AI Video Generation Pricing - July 2026

TL;DR

Cheapest API: Haiper Video 2.x at $0.033/sec (540p) - unchanged since April, still the floor
Best value at production quality: Runway Gen-4.5, which Runway quietly cut from 25 credits/sec to 12 credits/sec ($0.25 to $0.12/sec) - a 52% price drop
Biggest risk, not just a price change: OpenAI confirmed the Sora API shuts down completely on September 24, 2026 - don't build anything long-lived on it
Kling 3.0 is now sold direct through kling.ai/dev instead of only via resellers, at $0.084-$0.168/sec depending on resolution and audio

Quick Verdict

Runway's Gen-4.5 price cut is the story of this update. In April it cost 25 credits/sec ($0.25/sec); it's now 12 credits/sec ($0.12/sec), confirmed directly against Runway's API pricing docs. That makes it the best value pick for anyone who needs benchmark-topping quality without Veo-level sticker shock - a 5-second clip now runs $0.60 instead of $1.25.

For raw cost per API call, Haiper 2.x still wins at $0.033/sec (540p). Kling 3.0 moved from third-party resellers to an official direct API at kling.ai/dev/pricing, landing at $0.084/sec (720p, no audio) to $0.168/sec (1080p with audio) - more expensive than the old reseller estimates in this space, but first-party and reliable.

The bigger story for anyone planning around this data: OpenAI is shutting down the entire Sora API on September 24, 2026. If you're weighing Sora 2 against Veo 3.1 or Kling 3.0 for a new integration, that's not a footnote - it's disqualifying for anything you don't finish building and migrating off within two months. See our video generation benchmarks leaderboard and the best AI video generators roundup for quality comparisons alongside this pricing data.

Normalized Pricing Table

All prices are per second of output video. Where vendors use credits, I've converted at their published credit-to-dollar rates. Verified July 20, 2026.

Model	Provider	720p/sec	1080p/sec	Per 5s Clip	Input Type	Audio Included
Haiper 2.x	Haiper	$0.033 (540p)	$0.05	$0.25-$0.28	T2V, I2V	No
Runway Gen-4 Turbo	Runway	$0.05	$0.05	$0.25	T2V, I2V	No
LTX-2.3 Fast	Lightricks	$0.06*	$0.06	$0.30	T2V, I2V, V2V	No
Kling 3.0	Kling (API)	$0.084	$0.112	$0.42-$0.56	T2V, I2V	No
Runway Gen-4.5	Runway	$0.12	$0.12	$0.60	T2V, I2V	No
Sora 2	OpenAI	$0.10	N/A	$0.50	T2V, I2V	No
Veo 3.1 Fast	Google	$0.10	$0.12	$0.50-$0.60	T2V, I2V	Yes
Kling 3.0 (w/ audio)	Kling (API)	$0.126	$0.168	$0.63-$0.84	T2V, I2V	Yes
Hailuo 02	MiniMax	~$0.045	N/A	~$0.23	T2V, I2V	No
Runway Aleph 2.0	Runway	$0.28	$0.28	$1.40 (56cr min)	V2V editing	No
Seedance 2.0	ByteDance	$0.24 (Fast)	$0.682	$1.21-$3.41	T2V, I2V, Ref2V	Yes
Sora 2 Pro	OpenAI	$0.30	$0.70	$1.50-$3.50	T2V, I2V	No
Veo 3.1 Standard	Google	$0.40	$0.40	$2.00	T2V, I2V	Yes

*LTX-2.3 Fast has no distinct 720p rate - it charges by output resolution starting at 1080p; lower resolutions scale down proportionally. Sora 2 Pro's 1080p rate rose to $0.70/sec in this update (it was previously bundled at $0.50/sec alongside the 1024p tier - those are actually two separate rates per OpenAI's own pricing page).

