What a second of AI video costs, September 2026

Every AI video vendor publishes a price, and almost none of them publish a comparable one. Some charge per generation, some per second, some in credits that cost a different amount depending on the plan you are on, and several quote a headline rate for a resolution nobody wants to ship. So the only way to answer “what does a second cost” is to state the assumptions behind every number and compare only the rows that really match.

The basis

One finished second of vertical video, usually at 720p, using the cheapest plan that enables the model. The WaveSpeed Seedance 2.5 row is the stated 480p rate because that vendor published no flat 720p rate. Some figures are direct quotes; others are derived from credits, quota or a worked example. Prices stay in the currency each vendor charges, with no EUR/USD conversion. The table is a dated market survey, not a controlled quality or total-cost benchmark.

The same model costs four times more depending on where you run it

Among the USD-denominated 720p rows, Seedance 2.5 runs from $0.118 to $0.473 a second: the same model and resolution at about four times the headline price. The WaveSpeed row is excluded from that comparison because it is 480p, and Dreamina is excluded because it is priced in euros. Where you run a model can matter as much as which model you choose.

That also means a price advantage is a moment in time rather than a property of a vendor. One of the cheapest rows above is only cheap because of a 70% promotion; the list rate behind it is $0.194, which would move it most of the way down the table.

The cheapest row is not a business plan

The top row — under half a cent a second — is a personal quota on a $9 consumer plan, and it comes with arithmetic worth understanding, because it is the same arithmetic that makes free tiers look better than they are.

That platform bills reserved time with a 60-second floor, not the time your clip actually takes. Seven clips of about nine seconds each consumed seven minutes of quota rather than sixty-three seconds. Generating one finished second costs about 39.4 quota-seconds once both the generator and the conditioner bookings are counted, so a 40-minute daily window yields roughly 61 seconds of video a day.

What this table does not say

It does not say which model is better. There is no quality column here because no quality measurement was taken, and inventing one would make the whole table worse. A model at $0.047 that needs four attempts to produce a usable shot is more expensive than one at $0.150 that works first time — and neither the attempts nor the success rate are in this data.

It also does not price failure. Every provider above charges for a generation you throw away, and on at least one platform we watched crashes consume 23.6 of 40 available quota-minutes and return nothing at all. The honest version of “what does a second cost” is the price per second multiplied by how many takes a shot really needs, and that second number is the one worth measuring next.

How to use it

• Price the tier you will actually ship, not the headline. Several rows here are 720p rates for models whose 1080p price is several times higher.
• Check whether the cheap rate is a promotion, and what the list price behind it is.
• If a model has no API, it cannot be part of an automated workflow no matter what it costs.
• Treat every published figure as an estimate until one paid run reconciles it against the invoice — which is the subject of the next note.

Sources captured on 7 September 2026

The table uses first-party documentation and in-product calculators. The Dreamina and Atlas calculator values were recorded on the date above; calculator states do not have durable public URLs.

• Midjourney video usage and plan comparison
• Dreamina Seedance 2.0 pricing and Seedance 2.5 pricing
• Atlas Cloud Seedance 2.5 model page
• Comfy partner-node pricing and Comfy Cloud plans
• Higgsfield Seedance 2.0 pricing and Seedance 2.5 pricing
• fal Seedance 2.0 and Seedance 2.5
• WaveSpeed Seedance 2.0 and Seedance 2.5
• Figma Weave pricing and API status