AI Video Generation Pricing Compared (August 2026): What a Second Really Costs
Per-second API prices for the video models worth using in 2026, what the same clip costs on each, and why credit-based consumer plans are usually the more expensive way to buy the identical model.
There are two ways to buy AI video in 2026: per second from an API, or per credit from a consumer app. The second is convenient and almost always more expensive, because the credit-to-second rate is rarely published and changes without notice. Here are the numbers.
Per-second API prices, read 2 August 2026
Every figure below was pulled from the live fal.ai endpoint on that date. Prices move; the endpoint IDs are included so you can re-check.
| Model | Endpoint | $/second | 10s clip |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wan 2.7 Edit Video | fal-ai/wan/v2.7/edit-video | $0.100 | $1.00 |
| Kling 3.0 Turbo Standard i2v | fal-ai/kling-video/v3/turbo/standard/image-to-video | $0.112 | $1.12 |
| Kling 3.0 Standard Motion Control | fal-ai/kling-video/v3/standard/motion-control | $0.126 | $1.26 |
| Kling 3.0 Pro i2v | fal-ai/kling-video/v3/pro/image-to-video | $0.140 | $1.40 |
| HappyHorse 1.1 i2v / ref2v | alibaba/happy-horse/v1.1/* | $0.140 | $1.40 |
| OmniHuman 1.5 | fal-ai/bytedance/omnihuman/v1.5 | $0.160 | $1.60 |
| Kling 3.0 Pro Motion Control | fal-ai/kling-video/v3/pro/motion-control | $0.168 | $1.68 |
| MiniMax H3 ref2v | minimax/h3/reference-to-video | $0.260 | $2.60 |
| HeyGen v2 Translate (precision) | fal-ai/heygen/v2/translate/precision | $0.050 | $3.00/min |
The spread between the cheapest and the most expensive credible option is about 2.6×. That is much smaller than the spread between consumer plans, which is the first useful conclusion.
What that means for a real Instagram Reel
A typical Reel worth recreating is 8–15 seconds. At the prices above, the raw model cost of one vertical clip lands between $0.80 and $2.60. Add analysis, storage and retries and the true cost of a finished short video is roughly $1–4 in compute.
Consumer tools sell the same models at $9–49 per month with a credit pool, which is fine if you publish daily and terrible if you publish twice a month. The break-even is easy to compute once you know the per-second rate — which is the whole reason vendors avoid printing it.
Three pricing traps
Resolution and audio multipliers on credit platforms. Per-second API rates above are flat — the endpoint charges the same regardless of the resolution you request. Credit-based consumer plans are different: on Kling's subscription, a Kling 3.0 clip runs about 6 credits per second at 720p without audio and about 12 with 1080p and native audio. Two toggles, double the burn, and the rate is not shown next to the toggles.
Compute-second billing. Some endpoints charge for GPU time rather than output duration. You cannot quote a price to a user before the job runs, and a slow queue costs more than a fast one for identical output. We exclude these from production routing for exactly that reason.
Expiring top-ups. Credit packs that expire in 90 days are now an industry norm. If your usage is bursty, a meaningful share of what you buy is never spent.
Cheapest is not the answer, matched is
Wan 2.7 edit-video at $0.10/s is the cheapest thing on the list, and for a talking-head clip it is the wrong tool — it edits an existing video and has nothing to say about lip-sync from a script. HeyGen translate at $3.00/min looks expensive next to $0.14/s until you notice it does translation, timbre preservation and lip-sync in one call, which would otherwise be three billed steps.
The cost that matters is not $/second. It is dollars per usable clip, and that number is dominated by how many times you re-run a job because the model was a bad fit.