AI video is sold by the second, and a second is not a second. The same six-second clip can cost nine cents or well over two dollars depending on which model you run, what resolution you ask for, and whether sound comes out with the picture. If you post daily, that gap compounds fast, so the price list is worth reading closely before you commit a budget to one engine.
This is a buyer's view of cost. For how these same models compare on quality, length, and access, see the best AI video generators for social media and the Runway vs. Kling vs. Luma vs. Veo head-to-head. The image side has its own economics, covered in AI image pricing.
What AI video costs in 2026
For roughly 720p image-to-video, the format most social clips start from, representative list prices run from about $0.05 to $0.40 per second. Google's Veo 3.1 spans that whole band across its tiers, Kling 2.5 Turbo Pro sits near $0.07 per second for silent video, and ByteDance's Seedance 1 Pro runs from roughly $0.05 at 720p to about $0.12 at 1080p.
The three models on one scale, with providers, exact rates, and sources, live in the Model Guides as a cost chart you can scan in a glance. See the AI video pricing table. What follows here is the discussion behind those numbers, which is the part worth reading before you commit a budget.
The three ways AI video is billed
The headline rate hides the billing model, and the billing model is where the surprises live.
Flat per second. Google's Veo 3.1 lists a straight per-second price that steps up by tier. The Lite 720p tier is the floor at roughly $0.05 a second, Fast sits near $0.10, and Standard reaches about $0.40 a second at 1080p with audio generated in the same pass. The span is wide because you are really choosing among three products under one name. Pick the tier to the job: Lite or Fast for volume, Standard when a clip has to carry real dialogue or sound.
Base clip plus extensions. Kling 2.5 Turbo Pro prices a 5-second clip at about $0.35, then charges roughly $0.07 for each second beyond that. Averaged over a short clip the effective rate lands near $0.07 a second, but a very short clip costs more per second than a long one because the base is spread thinner. Kling's rate here is for silent video. Add audio or lip-sync and the economics change.
Token-billed. ByteDance's Seedance 1 Pro bills by video tokens, at about $2.50 per million, and a clip consumes more tokens as resolution and length rise. In practice that works out to roughly $0.05 a second at 720p and about $0.12 a second at 1080p. Token billing is the hardest to forecast because the same prompt can cost different amounts depending on what the model generates, so sample a few real clips and measure before you assume a rate.
Credits, which we do not price here. Runway and Luma sell credits rather than publishing a per-second dollar rate, and the credits-to-seconds conversion shifts by plan and model. A per-second estimate for them would not be comparable to the rates above, so we leave them out rather than guess.
What drives the price
Four levers move the number on your invoice, and they are mostly in your control.
- Resolution. 1080p roughly doubles the cost of 720p on most models, and 4K more than that. Most vertical social clips do not need more than 1080p.
- Audio. Generating sound with the picture is extra work and shows up in the rate. Veo Standard includes it; silent tiers and silent models are cheaper. If you are adding a voiceover track later anyway, you may not need the model to generate audio at all.
- Tier. Fast and Lite tiers trade some fidelity and features for a much lower rate. For a background B-roll clip that difference is invisible to viewers and large on the bill.
- Clip length. Per-second billing is linear, but base-plus-extension and token billing are not, so the sweet spot differs by model.
Cost per finished post, not cost per second
The sticker rate is the wrong number to optimize. What you actually pay is the cost of every second you generated to land the one clip you posted, including the rerolls. A model at $0.05 a second that needs four attempts to produce a keeper costs you $0.20 of generation per usable second. A model at $0.12 a second that lands it first time costs $0.12. The cheaper sticker lost.
So judge any model on cost per usable second on your own prompts, not on the list rate in a roundup. Then add the parts the video model does not cover: the voice track is its own line item, covered in the best AI voiceover tools for short-form video, and most brands end up running more than one video model in a single week because no single engine wins every shot. The real cost of AI video in 2026 is not any one subscription. It is stacking several, learning each interface, and routing each shot to the right one.
What is changing
The video market reprices faster than any roundup can, so read the rate alongside what is moving under it. Three shifts matter this year. Sora 2 is gone, since OpenAI retired its video API on September 24, 2026, and any list still ranking it is out of date. Token billing is spreading, with Seedance pricing by video tokens rather than a flat per-second rate, which makes spend harder to forecast and rewards sampling a few real clips before you commit. And the credit-only models, Runway Gen-4 Turbo and Luma Ray 2, still publish no clean per-second dollar rate, so they sit outside a like-for-like comparison and are left off the chart rather than estimated.
Budget 720p social video at roughly $0.05 to $0.40 a second depending on model, tier, and audio. Read the billing model, not just the rate, then judge each engine on cost per usable second once you count the rerolls.
Sources, read October 2026: Veo 3.1 from Google Gemini API pricing; Kling 2.5 Turbo Pro from the fal.ai model page; Seedance 1 Pro from the fal.ai model page. Prices are representative list rates and move often, so confirm with the provider before you budget.
The right video model, picked for you
Protegee renders through the leading AI video models and picks the one that fits each brief, so you are never locked to a single engine or its price. It makes the clip, attaches your brand, and posts to every account on a schedule. You never choose a model or watch a meter.
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