What the jump to a higher resolution costs

Within one channel the ladder is steep: SceneMixer's Wan 3.0 tiers run about $0.06, $0.12 and $0.24 a second at 480P, 720P and 1080P. MiniMax H3 runs $0.08 at 768P and $0.13 at 2K. As of 2026-09-12.

Inclusion rule. Channels publishing more than one resolution tier with a price attached to each. A channel publishing a single rate cannot show a ladder and is not listed. Order. By the size of the step from the lowest tier to the highest, largest first.

1The ladders have different shapes, and that is the interesting part

One channel doubles at each step, reaching four times the base by the top tier. Another adds roughly sixty per cent for a much larger jump in pixels. A third roughly doubles across its whole range. Those are pricing decisions rather than facts about compute, and they reward different production plans.

A series delivered at 720p pays very different premiums depending on which channel's ladder it is standing on, and the headline rate at the bottom of the ladder says nothing about that.

2Vertical drama rarely needs the top of the ladder

Short vertical video is watched on phones, and the delivery specs of the platforms it goes to are not demanding. A production that generates at the top tier is often paying for resolution that the distribution path discards.

This ledger does not recommend a tier, because the right one depends on where the work is going and on whether it will be reframed or upscaled later. What it can do is make the price of each step visible before that decision is made rather than after.

3Rungs are not comparable across channels

768P on one channel and 720P on another are close enough to compare; 2K and 1080P are not, and neither are the underlying models. The only comparison this table supports safely is the shape of each ladder, which is why the rows are sorted by step size rather than by price.

Reading across the rows to find the cheapest 1080p second is exactly the use this layout is trying to discourage, and the main ledger is the page for that question.

• Wan 3.0 480P
  10 credits per second, about $0.06the default tierSceneMixer, price list / recorded 2026-09-12
• Wan 3.0 720P
  19 credits per second, about $0.12SceneMixer, price list / recorded 2026-09-12
• Wan 3.0 1080P
  38 credits per second, about $0.24SceneMixer, price list / recorded 2026-09-12
• MiniMax H3
  $0.08 per second at 768P and $0.13 per second at 2KMiniMax, pay-as-you-go / recorded 2026-09-12

4Sources

Each figure is read from the vendor page linked in the ledger, checked 2026-09-12. How a figure qualifies is on method; what a rate leaves out is on limits and unspent credits and parallel generations. Nearby: A minute, costed, Who publishes, Clip ceilings.