing that bills annually is legal and it is also the single most effective way to make an annual commitment feel like pocket change.

Luma’s disappearing free tier. On 30 January 2026 Luma published four plans, Free, Lite, Plus and Unlimited, at $0, $7.99, $23.99 and $75.99. By 8 March 2026 those were gone, replaced by Plus, Pro and Premier at $30, $90 and $300. The entry price rose from $7.99 to $30, which is 3.75 times, and the free plan vanished. For a while the page still said all plans come with free trial credits. That line was present on 3 May 2026 and gone by 29 June 2026. As at 22 August 2026 the word free does not appear on Luma’s pricing page at all.

We can date that change precisely because we checked it against archived snapshots rather than asking Luma. It is the clearest example we have found of a price moving under an entire category of published advice.

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What we could not verify

CapCut. We are naming it rather than quietly leaving it out, because a gap you cannot see is worse than one you can.

capcut.com returns HTTP 451 from our location, which means unavailable for legal reasons, and two of its pricing paths return the same. A third returns 404. No archived snapshot of any CapCut pricing page exists to fall back on. That is a geo block on our side, not evidence that CapCut publishes nothing, and we will not write it up either way until we can read the page. CapCut almost certainly does publish pricing to readers who can reach it.

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How we checked

We went to each vendor’s own site, followed their navigation to the pricing page rather than guessing the URL, expanded every billing toggle and collapsed section, and read the resulting page. Guessing URLs produces 404s that look like missing pricing, and reading only the visible toggle state produces half a price table.

Two vendors needed different handling. HeyGen force redirects its pricing page to a country specific path even when asked for United States English, and Google serves Google One prices in local currency. For both we read a United States side Internet Archive snapshot instead and dated the figures to the snapshot, 7 August 2026 for HeyGen and 19 August 2026 for Google. A snapshot is evidence of what was published on its date, not of what is live right now, and we would rather show you a dated figure than an undated guess.

Where the nav led to the wrong product we corrected course. Kling’s top navigation goes to its developer pricing, which is API credit pricing at $0.08 to $0.42 per unit in packages from $700 to $8,400. That is not the consumer plan anyone reading this needs, so the figures above come from the membership plan page instead.

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What a second of video actually costs

Credits are the reason nobody can answer the question everyone asks, which is simply whether one tool is dearer than another. So here is that answer, worked out from each vendor’s own published conversions rather than from anything we estimated.

Runway is the only vendor that publishes the conversion directly on its pricing page. It states that 625 credits is 52 seconds of Gen-4.5, 2,250 credits is 187 seconds, and 9,500 credits is 791 seconds. Divide by the plan price and you get a cost per second.

Luma and Pika publish credit costs per generation instead, which gets you to the same place with one more step. Luma charges 100 credits for 5 seconds at 720p, so its 10,000 credit Plus plan is 100 generations, or 500 seconds. Pika charges 20 credits for 5 seconds at 720p, so its 700 credit Standard plan is 35 generations, or 175 seconds.

Tool and plan	Monthly price	Seconds of video	Cost per second
Pika Standard, 720p	$10	175	$0.057
Luma Plus, 720p	$30	500	$0.060
Pika Standard, 1080p	$10	88	$0.114
Runway Max, Gen-4.5	$95	791	$0.120
Runway Pro, Gen-4.5	$35	187	$0.187
Luma Plus, 1080p	$30	125	$0.240
Runway Standard, Gen-4.5	$15	52	$0.288

Read that column and the entry level plans invert. Runway Standard at $15 a month looks cheaper than Luma Plus at $30, and per second of output it is five times more expensive. Pika Standard at $10 gives you more than three times as many seconds as Runway Standard at $15.

Two honest caveats, because this table is only useful if you know what it is not. Gen-4.5 is Runway’s premium model and the seconds are not directly comparable in quality to Pika at 720p, so this measures cost, not value. And buying up reduces unit cost sharply on every platform: Runway Max is 2.4 times cheaper per second than Runway Standard, which is the steepest volume discount in the group.

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Every plan in detail

Runway

Free gives 125 one time credits, roughly 10 seconds of Gen-4.5, and they do not refill. Standard is $15 a month or $12 billed yearly for 625 credits, and it unlocks all image and video models, 4K upscaling and no watermarks. Pro is $35 or $28 yearly for 2,250 credits, adds custom voices for lip sync and 500GB of storage. Max is $95 or $76 yearly for 9,500 credits, and is the only plan where unused credits roll over, for one month. Enterprise is quote only.

Each vendor has a page of its own with worked examples and upgrade break evens: Runway, Pika, Kling AI, Luma AI, HeyGen and Vidu.

Runway is the most transparent vendor in this group. It publishes the credit conversion, the storage, the model list per tier and the annual saving in dollars rather than percentages. It is also the most expensive per second at entry level, and it publishes enough for you to work that out yourself, which is more than most.

Pika

Free gives 80 video credits a month at 480p only, with no watermark and commercial use permitted. Standard at $10 gives 700 credits and unlocks all resolutions. Pro at $35 gives 2,300 credits and faster generation. Fancy at $95 gives 6,000 credits and the fastest queue.

