OpusClip vs Captions: Clipping Long Video vs Making Short Video
Both turn footage into publishable shorts and charge in very different units — one per uploaded minute, one per credit. Which pricing model suits your source material.
These compete for the same slot in a creator's stack — "get me publishable vertical clips" — and get there from opposite directions. OpusClip starts from long video you already have. Captions starts from short video you are about to make.
Plans
| OpusClip | Captions / Mirage | |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 60 credits/month, watermark, 3-day export | yes, freemium since Jan 2025 |
| Entry | $15/month, 150 credits, no watermark | from ~$9.99, ~1,400 credits |
| Mid | $29/month or $174/year | Scale 2× (~2,800 credits) |
| Upper | custom Business: unlimited users, API | Scale 4× (~5,600 credits) |
| API | Business tier | ~$0.45 per input minute |
OpusClip's Starter has no annual option. Its credits expire after 60 days on monthly plans, 12 months on annual.
The pricing units are the real difference
OpusClip: one credit = one minute of the video you upload. Not one minute of output. A two-hour podcast costs 120 credits whether it yields three clips or thirty, so cost per usable clip depends entirely on how clippable your source is. Starter's 150 credits is about two and a half hours of source a month — a weekly hour-long episode blows through it in week three.
Captions: credits per generation, in the usual opaque way, with no published conversion to a number of videos.
Neither is better in the abstract. OpusClip's model is unusually predictable if you know your monthly upload hours, which most long-form creators do. Captions' is unpredictable in the way the whole category is.
What each is actually good at
OpusClip finds the moments. Scanning long video, ranking segments by likely performance, cutting them vertical with synced captions — that is hours saved per episode for anyone producing podcasts, streams or webinars. Pro adds AI B-roll and a scheduler, turning it into a repurposing pipeline rather than a cutter.
Captions is short-form native. Caption timing and styling are its origin, and the company (renamed to Mirage in September 2025, $75M raised March 2026) is now building its own foundation models for short video. Mirage Studio generates with AI actors; AI Twin makes a personalised avatar of you. It also generates, which OpusClip does not.
The question that decides it
Do you have long video?
If yes — podcasts, streams, long YouTube, recorded webinars — OpusClip is doing something Captions does not, and at $15–29/month against the editing hours it replaces it is not a close call.
If no, OpusClip has nothing to eat. Its credits are denominated in a resource you do not have, and Captions' generation plus captioning is the shape that fits.
What neither does
Generate a clip of you in a scene you never filmed. Captions gets closest with AI Twin, but that is a presenter reading to camera, not you in an arbitrary setting. For that:
| Job | Endpoint | $/second | 10s |
|---|---|---|---|
| You in a described scene | alibaba/happy-horse/v1.1/reference-to-video | $0.140 | $1.40 |
| Copy a clip's movement onto you | fal-ai/kling-video/v3/pro/motion-control | $0.168 | $1.68 |
Prices read live from fal.ai on 2 August 2026. Set aspect_ratio to 9:16 on HappyHorse — it defaults to 16:9.
The stack most people end up with
They are complements more than competitors: generate when you have nothing, clip when you have too much, caption everything. If you have to pick one, pick by your source material — that question answers itself and the pricing follows from it.