What Changed Since April

Runway Gen-4.5 dropped from 25 credits/sec to 12 credits/sec - the single biggest cut in this comparison.
Kling 3.0 replaced Kling 2.x as the flagship, now sold direct instead of only through resellers like PiAPI.
Google Veo 3 (original) and Veo 2 were shut down on June 30, 2026. The $0.75/sec Veo 3 rate that used to top this table no longer exists - Veo 3.1 Standard at $0.40/sec is now the ceiling of Google's lineup.
Runway Gen-3 Alpha Turbo and Gen-4 Aleph are deprecated and sunset on July 30, 2026, replaced by Aleph 2.0 at 28 credits/sec ($0.28/sec) with a 56-credit ($0.56) minimum charge per generation.
LTX-2 (fast and pro) is deprecated as of July 15, 2026 and gets fully removed August 15, 2026. LTX-2.3 is the only supported line from now on.

Subscription vs. API Pay-As-You-Go

Several vendors price subscriptions separately from their API. Kling and Luma in particular offer subscription credits that are meaningfully cheaper than their PAYG API rates.

Service	Plan	Monthly Cost	Credits	Effective $/5s Clip	Commercial Use
Runway Standard	Sub	$12	625 credits	~$0.31-$0.63 (Gen-4.5)	Yes
Runway Pro	Sub	$28	2,250 credits	~$0.31-$0.63 (Gen-4.5)	Yes
Runway Max	Sub	$76	9,500 credits (1mo rollover)	~$0.31-$0.63 (Gen-4.5)	Yes
Kling Standard	Sub	$6.99	660 credits	~$0.26 (5s std)	No
Kling Pro	Sub	$25.99	3,000 credits	~$0.26 (5s std)	Yes
Kling Premier	Sub	$64.99	8,000 credits	~$0.26 (5s std)	Yes
Kling Ultra	Sub	$180	26,000 credits	~$0.26 (5s std)	Yes
Pika Fancy	Sub	$76	6,000 credits	~$0.09-$0.35	Yes
Luma Plus	Sub	$30	10,000 credits	~$0.11-$0.38	Yes
Luma Pro	Sub	$90	40,000 credits	~$0.09-$0.32	Yes

Runway's tier names changed too - "Unlimited" is now "Max," still $76/month, now with 9,500 rolling credits instead of the flat 2,250 the Pro tier gets. Kling added a fifth tier, Ultra, at $180/month for 26,000 credits - a steep jump from Premier, and notably a 41% increase from its $128/month launch price in August 2025. Luma restructured its entire ladder in 2026: the old Plus/Pro naming survived but credit allocations tripled at every tier, and there's no longer a standalone free option on the new pricing page.

Runway Gen-4 sample outputs - consistent character across scene cuts Runway Gen-4's character consistency across scene cuts, one of the key differentiators for the Gen-4 line still carried into Gen-4.5. Source: runwayml.com

Per-Vendor Breakdown

OpenAI Sora 2 - and its looming shutdown

Sora 2 access is subscription-only through ChatGPT for consumers. Via the API, Sora 2 standard runs $0.10/sec at 720p with 4-, 8-, or 12-second clip options. Sora 2 Pro is tiered by resolution: $0.30/sec (720p), $0.50/sec (1024p), and $0.70/sec (1080p) for clips up to 25 seconds, confirmed directly against OpenAI's pricing page. No native audio generation.

The critical detail missing from every other pricing comparison: OpenAI confirmed the Sora web and app experiences were already discontinued on April 26, 2026, and the Sora API itself will be discontinued on September 24, 2026. Reporting at the time pointed to the economics - Sora reportedly cost roughly $1-15 million per day to run against about $2.1 million in total lifetime revenue. If you're picking an API for anything you plan to run past September, this rules Sora out regardless of its per-second rate.

Google Veo 3.x

The Veo lineup got simpler this year, not more complex. Google shut down the original Veo 3 and Veo 2 models on June 30, 2026, leaving Veo 3.1 as the only supported family. Veo 3.1 Standard costs $0.40/sec (720p/1080p) and $0.60/sec at 4K. Veo 3.1 Fast runs $0.10/sec (720p) or $0.12/sec (1080p). Veo 3.1 Lite is the budget option at $0.05/sec (720p) and $0.08/sec (1080p), though it doesn't support 4K output. All three include native synchronized audio by default.

