AI video generation cost calculator

How to work out what an AI video shoot will cost

Four inputs, all on this page. Nothing is sent anywhere and no API key is needed — the per-second rates are constants published below with their sources.

1. Count the clips in the cut, not the renders. A 30-second spot is four to eight finished shots. Put the number of shots you need in the first box and the length of one shot in the second.
2. Be honest about the throw-away rate. Video fails in more ways than a still: the motion drifts, the hands go wrong, shot 4 stops matching shot 1. Forty per cent is a normal working number, and it doubles a six-clip shoot to ten renders.
3. Compare the shoot column, then read the refund line. Per-second pricing means an eight-second take costs eight times a one-second one, so length dominates. What a failed render costs you is the second question, and the answer differs by vendor.

What one AI video clip actually costs

One eight-second AI video clip costs $3.20 at Google's published Veo 3.1 rate of $0.40 per second, $0.80 on Veo 3.1 Fast at 720p, $0.56 on Kling 2.5 Turbo Pro — and $0.48 flat on Clize, where a clip is one price regardless of how long it comes back. Those are per render, not per usable clip. At a 40% throw-away rate a six-shot cut takes ten renders, so the Veo 3.1 line is $32.00 and the Clize line is $4.80.

Video pricing is per second almost everywhere, and that is the single fact that makes it behave differently from images. Doubling the length doubles the bill; a model that is a third the price per second stops being cheaper the moment it needs two takes to land a shot. The calculator above puts both effects on the same screen, because in practice they cancel each other out more often than anyone expects.

The prices come from the vendors' own pricing pages and carry the date they were read. Nothing here is estimated, and no request leaves your browser — a page on one domain cannot read a price list on another anyway, so a "live" price would be a fiction.

Published video prices, with sources

Read on 4 September 2026. The calculator above uses exactly this table.

One caveat we would rather write down than let you infer. Clize's flat per-clip price is not a claim to be Veo 3.1 at 1080p for a fraction of the money: hosted video runs through a provider, you do not get to pin a resolution tier, and the model decides the clip length. What the flat price buys is a number that does not move — six shots is $2.88 whether each one lands at three seconds or eight. If you need a specific resolution tier under contract, go direct and pay by the second.

Who pays when the render comes back wrong

This is the line item every video cost calculator leaves out, and it is worth more than the per-second rate. There are two different failures and they are billed differently everywhere:

• The render fails. The provider errors, the job is refused, nothing is produced. On Clize this is refunded in full — including the case that actually bites, a video job that was accepted, charged, ran in the background and then failed on the provider's side. The refund lands when the job's final state is read.
• The render succeeds and you hate it. The motion is wrong, the product is deformed, shot 4 does not match shot 1. Nobody refunds this, anywhere, and it is the overwhelming majority of what you throw away. It is exactly what the retry-rate box is for.

The gate in front of both: every render is quoted before it is charged. clize gen video "…" on its own prints the price and spends nothing; only adding --confirm submits and charges. There is no pre-approved allowance and no way to skip the flag — each render is confirmed on its own, every time, which is the property that matters when the thing pressing the button is an agent working through a shot list unattended.

$ clize gen video "slow dolly across the workbench, morning light"
      📋 Quote about $0.48 (video). Add --confirm to generate.
      
      $ clize gen video "slow dolly across the workbench, morning light" --confirm
      Submitted; generating in the background.
      $ clize gen jobs        # what is still running
      $ clize gen list        # every asset, with model, prompt and cost

Long renders survive a lost session: --async returns the job id immediately and clize gen status <id> picks it up later, which is also the call that writes the finished file to disk. The same quote-then-confirm gate covers image generation and domain registration.

Length, resolution and reference images: what really moves a video bill

Length. On per-second pricing it is a straight multiplier, so the cheapest real saving is cutting a shot from eight seconds to four. Clize's hosted veo is the exception in the table: the price is per clip, the model picks the length, and it returns at most eight seconds — so a longer sequence is several clips cut together rather than one expensive render.

Resolution. Going from 720p to 1080p on Veo 3.1 Fast is $0.10 to $0.12 per second; going to 4K on the standard tier is $0.60. Decide the delivery format before you render the shot list, not after — re-rendering at a higher tier means paying for the whole shoot twice.

Reference images. Three, on hosted veo — that is the model's reference-to-video cap, not a plan limit, and they cost nothing extra. Spend them well: a first frame, the character, the location. Continuity is the failure mode that drives video retry rates, and reference images are the only lever that attacks it without costing money. Compare that with a still-image batch, where the same models take up to sixteen references.

What does not move the bill: the prompt length, the aspect ratio, and how many times you read the result back. Everything Clize has charged you is on the record — clize gen list per asset, clize status for the month's total. Agent Media is the product these prices belong to, and Agent Storefront is how you sell what comes out of it.

$ npm i -g @clize/clize && clize install
$ clize gen video "slow dolly across the workbench" --ref frame1.png