What AI Video Actually Costs: Our Full Rate Sheet
The short answer
In Merlyn, AI video is billed by the second: 3 credits per second at 480p, 5 at 720p, and 12 at 1080p, so a 5 second clip at 720p costs 25 credits. A 1K image is 3 credits and a caption is 1. The pattern behind those numbers matters more than the numbers: resolution is the steepest cost lever in video, images are roughly an order of magnitude cheaper, and text is close to free. A month of steady publishing with 8 video clips, 12 images, and 20 captions costs 152 credits, which means for most people video is the entire budget and everything else is rounding.
Most AI tools price in a way that makes it impossible to work out what a campaign will cost until after you have run it. We publish the rate for every billable action instead, on a page that reads the same source of truth the product bills against.
This post is about what those numbers mean once you start planning around them.
The rates
Video is billed per second of finished footage. Everything else is billed per item.
| Action | Charged | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| Video, 480p | per second | 3 |
| Video, 720p | per second | 5 |
| Video, 1080p | per second | 12 |
| Image, 1K | per image | 3 |
| Image, 2K | per image | 5 |
| Image, 4K | per image | 7 |
| Caption | per caption | 1 |
| Voice clone | per voice, once | 15 |
| Brand scan | per scan | 50 |
| Competitor scan | per scan | 50 |
| 30 day content calendar | per calendar | 30 |
The full sheet, including the faster and cheaper video models, is on the credit rate sheet page.
Three things the numbers tell you
Resolution is the steep lever, not length. Going from 480p to 1080p multiplies the per second cost by four. Going from a 5 second clip to a 10 second clip only doubles it. If you are trying to get more output from the same budget, drop resolution before you shorten the clip, because a 10 second 480p clip costs 30 credits while a 5 second 1080p clip costs 60.
Images are roughly an order of magnitude cheaper than video. A 1K image is 3 credits. Five seconds of 720p video is 25. That is eight images for one short clip. A feed that mixes formats goes much further than one that is all video, and this is a cost argument rather than a creative one.
Text is close to free. A caption is 1 credit. Twenty captions across five channels is 20 credits, which is less than one video clip. Nobody should be rationing writing.
Where a month actually goes
Here is a first month for one brand, costed line by line at the rates above.
| Line | Credits |
|---|---|
| Brand scan, once at signup | 50 |
| Competitor scan | 50 |
| 30 day content calendar | 30 |
| 20 captions across five channels | 20 |
| 12 images at 1K | 36 |
| 8 video clips of 5 seconds at 720p | 200 |
| Total | 386 |
Two things stand out. Video is 200 of 386 credits, more than half the month, from only 8 assets. And the scans are 100 credits that never repeat, so the same output in month two costs 286.
That shape holds for almost everyone. The planning and writing that feels like the bulk of marketing work is the cheapest part to run. Video is the budget.
What that means for choosing a plan
Plans include a monthly credit allowance. Divide by the clip cost to get the honest capacity.
| Plan | Credits a month | 5 second 720p clips | 1K images |
|---|---|---|---|
| Premium, $29 | 300 | 12 | 100 |
| Premium Plus, $59 | 600 | 24 | 200 |
| Pro, $89 | 900 | 36 | 300 |
| Business, $299 | 3,000 | 120 | 1,000 |
These are alternatives, not a bundle. Nine hundred credits is 36 clips or 300 images or some mix, not both columns at once.
What this page does not tell you
Three honest caveats, because a rate sheet read too literally will mislead you.
Credits do not roll over. They reset each billing cycle. Sizing a plan for your busiest month means paying for that ceiling in every quiet month too. Buying extra credits on demand is usually the better fit for uneven workloads.
Retries cost credits. A generation you are unhappy with still consumed the models that produced it. Budget for more than one attempt on video specifically, because that is where both the cost and the variance are.
Rates move with model pricing. They are not frozen. When the underlying models get cheaper, these numbers come down, and the reverse is also true. Check the live rate sheet rather than a screenshot of this post.
Why we publish this
Partly because it is genuinely useful to know what a campaign costs before you commit to it. Mostly because a tool that will not tell you its unit costs until you have spent them is asking for a kind of trust it has not earned.