Practically, this means the eye-watering $0.75/sec sticker price that used to define this category is gone. Google's own pricing table now tops out at $0.60/sec, a 20% cut off the old ceiling even before counting the Fast and Lite tiers.

Runway Gen-4.5 / Gen-4 Turbo / Aleph 2.0

Runway's API remains credit-based at $0.01/credit, but the rates moved. Gen-4.5 dropped from 25 credits/sec to 12 credits/sec ($0.12/sec) - confirmed directly on Runway's developer pricing docs. Gen-4 Turbo is unchanged at 5 credits/sec ($0.05/sec). Gen-3 Alpha Turbo and the original Gen-4 Aleph are both marked deprecated and sunset on July 30, 2026; Runway is pushing Gen-3 users toward Gen-4.5 or Gen-4 Turbo, and Aleph users toward the new Aleph 2.0 video-editing model at 28 credits/sec ($0.28/sec) with a 56-credit ($0.56) minimum per job.

On the subscription side, Runway's plans are Free (125 one-time credits), Standard ($12/month, 625 credits), Pro ($28/month, 2,250 credits), and Max ($76/month, 9,500 credits with one-month rollover) - the old "Unlimited" name is gone. Every paid tier now bundles third-party models including Veo 3.1, Kling 3.0 Pro, and Seedance with Runway's own line, so a single subscription buys access across most of this table.

Kling 3.0 (Kuaishou)

Kling stopped being a reseller-only story. The official developer pricing page now lists Kling 3.0 direct at $0.084/sec (720p, no audio) up to $0.168/sec (1080p with audio, no voice control), with 4K at a flat $0.42/sec regardless of audio. Kling 3.0 Turbo, which bakes in native audio, runs $0.112/sec (720p) to $0.14/sec (1080p). There's also a Motion Control variant ($0.126-$0.168/sec) and an Avatar/lip-sync model ($0.056-$0.112/sec).

Consumer subscriptions grew a fifth tier: Free (66 credits/day, no commercial use), Standard ($6.99/month, 660 credits), Pro ($25.99/month, 3,000 credits), Premier ($64.99/month, 8,000 credits), and the new Ultra ($180/month, 26,000 credits). Ultra itself isn't cheap history - it launched at $128/month in August 2025 and rose to $180 by January 2026, a 41% increase in five months.

Luma Ray3 (Dream Machine)

Luma restructured its entire consumer ladder in 2026: Plus is $30/month for 10,000 credits, Pro is $90/month for 40,000 credits, and Ultra is $300/month for 150,000 credits (all roughly 17-20% cheaper billed annually). There's no standalone free tier on the current pricing page. Ray 3.14, released January 26, 2026, was the flagship for most of this update cycle, but Luma has since moved on again: Ray3.2 shipped June 9, 2026, and Luma's own documentation now calls Ray3.14 and Dream Machine deprecated in favor of it.

ByteDance Seedance 2.0

Seedance 2.0's official fal.ai listing confirms $0.3034/sec at 720p with audio (standard tier) and $0.2419/sec at 720p with audio (fast tier) - both unchanged since launch. What's new is a 1080p tier at $0.682/sec, more than double the 720p rate, which wasn't previously documented outside China. Audio and video are generated together natively at no extra cost across every tier.

Hailuo 02 (MiniMax)

MiniMax restructured Hailuo's consumer plans down-market: promotional pricing puts the entry Standard tier at $7.99/month (from a prior $14.99), scaling up to $199.99/month for the Max plan. Third-party API access via providers like Segmind still runs around $0.045/sec at 768p, making a 6-second clip about $0.27 - still among the cheapest ways to get 1080p-adjacent output with reasonable physics fidelity. No native audio.

LTX Studio / LTX-2.3 (Lightricks)

LTX confirmed that ltx-2-fast and ltx-2-pro are deprecated as of July 15, 2026 and will be fully removed on August 15, keeping current pricing only until then. The successor line, LTX-2.3, is priced at $0.06/sec (fast, 1080p) up to $0.24/sec at 4K, and $0.08/sec (pro, 1080p) up to $0.32/sec at 4K. A Retake/Extend editing endpoint on the Pro model costs $0.10/sec (1080p only).

