Pika Pricing (2026): The Only Free Plan That Renews, and What Credits Really Cost

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What Pika costs

Plan	Price	Monthly credits	Resolutions	Speed
Basic	$0	80	480p only	Standard
Standard	$10	700	All	Fast
Pro	$35	2,300	All	Faster
Fancy	$95	6,000	All	Fastest

Every plan, including the free one, allows watermark free downloads and commercial use, and every plan can buy additional rollover credits. Verified on pika.art/pricing, 22 August 2026.

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.

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The free plan, honestly

Pika’s Basic plan gives 80 video credits a month, and unlike most free tiers in this category it renews. Image to video at 480p for 5 seconds costs 12 credits, so 80 credits is about six clips a month, or roughly 33 seconds of finished video.

That is not a professional workflow. It is, however, the most useful recurring free plan in the category, because two things most competitors restrict are included: there is no watermark, and commercial use is permitted. HeyGen’s free plan gives more finished output at three one minute videos, but it watermarks them. Runway’s free credits do not renew at all. Luma no longer has a free plan.

The catch is resolution. Basic unlocks Pika 2.5 at 480p only. If you need 720p or 1080p you are on Standard at $10, and no amount of credit buying changes that.

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The credit costs, which Pika publishes in full

Pika is the most transparent tool in this category on what a generation actually costs. The whole table is on the pricing page, broken out by feature, resolution and clip length. Here is the part most people need.

Feature	480p, 5s	720p, 5s	1080p, 5s
Text to video and image to video, model 2.5	12 credits	20 credits	40 credits
Same, at 10 seconds	24 credits	40 credits	80 credits
Pikascenes	20 credits	35 credits	65 credits
Pikadditions and Pikaswaps	20 credits	35 credits	65 credits
Pikaffects	15 free, 18 paid	n/a	n/a
Pikatwists	n/a	60 credits	80 credits

Pikaframes, which builds longer sequences, runs from 12 credits for 5 seconds at 480p up to 200 credits for a 20 to 25 second clip at 1080p.

Turn that into cost per second and Pika comes out as the cheapest way to make video in this category:

Plan and resolution	Price	Seconds per month	Cost per second
Standard, 720p	$10	175	$0.057
Standard, 1080p	$10	88	$0.114
Pro, 720p	$35	575	$0.061
Free, 480p	$0	33	Free

For comparison, Runway Standard at $15 a month works out at $0.288 per second of Gen-4.5. Pika Standard at 720p is roughly five times cheaper per second, on a lower tier model.

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Which plan to buy

Stay on Basic if you want to find out whether AI video is useful to you at all. Six clips a month is enough to answer that question and it costs nothing.

Standard at $10 is the plan most people should buy. It unlocks every resolution, adds Pikaframes, gives 700 credits and speeds up generation. At 720p that is roughly 35 clips a month.

Pro at $35 buys 2,300 credits and a faster queue. On cost per second it is barely different from Standard, so buy it for volume and queue priority rather than for value.

Fancy at $95 buys 6,000 credits and the fastest generation. Worth it only if queue time is costing you more than the money.

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When to leave the free plan

The free plan gives 80 credits. Standard gives 700 for $10. So paying multiplies your allowance by 8.75 and, more importantly, unlocks resolutions above 480p.

Here is the honest trigger. Stay free while 480p is acceptable and six clips a month is enough. Pay the moment either of those stops being true, because there is no middle option: you cannot buy your way to 720p on the Basic plan, and additional credits do not lift the resolution cap.

Your need	Plan	Monthly cost
Testing whether AI video is useful at all	Basic	$0
Six or fewer 480p clips a month	Basic	$0
Any 720p or 1080p output	Standard	$10
Around 35 clips a month at 720p	Standard	$10
Around 115 clips a month at 720p	Pro	$35
Queue time is costing you money	Fancy	$95

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A worked example

Take the same brief as any other tool in this comparison: eight finished 5 second clips a month at 720p, assuming a 50% keep rate, so sixteen generations.

Sixteen generations at 720p costs 20 credits each, which is 320 credits. Standard gives 700. So you finish the month at under half your allowance, on the $10 plan, with room for another sixteen attempts.

Run the same brief at 1080p and each generation costs 40 credits, so sixteen attempts is 640 credits. Still inside Standard, but only just. Push to 10 second clips at 1080p and each costs 80 credits, sixteen attempts is 1,280, and you need Pro at $35.

The pattern to notice is that resolution and length move your bill far more than volume does. Doubling clip length doubles cost. Moving 480p to 1080p multiplies it by 3.3.

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Rollover credits, which most tools do not offer

Every Pika plan, including the free one, can purchase additional roll over video credits. That is unusual. On Runway, credits roll over only on the $95 Max plan. On most others they do not roll at all.

It means a Pika plan sized for your average month rather than your busiest one is a workable strategy, because you can top up in the months that spike without upgrading the subscription permanently. Buy for the median, not the peak.

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What the free plan does not give you

Only 480p. This is the real constraint and it is worth being blunt about it: 480p is 854 by 480 pixels, which is below the resolution of a phone screen from a decade ago. It is fine for testing a concept and it is not fine for anything you would publish.

Free is also limited to a subset of features. Pikaframes, the tool for building longer sequences, is not available on Basic, and only the standard generation queue is included.

What you do get, and what almost no other free plan in this category offers, is no watermark and commercial use rights. If you make something usable at 480p, it is genuinely yours.

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How we verified this

We went to pika.art, followed the navigation to the pricing page, and expanded the yearly, monthly and weekly billing toggles so the full table was visible rather than one state of it. Figures were read from Pika’s own page on 22 August 2026.

Pika also advertises yearly billing at 20% off. We have quoted monthly rates throughout, because the credit allowances are stated per month and mixing the two produces figures that look precise and are not.

We have not tested Pika’s output quality and make no claim about it. This page reports published prices and the arithmetic that follows from them.

For the other tools at this price point, see Vidu pricing and Kling AI pricing. For the tool that dropped its free plan, Luma AI pricing.