Which AI Video Tools Still Have a Free Tier in 2026

The answer, in one table

Every figure above was read from the vendor’s own page or help documentation on 24 August 2026. Where we could not read a page we have said so, rather than reporting an absence of evidence as evidence of absence.

Ranked by what you can actually make

Most roundups rank free tiers by whether the plan exists. That is not useful. What matters is how much finished video comes out of it, and on that measure the gaps are enormous.

Google Flow is not slightly ahead. It produces more than thirty times as much video per month as Pika, the next real image to video option, and in a single day it produces about four times what Runway’s free plan will produce in its entire existence.

Google Flow: 50 credits a day, and one hard ceiling

With no subscription at all, Google gives 50 Google Flow credits every day. Veo 3.1 Lite costs 10 credits and produces a clip of 4, 6 or 8 seconds for the same price, so the practical output is five 8 second clips a day, indefinitely.

Three conditions are worth knowing before you plan around it. Credits do not roll over, so the ceiling is 50 a day and cannot be banked. The daily refresh is triggered by your first generation rather than by a calendar reset. And free credits work only on Veo 3.1 Lite, Fast and Quality.

That third condition contains the catch. Veo 3.1 Quality costs 100 credits for every user, the free grant is 50 a day, and unused credits are forfeited. So the free tier can never generate a single Quality clip, no matter how long you wait. The model is listed as included. The arithmetic makes it unreachable.

One more thing to know before you upgrade: subscribing wipes any remaining free credits immediately. Full breakdown in Google Flow pricing.

HeyGen: the most finished minutes, if you want a presenter

HeyGen’s free plan gives three videos a month, each up to one minute, at 720p with a watermark. It includes Avatar IV and Video Agent.

In raw minutes that is the second most generous free tier here, and for a specific job it is the most useful one on the list. If what you need is a person delivering a script, nothing else in this comparison does that at all.

It is also the free tier least like the others. HeyGen makes an avatar talk. Pika, Runway, Kling, Vidu and Luma animate or generate footage. Comparing them on credits misses that they are not substitutes. Detail in HeyGen pricing.

Pika: small, but it renews and it does not watermark

Pika’s free Basic plan gives 80 video credits a month. Image to video at 480p for 5 seconds costs 12 credits, so the honest figure is six clips a month, and 480p is the only resolution the free plan unlocks.

Six clips is not much. What makes Pika the best conventional free tier here is what surrounds it: the credits renew every month, there is no watermark even on free, and commercial use is permitted. Very few free tiers in any category give you commercial rights and clean output at the same time.

Pika also publishes its full credit cost table, which means you can work out in advance exactly what you will get. Of the eight tools here, only Pika, Runway and Google do that. See Pika pricing.

Runway: a trial that is labelled as a plan

Runway’s free plan is called “Free forever” and gives 125 credits described on the page as one time credits to explore. They do not refill.

Using Runway’s own published conversion, 625 credits is 52 seconds of Gen-4.5, so 125 credits is roughly ten seconds of finished video. Once. That is the whole free tier.

To be fair to Runway, the page says “one time” plainly, which is more honest than most. The problem is downstream: a great many roundups list Runway’s free tier alongside monthly ones as though it renews. It does not. Spend those ten seconds on the single shot that tells you whether to subscribe. See Runway pricing.

Kling AI: a $0 plan with no published allowance

Kling’s Subscription Comparison table lists a Basic tier at $0, next to Standard, Pro, Premier and Ultra. So a free Kling account exists.

What the page will not tell you is what it gives. The Monthly Credits row reads 660 for Standard, 3,000 for Pro, 8,000 for Premier and 26,000 for Ultra. For Basic the cell is empty. Price per 100 Credits is empty for Basic too. The only two Basic figures anywhere on the table are 30 element creations and one video per generation.

Kling does list daily free credits, but read the column: the row is titled “Daily Free Credits for Subscribers”. Free daily credits for non subscribers are widely reported elsewhere and are not published on the membership page, so we are not going to state a figure we cannot source. See Kling AI pricing.

Vidu: ten references, and a number attached to the wrong plan

Vidu’s free plan gives 10 references a month. References are inputs for consistency across generations, not finished videos, which makes this the thinnest real free tier on the list.

Vidu is also the source of the most repeated wrong number in this category. Search for Vidu and you will find “200 videos a day, free”. That figure is real. It is Free Off-Peak Mode, and it is a feature of the Ultimate plan at $99 a month. It appears on the Ultimate card under the 8,000 credits line and nowhere near the free plan. See Vidu pricing.

Luma AI: the one that took its free tier away

Luma is the reason this article needed writing. It is still recommended as a free image to video tool across the web, and it has not had a free plan since March 2026.

We dated the change against archived snapshots of Luma’s own pricing page:

So the free plan went between 30 January and 8 March, and the entry price went from $7.99 to $30, which is 3.75 times higher. Anything recommending Luma’s free tier today is repeating a page that stopped existing six months ago. Detail in Luma AI pricing.

CapCut: we could not check, and we are not going to guess

CapCut appears on almost every list of free AI video tools. We cannot confirm what it offers.

Requests to capcut.com from our location return HTTP 451, which means unavailable for legal reasons. That is a geo block on the requesting address, not a missing page. We then checked the Internet Archive, which crawls from United States infrastructure, and found no archived snapshot of any CapCut pricing path at all. The homepage snapshot from 21 August 2026 is marketing copy with no plan table.

So the honest entry is “could not check”. A vendor whose page we cannot read is not a vendor that publishes nothing, and the difference between those two statements is the whole point of this article.

What the pattern says

Six of eight publish a free plan. Only five state what it gives you. One withdrew its free plan and is still being recommended as free. One cannot be checked from here at all.

The direction of travel in this category is downward, with a single enormous exception. Luma removed its free tier and quadrupled its entry price. Runway’s free grant is a one time trial. Kling publishes a $0 tier and no allowance to go with it. Against that, Google gives away 50 credits a day, which is more monthly value than its own $4.99 and $19.99 plans deliver.

That is not a market where free tiers compete with each other. It is a market where one participant does not need the revenue and everyone else does.

How we verified this

For each vendor we went to the homepage and followed its own navigation to the pricing page, rather than guessing a URL. Guessing is how you end up on Kling’s developer pricing page, which sells API credits in packages up to $8,400 and has nothing to do with the consumer plans.

Where a live page was localised or blocked from our location, we read a United States side snapshot from the Internet Archive instead and dated the figure to the snapshot. That applies to HeyGen and to the Luma timeline above. Where neither a live read nor an archived copy was available, which is CapCut only, we have recorded that we could not check rather than filling the gap.

We have not tested any of these tools and make no claim about output quality here. This page reports what each vendor publishes about its free tier, and what the arithmetic on those published numbers implies. Free tiers in AI video change faster than anything else we track, usually downward, so check the page yourself before planning around it.

Written by

Faz

Faz is the founder of AIToolsBakery. Every tool on this site is personally tested with real-world writing tasks before a single word gets published. No sponsored rankings, no recycled press releases.

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Faz

The Baker

Faz is the editor and founder of AI Tools Bakery, where every AI tool review is built on verified vendor pricing, documented user reports, and published product records. 10+ years in digital marketing, now covering AI software across 19 industries with honest verdicts and no pay-to-win rankings.

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