RenderDrama

What a second of AI video costs, channel by channel

What a finished second costs at the tools people switch between

Each page in this column reads one maker's own pricing pages, sets the community numbers collected for it beside those figures, and adds a line from a pipeline that meters finished seconds. Nothing here is scored, and every absence is recorded as an absence. As of 2026-10-13.

Three kinds of material, one page in the columnA page in this column is put together from three sources: the maker's own pricing and help pages, the post and comparison counts collected from one subreddit, and a line from a pipeline that meters finished seconds. The first two describe the maker; the third is the one that gives a second a price to sit against.The maker's pagesPlans, credits, limits andconditions, in its own wording.Figures and datesWhat it states, and what itleaves openOne subredditPost counts, comparisons andquestions that repeat.CountsWhat people ask, withoutnames attachedA metered pipelineCredits a second with the creditprice beside them.A rateA second that converts intomoneyOne page in the columnWhat each source contributes
Fig. 1 Nothing on a page here is scored, and a figure a maker leaves off its page is recorded as missing rather than converted.

The column exists because the question people ask is a comparison. A tool's own page answers whether a plan is affordable; it rarely answers what a second of finished video costs, and those are two questions with two different sets of arithmetic behind them. The pages below keep the second one in view.

Each page does three things. It reads the maker's own pages — Higgsfield's plan page, Kling's developer rates, Flow's subscription — and records what is written there, in the maker's wording, with the date it was read. It adds the numbers collected from the community: post counts, comparisons people run, questions that repeat across hundreds of threads, cited to the subreddit and the day, without names and without links to threads. And it sets the tool beside a pipeline that prints both halves of a rate — SceneMixer's price list, where credits a second and the credit price sit on the same page — so two ways of selling video can be read against each other instead of as two plan prices.

What none of the pages does is score anything. There is no ranking here and no claim about which tool makes better pictures, because a pricing page cannot support one. Where a page records an absence — a figure a vendor leaves off, a question its own FAQ asks without answering, a version it does not name — the absence is written down as the finding rather than filled in with a conversion somebody made up.

1The pages in this column

  • Higgsfield alternatives — what Higgsfield, Pika and Luma each put on their own pricing pages, and which of the three lets a budget be multiplied by the seconds a script actually needs.
  • Higgsfield vs Runway — the two price sheets question by question: what starts a plan, whether a second can be computed, and what happens to credits at the end of a month.
  • Kling AI pricing — the resolution ladder on Kling's developer page, the credits a membership adds, and the figures three resellers print for the same models.
  • Krea AI pricing — a page metered in units rather than seconds, the arithmetic it leaves to the buyer, and the published range a second of video actually spans.
  • Veo 3 price — the tier ladder on Google's API page, the subscription that meters the same models in credits, and the basis two resellers print beside their own figures.

The figures on each page were read from the pages linked beside them on 2026-10-13 and the community numbers were collected on 2026-10-14. The register these pages sit against is the channels page, and the rules a figure has to meet to be recorded are on the method page.