Pika publishes the most detailed credit costs of anyone here, broken out by feature, resolution and clip length. Image to video on model 2.5 costs 12 credits for 5 seconds at 480p, 20 at 720p, and 40 at 1080p, doubling for 10 seconds. Pikaframes runs from 12 credits for a 5 second 480p clip up to 200 credits for a 20 to 25 second clip at 1080p. If you want to forecast a bill before paying it, Pika is the only tool here that gives you everything you need.

Vidu

Free gives 10 references a month. Standard at $10 gives 800 credits and states up to 200 videos. Premium at $35 gives 4,000 credits and up to 1,000 videos. Ultimate at $99 gives 8,000 credits plus Free Off-Peak Mode, which allows up to 200 video submissions daily.

That off-peak figure is the most quoted number about Vidu and it is almost always attributed to the wrong plan. It sits on the $99 tier. Vidu also states its video length range as 3 to 16 seconds across paid plans, and allows 4 concurrent generations.

Kling AI

There is no free plan on the membership page. Standard is $10 a month, shown as $6.99 for the first month and $8.80 ongoing, for 660 credits. Pro is $37, or $32.56 ongoing, for 3,000 credits. Premier is $92, or $80.96 ongoing, for 8,000. Ultra is $180, or $159.99 ongoing, for 26,000.

Kling is the only vendor here that publishes an explicit credit unit price: 100 credits costs $1.06 on Standard, $0.87 on Pro and $0.81 on Premier. That is a 24% unit discount from entry to Premier and it is stated plainly, which we appreciate. What it does not publish is the credit cost per generation, so you cannot convert that into seconds of video without signing in.

HeyGen

HeyGen is the outlier here because it sells finished avatar videos rather than raw generation. Free gives 3 videos a month, up to 1 minute each, with access to Avatar IV and 500 stock digital twins. Creator at $29 a month gives 600 credits, videos up to 30 minutes, 1080p export, watermark removal and voice cloning. Pro at $49 gives 1,000 credits, 4K export and access to all advanced models. Business plans are quote only.

For anyone who needs a presenter rather than a moving image, HeyGen’s free plan is the most useful in this entire comparison. Three finished minute-long videos a month is a real amount of output.

Luma AI

Plus is $30 a month or $25 billed yearly for 10,000 credits. Pro is $90 or $75 for 40,000. Ultra is $300 or $250 for 150,000. Team and Enterprise are quote only. There is no free plan, and there has not been one since early 2026.

Luma publishes the most granular generation costs of anyone. On Ray3.2, image to video runs 20 credits for 5 seconds in draft, 50 at 540p, 100 at 720p and 400 at 1080p, all doubling and then tripling as length increases. Video to video is charged per second rather than per clip, from 36 credits a second in draft to 144 at 1080p. Reframe is cheaper, from 10 to 120 credits a second.

Vivideo

Pro is advertised at $2 a week and billed yearly at $99, giving 30 credits a week or about 10 videos. Max is $4 a week, billed yearly at $199, giving 100 credits a week or about 33 videos. Enterprise adds seats, API access and SSO.

Vivideo’s own FAQ describes the free plan as working like an ongoing free trial with free generations and no card needed, but the plan table publishes no free allowance. It also offers something none of the others do, which is a single prompt producing a video up to 5 minutes long, extendable to around 10, built scene by scene. Whether that is useful depends entirely on whether you want the AI making structural decisions for you.

Google Veo 3

Veo access sits inside Google One AI rather than being sold separately, which is why Gemini has no pricing link in its navigation. The plans page shows US$10, US$40 and US$100 a month. Google publishes no per generation allowance for Veo on that page, so how much video any tier actually buys is not something we can tell you from published sources.

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What to do before you pay

Check the date on any price you find, including this one. Every figure here was verified on 22 August 2026, or on the archive snapshot date named beside it, and this category moves faster than any other we track.

Work out your own cost per second rather than comparing monthly prices. The plan that looks cheapest almost never is, and the arithmetic takes two minutes with the credit costs above.

Decide your resolution before you decide your plan. On Luma the jump from 720p to 1080p makes every clip four times more expensive, and on Pika it doubles the cost. A plan sized for 720p work will not survive the same volume at 1080p.

If you only need a handful of clips a month, use Pika’s free plan and keep your money. Six 480p clips is not a professional workflow, but it is enough to find out whether any of this is useful to you before committing to anything.

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Which one to actually buy

If your budget is genuinely zero, Pika is the only tool here with a recurring free plan that produces usable clips without a watermark and allows commercial use. Six clips a month at 480p is not much, but it is real and it renews.

For the avatar tools specifically, where pricing works differently again, see our Synthesia review and Synthesia vs Colossyan. For model release timing, we track it in AI tools updates 2026.

If you want to try before paying, Runway’s 125 one time credits give you about ten seconds of output to judge quality on. Use them deliberately.

If you are buying entry level, Pika and Vidu at $10 and Kling at $8.80 ongoing are the cheapest real plans. Kling is cheapest per month, Vidu gives the most stated output at that price with 800 credits and up to 200 videos, and Pika gives 700 credits with the clearest published credit costs.

If you need talking avatars rather than animated stills, HeyGen is the only tool here built for it, and its free plan of three one minute videos a month is the most generous free allowance in the group in terms of finished output.

If you need precise motion control, Luma still has the best controls in this group, and it will now cost you $30 a month minimum. Price it against Runway Standard at $12 billed yearly before committing.

Whatever you pick, check the price yourself before you pay. Every figure on this page carries the date we verified it, and in this category that date starts expiring immediately.