What AI video actually costs.
Every studio prices in its own invented unit — credits, points, gems, compute units — and none of them convert to each other. That is not a conspiracy; it is just what happens when nobody has a reason to be comparable. Here is the arithmetic that makes them comparable, and our own numbers in dollars.
A credit is not a unit.
Ask what a five-second clip costs on any major AI video platform and the honest answer is: nobody can tell you without doing homework. One sells 1,000 credits a month for a subscription price; another sells gems in packs; a third meters compute units that are consumed at different rates by different models. The same underlying model — the identical model, licensed from the same lab — can sit behind three different unit systems at three very different effective prices.
The units are the problem. Prices are usually published; they are simply not commensurable. So comparison shopping quietly becomes impossible, and everyone stops trying.
Convert any credit plan to dollars, in one line.
You can do this for any platform in about two minutes, using only their own published pages. It is the calculation we would want someone to run on us.
Three things to watch while you do it. First, most pricing pages display the annual-billed monthly rate by default — if you are paying monthly, your real divisor is higher. Second, credits that expire are not credits you own; a plan whose unused balance resets each month has a higher effective price than the arithmetic suggests, and packs with a 90-day life are a real cost you should count. Third, check whether a failed render refunds. If it does not, every failure is a silent surcharge on the successes.
The Saga column, live.
There is no arithmetic to do here, because there is no unit in between. This is the studio's own board, in dollars, at the settings you pick — the same numbers the composer quotes before it charges you.
| Model | Supports | Price |
|---|---|---|
Fetching live rates… | ||
Our prices are the providers' live rates plus one flat service margin. That margin is the entire business model — there are no other fees, no credit packs, and no expiry on a balance you have paid for.
The meter is a public API.
You do not have to trust this page, or even have an account. The board above is drawn from an open endpoint that returns every current rate in dollars — the same call the studio makes before it bills a render:
Script it, diff it over time, or quote it back at us if we ever drift. A studio that publishes its meter has to keep the meter honest. The rest of the promises →
The competitor columns, when they are verified.
The obvious next step is a table of effective per-render prices across the major platforms, computed with the formula above. We are building it from each platform's own published pricing pages only — no third-party blog figures, no screenshots of someone's dashboard, with the arithmetic and the source link shown for every cell.
That takes longer than copying a comparison table off a listicle, and a table like this one is worth exactly nothing if a single number in it is wrong. It lands here when every cell can be checked. In the meantime, the formula above is the whole method — run it on us too.
The pricing questions, asked plainly.
Why is comparing AI video prices so hard?
Because each platform invents its own billing unit — credits, points, gems, compute units — and the same model can consume different amounts of them on different services. The prices are usually published, but they are not commensurable, so like-for-like comparison requires converting everything back to dollars per render yourself.
How do I convert credits to dollars per render?
Divide the plan’s monthly price by the credits it includes, then multiply by the credits that specific render consumes. Use the monthly-billing price rather than the annual-billed figure most pages show by default, and use the cheapest plan that can actually run the render you want.
What makes a cheap plan more expensive than it looks?
Expiring credits and billed failures. A monthly credit allowance that resets, or a pack that dies after 90 days, means you paid for output you never made. And if failed renders are not refunded, every failure is a hidden surcharge on the renders that worked.
What does Saga charge?
The providers’ live rates plus one flat service margin, quoted in dollars before each render. No credit unit exists on the platform, balances never expire, and failed renders refund automatically. The live board on this page and the public pricing API are both open to anyone.
Can I see the raw pricing data?
Yes — https://sagastudio.app/api/pricing is public and unauthenticated, and returns the current dollar rate for every model the studio offers. It is the same call the composer makes before it charges you.
Every model, in dollars.
Read the meter before you spend.
No credits, no subscription, no expiry — just a dollar figure before every render.
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