Captions (Mirage) Pricing 2026: Credits, the API Rate, and What the Rename Changed
Captions became Mirage and moved from an editing app toward its own video models. The current plan structure, the per-minute API rate, and which of its three products you are actually buying.
Captions started as the app that made short-form captioning effortless. In September 2025 the company renamed to Mirage, signalling a shift toward building its own foundation models for short video — while the app itself is still called Captions. It raised $75M in March 2026 to continue that. Worth knowing, because the pricing now covers several quite different products.
What you are actually buying
Three things sit under one subscription:
- The editor — captioning, editing, the original product.
- Mirage Studio — generating video with AI actors.
- AI Creator / AI Twin — a personalised avatar of you.
Most price comparisons treat this as a captioning tool, which undersells it, or as an avatar generator, which oversells the editing side.
The plans
The company moved to a freemium model in January 2025, explicitly to compete with CapCut and Meta's Edits. Reported structure as of mid-2026: pricing starts around $9.99, the standard plan carries 1,400 credits per month, with Scale 2× (2,800 credits) and Scale 4× (5,600 credits) available above it. Agency and enterprise packages are quoted directly.
Reported figures vary across sources here more than for most competitors; check the current pricing page before committing.
The API is priced differently, and more clearly
The Mirage API bills by input duration, rounded up to the minute — a 2.5-minute video is billed as 3 minutes, at a reported $0.45 per minute.
That is worth noting because it is a rare case of transparent, predictable pricing in this category: you know the cost before you submit, and it scales with what you feed in rather than with an opaque credit table. If you are automating captioning at volume, this is the number to plan against.
Strengths
Short-form is what this product knows. Caption timing, styling and the vertical-first workflow are better than in general-purpose editors, which is what the original app was built around and what the new models are trained for. AI Twin — a personalised avatar of yourself — is a genuinely different offer from the stock-actor libraries most competitors ship.
Limits
It is an app-first product. If your workflow is programmatic beyond the captioning API, or if you need a specific model for a specific job, you are working inside someone's product rather than choosing an endpoint.
And like every credit-based plan here, 1,400 credits does not convert to a published number of videos, so real capacity is discovered by spending.
The per-second comparison
If your job is generating a clip rather than editing one, prices read live from fal.ai on 2 August 2026:
| Job | Endpoint | $/second | 10s |
|---|---|---|---|
| Talking presenter from a photo | alibaba/happy-horse/v1.1/image-to-video | $0.140 | $1.40 |
| You in a described scene | alibaba/happy-horse/v1.1/reference-to-video | $0.140 | $1.40 |
Who it suits
Yes: you publish short-form constantly and captions plus a personal avatar are your daily workflow. At around $10 entry, it is one of the better-value subscriptions in this list.
No: you want one specific video with your face in a scene you did not film. That is a generation job, priced per clip — ours starts at $0.99 for a first video. For everything downstream of having footage, Captions remains a better tool than any endpoint.