The LTX Studio web subscription runs Free (800 one-time credits), Lite ($15/month, personal use only), Standard ($35/month, adds commercial rights and Storyboards/Elements), and Pro ($125/month, 110,000 credits plus bundled Veo 3.1 access) - per LTX's studio pricing page.

Pika

Pika's pricing held steady: Standard at $8-10/month (700 credits), Pro at $28-35/month (2,300 credits), and Fancy at $76-95/month (6,000 credits), with a free tier at 80 credits/month. Pika 2.5 is the current model. There's still no standalone API - access runs through the web app or third-party integrations, and video credits don't roll over month to month (extra purchased credits do).

Haiper 2.x

Haiper's pricing is unchanged and remains the cheapest confirmed API rate in this comparison at $0.033/sec (540p) and $0.05/sec (720p). For high-volume, lower-fidelity work - storyboarding, social drafts, iteration - it's still the most economical pure-API option here.

Genmo Mochi

Mochi 1 remains open-source (Apache 2.0) with no managed commercial API. Self-hosting on cloud GPU infrastructure like Modal with H100s runs roughly $0.33 per generation. For teams wanting open-weight flexibility without per-second vendor lock-in, it's still the only entry on this list you can run entirely on your own infrastructure. See the AI video generation capability guide for the broader open-vs-closed tradeoffs.

AI-generated character from a short film made with Runway Gen-4 AI-produced short film character showing what sub-$1-per-clip quality looks like in 2026. Source: runwayml.com

Hidden Costs

Platform Discontinuation Risk Is a Real Line Item Now

This update surfaced four separate deprecation or shutdown events in three months: Google retired Veo 3 and Veo 2 (June 30, 2026), Lightricks retired base LTX-2 (July 15, deprecated; August 15, removed), Runway is retiring Gen-3 Alpha Turbo and Gen-4 Aleph (July 30, 2026), and OpenAI is shutting down the entire Sora API (September 24, 2026). None of these show up on a vendor's pricing page as a "cost," but migrating a production pipeline off a discontinued model on short notice has a real engineering cost. Before committing to any model in this table for a long-lived integration, check its deprecation status directly with the vendor, not just its price.

Audio Is Still a Separate Line Item for Most Providers

Veo 3.x, Seedance 2, Kling 3.0 Turbo, and Sora (via add-ons) include or offer audio. Runway, Kling's base tier, Pika, LTX, Haiper, and Luma don't bundle it by default. Kling in particular now prices audio as a distinct SKU: enabling it on Kling 3.0 raises the per-second rate by roughly 50% (720p goes from $0.084 to $0.126/sec).

Resolution Multipliers Are Non-Obvious

Most vendors charge by pixel area, not a flat tier name. LTX-2.3 scales linearly: $0.06/sec at 1080p quadruples to $0.24/sec at 4K on the fast tier. Kling's 4K rate is a flat $0.42/sec regardless of audio or model variant - a five-fold jump over its 720p rate. Google prices Veo 3.1 4K at 1.5x its 1080p rate, the gentlest multiplier of the group.

Credit Expiration and Minimum Charges

Runway credits now roll over one month on the Max tier only; Standard and Pro credits still expire. Kling credits don't roll over on Standard; they do on Pro and above. Runway's new Aleph 2.0 editing model has a 56-credit ($0.56) minimum charge per job regardless of clip length - a detail worth knowing if you're doing short edits at volume.

Commercial Use Restrictions

Kling's Free and Standard tiers exclude commercial use; Pro and above permit it. Pika, Runway (Standard and up), Luma, and LTX Studio (Standard and up) permit commercial use on paid tiers. LTX Studio's Lite plan ($15/month) is explicitly personal-use-only despite being a paid tier - an easy trap if you're comparing plans by price alone. Our best AI video editing tools guide covers commercial licensing in more depth.

Runway cut its flagship Gen-4.5 rate in half this year while Google quietly retired the model that used to be the most expensive line item in this entire comparison. Video generation pricing is moving the same direction LLM pricing did in 2024 - down, fast.

