What Does a 30-Second AI Video Actually Cost to Generate?
A 30-second AI video costs 60 to 300 credits depending on the model, billed per second of footage. Narrated videos built from a deck are billed per slide instead, which is far cheaper for anything over a minute.
A 30-second AI video costs between 60 and 300 credits to generate, and which end you land on depends entirely on the model you pick. Text-to-video models are billed per second of generated footage, so the same 30 seconds is 60 credits on a fast model and 300 on a top-end one. That is the whole answer for a single clip. If what you actually want is a longer narrated video, there is a second route billed per slide rather than per second, and past about a minute of finished video it is far cheaper.
Why one number cannot answer this question
Most tools quote a monthly subscription and leave you to work out what a specific video costs. The useful unit is the generation itself. On a per-second model, the arithmetic is simply the model's rate multiplied by the seconds you ask for:
| Model | Credits per second | 30 seconds | Plan needed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wan 2.5 | 2 | 60 credits | Free |
| Kling 2.5 | 2 | 60 credits | Starter |
| Veo 3.1 Fast | 3 | 90 credits | Pro |
| Seedance 1.5 | 4 | 120 credits | Starter |
| Seedance 2.0 | 8 | 240 credits | Pro |
| Sora 2 | 8 | 240 credits | Pro |
| Veo 3.1 | 10 | 300 credits | Pro |
The rate is the model's, not a markup that varies by how you use it. Ask for five seconds and you are billed for five; ask for thirty and you are billed for thirty. What a credit costs in your own currency is on the pricing page, which shows rupees or dollars depending on where you are.
The second route: billed per slide, not per second
The per-second math turns punishing the moment you want a long video. Three minutes of continuously generated footage is 360 seconds of model time on any platform, at any rate. This is the part most comparisons miss: a narrated video built from a PowerPoint deck, a PDF or a single image is billed per slide, and the finished video runs as long as the narration does.
| Render tier | How it is billed | A 10-slide deck |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | 3 credits per slide | 30 credits |
| Enhanced | 14 for the opening AI clip, then 5 per slide | 59 credits |
| Cinematic | 14 per AI clip (every third slide), 5 for the rest | 86 credits |
A ten-slide deck on the Standard tier is 30 credits for a video that may run four or five minutes, because its length is set by how much narration the slides need, not by a duration you paid for in advance. The same length generated as raw footage would cost several hundred. Choosing a premium speech engine or your own cloned voice adds 4 credits per slide; audio-only output, if you want just the narration track, is 2 credits per slide.
What the number does not include
- Model access is tiered. Wan 2.5 runs on the free plan. Kling 2.5 and Seedance 1.5 need Starter. Veo 3.1, Sora 2 and Seedance 2.0 need Pro. A cheap per-second rate on a model your plan cannot reach is not a price you can actually pay.
- A generation you dislike still costs. There is no free re-roll anywhere in this category. Regenerating a 30-second clip at 8 credits per second costs the same 240 credits again, which is the strongest argument for testing an idea at four seconds before committing to thirty.
- Voiceover on a raw clip is separate. Speech models are billed on their own, from 2 credits for a standard voice up to 5 for a cloned one. The per-slide deck pricing above already includes narration; the per-second clip pricing does not.
See the cost before you spend it
Both routes show the charge before anything is spent. The composer displays the credit cost of your current model and duration next to the generate button, so the number changes as you change the settings. The deck route runs a preflight that reads your file, counts the slides and returns the exact charge before you commit to it. Neither figure is an estimate, and neither one bills you for asking.
Where this is not the cheapest answer
If you need one short clip occasionally, the honest answer is that you probably do not need a subscription at all: the free tier is 20 one-time credits with no card, which is one four-second clip on a 2-credit-per-second model with change left over. If you need frame-accurate editing, colour grading or a timeline, a generator is the wrong tool and you should be looking at an editor instead. And if you genuinely need ten minutes of continuous cinematic footage, no per-second pricing on any platform will feel cheap, which is exactly why the per-slide route exists.
The reason to reason in credits rather than in a monthly fee is that credits are comparable across video, images, voiceover and 3D models on one balance. A 30-second clip, forty images and a narration track all draw from the same pool, so the question stops being which subscription to buy and becomes what this particular piece of work costs.