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Create·6 min read·By Faz·Updated Aug 23, 2026

Luma AI Pricing (2026): The Tool That Stopped Being Free, and Exactly When

Luma AI publishes three individual plans as at 22 August 2026: Plus at $30 a month or $25 billed yearly, Pro at $90 or $75, and Ultra at $300 or $250. There is no free plan. It was withdrawn between 30 January and 8 March 2026, when entry pricing rose from $7.99 to $30.


What Luma AI costs

Plan Monthly Billed yearly Monthly credits
Plus $30 $25/mo, $300/yr 10,000
Pro $90 $75/mo, $900/yr 40,000
Ultra $300 $250/mo, $3,000/yr 150,000
Team Quote Quote Shared team credits
Enterprise Quote Quote Custom

Verified on lumalabs.ai/pricing, 22 August 2026. There is no free plan on that page.

For every tool in this category side by side, with cost per second worked out from each vendor’s own conversions, see AI video generator pricing compared.


The free tier, and exactly when it went

Luma used to have a free plan. A great deal of published advice still says it does. Here is the timeline, checked against archived snapshots of Luma’s own pricing page rather than against anybody’s write up.

Date What the page showed
20 Sep 2025 Free, Lite, Plus, Unlimited at $0, $9.99, $29.99, $94.99
21 Oct 2025 Same four plans, repriced to $0, $7.99, $23.99, $75.99
30 Jan 2026 Still four plans. Free at $0 gives 8 draft videos
8 Mar 2026 Plus, Pro, Premier at $30, $90, $300. No free plan
3 May 2026 Still says all plans come with free trial credits
29 Jun 2026 That line removed
22 Aug 2026 The word free does not appear on the pricing page

So the free plan disappeared between 30 January and 8 March 2026, and the entry price went from $7.99 to $30. That is 3.75 times, and it happened alongside the zero cost option vanishing entirely.

For a few months afterwards the page still advertised free trial credits on all plans. That line was present on 3 May and gone by 29 June. As at 22 August 2026 the pricing page contains no occurrence of the word free at all. Luma’s homepage still carries a Try Free button, and neither the product pages nor the pricing page say what it gives you.

Faz says: We can date this to a five week window because we checked archived snapshots instead of asking around. Nobody goes back and rechecks a price they already published, which is how a tool stays listed as free for six months after it stops being free. Including, until today, on one of our own pages.

What generations actually cost

Luma publishes the most granular cost table of any tool in this category, and it reveals something the plan prices hide: the spread inside a single plan is enormous.

On Ray3.2, image to video and text to video:

Setting Cost Clips on Plus (10,000 credits)
Draft, 5 seconds 20 credits 500
Draft, 10 seconds 60 credits 166
540p, 5 seconds 50 credits 200
540p, 10 seconds 150 credits 66
720p, 5 seconds 100 credits 100
720p, 10 seconds 300 credits 33
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 the single most important thing to understand before subscribing.

Video to video is priced per second rather than per clip: 36 credits a second in draft, 48 at 540p, 72 at 720p and 144 at 1080p. Reframe is cheaper at 10, 20, 40 and 120 credits a second respectively.

Turned into cost per second, Plus at 720p is about $0.060 a second, and at 1080p it is $0.240. Working at 1080p makes every clip four times more expensive.

Saru says: Decide your resolution before you decide your plan. On Luma that single choice moves your effective cost by a factor of four, and no plan upgrade compensates for picking wrong.

Is Luma still worth it

Luma’s motion controls remain the most precise in this group. Start frame, end frame and direction control are genuinely better than what the cheaper tools offer, and if that is what your work needs, Luma is still the tool that does it.

What has changed is the price of entry. At $30 a month minimum it now sits above Pika at $10, Vidu at $10 and Kling at $8.80, and it is the only one of those with no way to try it without paying. Runway Standard at $12 billed yearly is a quarter of the cost and gives access to a broad model set including third party models.

So the honest position is that Luma is a specialist purchase now rather than a default one. If motion control is the reason you are here, it is worth the money. If you came looking for free image to video, Luma has not been that since March.


What the price change means if you are already a customer

If you subscribed to Luma before February 2026 on Lite at $7.99 or Plus at $23.99, those plans no longer appear on the pricing page. Whether existing subscribers were grandfathered is not something Luma publishes, and we are not going to guess.

What we can say is what a new customer faces. The cheapest way into Luma today is $30 a month, or $25 a month billed yearly at $300 up front. Before March 2026 the cheapest way in was $7.99. Anyone budgeting from a figure they read last year is out by a factor of nearly four.


A worked example at each resolution

The same brief as elsewhere in this cluster: eight finished 5 second clips a month, sixteen generations at a 50% keep rate.

Resolution Credits per generation Sixteen generations Share of Plus (10,000)
Draft 20 320 3%
540p 50 800 8%
720p 100 1,600 16%
1080p 400 6,400 64%

At 720p that brief uses 16% of a $30 plan, which is comfortable. At 1080p the identical brief consumes nearly two thirds of the same plan. Push to 10 second clips at 1080p and each generation costs 1,200 credits, so sixteen attempts is 19,200, which is nearly twice the Plus allowance and pushes you to Pro at $90.

Nothing about the brief changed. Only the resolution and the clip length did.


How Luma compares at the same resolution

Cost per second at 720p, using each vendor’s published figures:

Tool and plan Monthly Seconds at 720p Cost per second
Pika Standard $10 175 $0.057
Luma Plus $30 500 $0.060
Runway Standard, Gen-4.5 $15 52 $0.288

At 720p Luma is almost exactly as cheap per second as Pika, and about five times cheaper than Runway Standard. The catch is the entry ticket: Luma will not sell you less than $30 a month, so if you need under 175 seconds a month, Pika does the same work for a third of the outlay.

Luma is therefore good value at volume and poor value at low volume, with the crossover around 175 seconds of 720p a month.


Who should still pay for Luma

Anyone whose work depends on motion control. Start frame, end frame and direction control are more precise here than in any competitor we looked at, and Luma also prices video to video and reframe operations explicitly, which most tools do not offer at all.

Anyone generating at volume at 720p or below, where the credit allowance is generous relative to the price.

Anyone who needs the published cost table for budgeting. Luma is one of only three tools in this category that publishes generation costs in enough detail to forecast a bill before paying it, and the only one that publishes per second rates for video to video work.


How we verified this

We read lumalabs.ai/pricing on 22 August 2026, expanding the monthly and yearly toggles. To date the free tier’s removal we queried archived snapshots of the same URL through the Internet Archive and read each one, checking both the plan names and whether the word free appeared at all. Snapshot dates are given above so any of this can be checked independently.

A snapshot is evidence of what was published on its date, not of what is live today. The 22 August 2026 row is a live reading.

We have not tested Luma’s output and make no claim about its quality beyond noting that its motion controls are more extensive than its competitors’, which is a feature comparison rather than a quality judgement.

For the cheaper alternatives that still publish a free plan, see Pika pricing and Runway pricing.

Faz - founder of AIToolsBakery

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. Sponsored content is always clearly labelled.

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Faz
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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