Free Tier Comparison

Provider	Free Offering	Amount	Limitations
Kling	Daily credits	66 credits/day (~6 clips/day)	No commercial use, 720p watermarked
Pika	Monthly credits	80 credits/month	~8 basic clips
LTX Studio	One-time allocation	800 computing-seconds	Watermark, non-commercial
OpenAI / Sora	None (requires ChatGPT Plus)	0 standalone	API shuts down Sept 24, 2026 regardless
Google Veo	Paid API tier only	0 standalone	-
Runway	One-time credits	125 credits	No Gen-4.5 access
Haiper	Beta tier	~10 daily creations	Lower resolution
Luma	None	0 standalone	Removed in 2026 pricing restructure

Kling remains the clear winner on ongoing free access - 66 daily credits for roughly 6 standard 5-second clips indefinitely. Luma dropping its free tier entirely this year is the most significant change in this table; it now requires a $30/month minimum commitment to touch its current model at all.

Price History

Jul 2026 - Runway cut Gen-4.5 from 25 to 12 credits/sec. Kling launched official direct API pricing at kling.ai/dev, ending its reseller-only era. LTX-2 deprecated (removal Aug 15). Sora API shutdown confirmed for September 24.
Jun 2026 - Google shut down the original Veo 3 and Veo 2 models, leaving Veo 3.1 as Google's only supported video line. Sora's web and app experiences had already been discontinued in April.
Apr 2026 - ByteDance Seedance 2 launched on fal.ai, making the API available outside China at $0.24-$0.30/sec at 720p. Sora web/app discontinued April 26.
Mar 2026 - Google released Veo 3.1 and Veo 3.1 Lite. Veo 3.1 Lite at $0.05/sec (720p) undercut the original Veo 3 by 93%.
Jan 2026 - LTX Studio launched the LTX-2.3 line. Runway added Gen-4.5 at its original $0.25/sec rate. Sora 2 Pro API went live at $0.30-$0.50/sec. Luma shipped Ray 3.14, since superseded by Ray3.2 in June.
Aug 2025 - Kling launched its Ultra consumer tier at $128/month, before raising it to $180/month by January 2026.

The market keeps splitting into the same two tiers, but the price gap between them is narrowing. Premium providers (Veo 3.1 Standard, Sora 2 Pro, Seedance 2.0) still charge $0.30-$0.70/sec for native audio and physics fidelity. Budget options (Haiper, Runway Gen-4 Turbo, Kling's base tiers) sit at or below $0.10/sec with output that's good enough for a growing share of production use cases.

FAQ

Which AI video API is cheapest?

Haiper 2.x at $0.033/sec (540p) and $0.05/sec (720p) - unchanged since our last update. Runway Gen-4 Turbo at $0.05/sec is the cheapest option with no resolution asterisk attached.

What's the best value for production video generation?

Runway Gen-4.5 at $0.12/sec after its 2026 price cut - benchmark-topping quality at half its old rate. Kling 3.0's direct API ($0.084-$0.168/sec) is a close second now that it's first-party instead of reseller-only.

Is it safe to build on the Sora API right now?

No, for anything long-lived. OpenAI confirmed the Sora API shuts down entirely on September 24, 2026. A short-term test or bounded batch job is fine; a new production dependency isn't.

Did Veo 3 pricing actually improve?

Indirectly. The original $0.75/sec Veo 3 model was shut down on June 30, 2026. Veo 3.1 Standard, its replacement, costs $0.40/sec - 47% cheaper, with Fast and Lite tiers going as low as $0.05/sec.

Can I use AI-generated video commercially?

Check per-tier rules before shipping. Kling's Free and Standard tiers exclude commercial use; Pro and above allow it. Runway, Luma, LTX Studio, and Pika permit commercial use starting at their entry paid tier, except LTX Studio's $15/month Lite plan, which is personal-use-only.

What's the difference between T2V, I2V, and V2V pricing?

Text-to-video (T2V) is the base rate almost everywhere. Image-to-video (I2V) costs the same as T2V at Runway, Sora, Veo, Kling, and Haiper. Video-editing models like Runway's Aleph 2.0 and Seedance's reference mode price differently - Aleph 2.0 has a 56-credit minimum per job regardless of length.

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