What a minute of AI video really costs: the clip is the cheap part

I build Ziztu, an AI studio for micro dramas and anime, so weigh that. I wrote this because comparing AI video prices is harder than it looks, and I had to work out how to do it fairly for our own price page.

Per second is only the clip

Most price lists give you a cost per second. That is the price of the clip and nothing else. A finished episode also needs a script, a shot list, a cast that looks the same in every shot, voices, a score and a cut. If a tool sells only the clip, the rest of the job is billed somewhere else, in other software or in your time.

Five things I check before comparing two prices

1. The unit. Per second, per clip and credits are not the same thing. Convert everything to one unit before you compare.
2. The resolution. Most video models bill more for 768P and 1080P than for 480P, so a headline price at 480P tells you little about a 1080P clip.
3. The sound. Some models include audio and some do not. If voices and music are extra, add them.
4. The retakes. A shot that comes out wrong is a second shot. Plan for it.
5. What is outside the clip: the script, the cast and the cut.

A worked example

From our rate card: 12 shots of 5 seconds at 768P, a cast drawn once, 8 spoken lines, one score cue and 5 Director chats come to about 775 credits. Retakes cost extra. This is a worked example from the rate card, not a quote.

How we try to keep the numbers honest

• The table on the price page is built when the page loads, from the same price list the server uses to charge for a request. Nobody edits it by hand.
• Provider prices are the raw prices from fal.ai model pages and OpenRouter's pricing API, checked at least once a month.
• Credits are priced from the provider's published rate, with a small allowance for price changes, and rounded up to a whole credit.
• The price of a generation is shown before you run it.

It is not the cheapest for everything. For a single clip, some tools sell it for less than we do, and the page says which. If you only need one clip, compare the per-second prices in the table with the tool pages linked from it.

The full table, with the date it was last checked, is here: https://getziztu.com/ai-video-price-index

If you are choosing between presenter tools and story tools, this page sets out who each one fits: https://getziztu.com/alternatives/heygen

If a price on the page is wrong, tell me and I will fix it.