Credits, seats, or paying the provider directly: three ways to buy AI video, and only one lets you do the arithmetic. Here is the per-Short math at list prices, what credit systems hide, and the cases where a credit plan is the better deal.
Full disclosure first: I build ReelMint, a video studio for developers making vertical Shorts, and our pricing is built around the third model below. So I have a stake in this question. What I can do is show the arithmetic and tell you where each number came from, so you can check it instead of trusting me. When I searched for "how much does AI video generation cost" while planning this post, most of what came back was either a price list for one product or a refusal to name a per-video number at all. This is my attempt at the per-video number.
Almost every AI video tool prices in one of three ways. They are different bets about who carries the AI bill, and that decides what you can predict.
Credit bundles. You pay a monthly or yearly fee and get a pool of credits. Generating a script, an image, a voiceover or a render each burns some number of credits, and the exchange rate between credits and finished videos is set by the vendor and often varies by model or by length. Some plans let unused credits roll over. Some do not. The upside is a single bill and no provider accounts. The downside is that you cannot easily compute what one video costs, because the unit you are buying is not the unit the work is measured in.
Per-seat subscriptions. A flat monthly price per user, usually with a cap on videos, minutes or exports, and sometimes with the better models gated to higher tiers. This is the easiest to budget when you make a steady, moderate amount of video. It is the worst fit when your volume swings, because you pay the same in a month you publish nothing.
Pay the provider (BYOK). You bring your own API keys, the tool calls Gemini, OpenAI or ElevenLabs on your behalf, and those providers bill you at their published prices. The tool charges for whatever it adds on top, which can be nothing. Everything about cost is visible in your own provider dashboard. The downside is real: you have to create and fund provider accounts, and you can overspend if you wire up an expensive model and forget about it.
None of these is the honest one by default. They answer different questions. The rest of this post is about the third, because it is the one where you can do the math yourself.
Strip away the interface and a vertical Short built from a script is a few kinds of metered work:
That is the whole bill of materials. Everything else, including editing and publishing, is either included in a tool's price or done by you. The point of listing it is that once you know the four line items, every pricing model above becomes a question about how the vendor converts them into money.
These are the exact per-unit figures our bring your own keys page publishes and its calculator runs on, taken from the constants in the site's code. They are provider list prices, and the page's source comments record the sources and the dates we last checked them against each provider's public pricing, most recently July 2026. I have not re-checked them as of today, so treat them as July 2026 prices and confirm on each provider's pricing page before you rely on them. Providers change prices without notice.
Now add them up for one Short, three ways.
Over twelve Shorts a month, the mixed case comes to roughly $2.09 and the image-rich case to roughly $6.18. That spread is where the headline range on the BYOK page comes from: about $0.02 to $0.52 per Short, with the Gemini-only middle sitting around $0.06 to $0.18. Notice what dominates. Images and premium voice are nearly all of the cost. The script is rounding error. If you want to move your bill, change the number of generated images or the voice, not the language model.
Two caveats that matter. First, these are the marginal AI costs only. They do not include your time, a free tier's limits, or any provider minimum. Second, a per-Short figure assumes things go right the first time. The next two sections are about when they do not.
I am going to stay generic here, because I have not checked any specific competitor's pricing today and I would rather leave a name out than quote a stale number. What follows is a description of the structure, and you can test each point against whichever credit-based studio you are looking at.
None of this is dishonest. A bundle is a legitimate product, and a vendor carrying the inference bill has to cover it somehow. It simply means the vendor, not you, holds the information needed to compute a per-video cost. That is the thing I would want to know before paying, and it is why we publish the calculator.
The per-Short figure above has two blind spots, and they are bigger than the API bill.
Re-renders of baked-pixel output. Text-to-video generators hand you finished pixels. If scene three has the wrong number in it, there is nothing to edit, so you regenerate, and you pay for the retry and hope the new version fixes the number without breaking the rest. With scene-based output, where the text, timing and layout stay separate until render, a fix is an edit to one scene and a re-render, not a new generation. We wrote about that difference in our guide to editable AI Shorts generators. Even if you ignore it for quality reasons, it is a cost reason: every regeneration is another full set of metered calls.
Your time. The cash cost of a Short is cents. The time cost is hours, and it is the larger number by far. What we have measured for ourselves, with heavy caveats: producing a 60 to 90 second reel through the MCP path, driven by an agent, took about 45 to 60 minutes of elapsed time, of which about 10 to 20 minutes was hands-on work for me, reading the script, asking for changes, checking scenes and instructing fixes. The rest was waiting on generation and render. The caveats are not decoration. That is one person (n=1), it is the person who built the product and so is faster than a new user will be, it covers only the MCP path and not the web editor, and the time grows with the length of the reel. I would not call it a benchmark. It is the honest shape of the work, which is supervising instead of editing a timeline.
For context, the people who describe their editing time in public threads talk about hours per finished short, not minutes. I will not put a precise multiple on the comparison, because ours is a single measurement and theirs are anecdotes. The direction is clear enough to matter for the math: if your time is worth anything, it dwarfs the API line items, which is exactly why the credits-versus-BYOK debate over a few dollars a month can miss the point. The question that decides your real cost is how many attempts a video takes.
Everything in this section comes from our pricing page, and it is what the product enforces today, not a plan.
The limits are real constraints. Four videos a week and fifteen kept is plenty for a developer posting a few Shorts a week, and not enough for someone batch-producing dozens a month. If you are in the second group, the current free tier is not your plan, and I would rather you know that now.
Being fair, there are cases where I would point someone away from BYOK.
The pattern is that credits and subscriptions buy convenience and a ceiling, and BYOK buys visibility and a price that tracks what you actually use. Which one is worth it depends on whether your volume is steady, whether you already hold provider accounts, and how much the opaque conversion bothers you.
The quickest way to test any of the numbers above is to make a video. Your first five are free on our keys, with no card. After that, open the bring your own keys calculator, set the sliders to the way you work, and compare its line items with your provider's own invoice after a week. If they disagree, tell me, because the calculator is supposed to be the thing you can check. You can start at reelmint.io.
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