People ask for one number. Here are all of them, for a four-minute story at Standard quality, roughly 32 scenes of 5 to 10 seconds, five cast members and ten spoken lines. The point of listing every line is not the total; it is seeing where the money goes, because that decides where saving is possible and where it is pointless.
Provider cost
- Director run (language model): a few cents.
- Five cast sheets: about 0.20 dollars.
- 32 keyframes: about 1.30 dollars.
- 32 video clips: about 30 dollars; this is the film.
- Lip-sync for ten lines: about 1.50 dollars.
- Narration, music, edit: under a dollar.
Total: roughly 33 dollars of real cost, of which the video clips are the overwhelming majority. Everything that makes the film a film rather than a set of clips, the screenplay, the cast, the voices, the music, costs less than a handful of the clips.
Our price
With the 40% margin formula and the Pro plan multiplier, about 26 to 30 dollars in pricing">tokens depending on scene durations; the wizard shows the exact figure on the Ready screen before production. Basic pays about a quarter more, because Pro's multiplier is 0.8 and Basic's is 1.0. The free plan pays 1.3 times the base price.
The charge is split in two. At creation you pay for the director run and up to five sheets; unused sheet slots are refunded. At production you pay the rest, and the amount you see is computed from the real scenes, not the estimate. Anything that fails on our side goes back to the wallet by the nightly refund job.
Higgsfield
Generating the same 32 clips by hand on Higgsfield's top plan costs about 25 to 30 dollars in credits, once, with no screenplay, cast consistency, narration or editing, and typically three attempts per clip in practice, because a text-to-video call reinvents the character every time. The published prices are on their pricing page; we link the comparison in the pricing article. The honest summary: on one fast-tier clip type they are slightly below our cost price and we stay a little above them; on the film as a whole, we are below.
Where the tiers change the number
The video line is the only one that moves. Draft is cheaper than Standard and fine for animatics. Cinema and Cinema Pro make scenes of 4, 6 or 8 seconds with richer motion, and the video line grows accordingly while every other line stays the same. The pricing page lists the per-operation figures live, so you can do the arithmetic for your own tier before you start.
How to spend less
- Produce one minute first. Most creative decisions are visible in the opening: cast, style, voices, pacing. Fix them there, then commit to the full length from the same text.
- Use Draft for animatics and reserve Cinema for scenes that need complex motion. Mixing tiers within one film is fine; assembly normalises resolution.
- Regenerate single scenes, not the film. A scene card regenerates one keyframe and one clip; the rest of the film is untouched and uncharged.
- Keep the cast to the characters who actually speak or recur. Crowds and passers-by are described in the scene prompt and cost nothing extra.
- Look at the keyframes. Reviewing 32 stills takes a couple of minutes and catches most composition errors before the expensive step.
What does not save money
Shortening narration does not; speech is a rounding error. Removing music does not; a track is a small operation. Skipping lip-sync saves little and costs the shot on a close-up. The only lever that matters is the number of seconds of video and the tier they run on, so those are the two controls we put on the first screen.
Frequently asked
Do longer films get cheaper per second? No. Video pricing is linear in seconds; there is no bulk discount from providers, and we do not invent one we cannot fund.
What if a clip fails halfway through the film? That clip's charge is refunded and the film is not restarted: the cast and the finished scenes are kept and the failed scene is retried. Only the failed operations are ever charged back.
Is the estimate in the wizard binding? The wizard shows what is charged now and an estimate for production based on the suggested scene count. The Ready screen replaces it with the exact figure from the real scenes, and that is the number deducted.