AI Video Model API Pricing Comparison: 112 Models (2026)

Search for video model API pricing and you get a wall of GPT, Claude and Gemini tables — per-million-token rates for text models, on pages that never mention a video model at all. That is not a search error on your side. As of September 15, 2026, Google’s first page for ai video model api pricing comparison returns 19 organic results, and most of them are LLM token price lists: 10 of the 19 by a strict count of results whose subject is per-million-token pricing for GPT, Claude and Gemini, and 12 once the token-pricing calculators and OpenAI’s own model-comparison tool are added in. That first page is a snapshot of one day’s ranking, not a fixed set of results. The word “video” is in your query; it is not in their content. If you arrived here expecting per-second numbers and got per-token numbers instead, you are the reader this page was built for — and if the token table is genuinely what you wanted, our LLM API pricing comparison is the page for that question instead.

So here is the per-second version. Below is every video model on sale at Modellix — 112 of them, measured from the live model pages on September 15, 2026 — with the per-second list price each one actually shows, the nine providers they come from, and the one thing almost no pricing page explains: why those numbers cannot simply be subtracted from each other. Modellix runs this blog and distributes all 112 routes, so we have a commercial interest in the second half of this page. The prices below are not ours to argue with — they are on the model pages, one URL per row, and you can check any of them.

The short version. 112 video models, $0.0050 to $1.4400 per second, median lowest list price $0.0710/sec — around $0.36 for a five-second clip at the median. 88 of the 112 publish a range, not a single number, because the price moves with resolution or with the task type. Same family, same provider, and the top of the range can be 11.1× the bottom.

What 112 video models charge per second, priced September 15, 2026

Start with the shape of the catalog. The 112 routes split by what you hand the model, and the cheapest and most expensive point in each group is a different model:

Group	Models	Cheapest list price	Most expensive list price
Image-to-video	58	$0.0050/sec — vidu/viduq2-pro-digital-human	$0.7800/sec — bytedance/seedance-2.0-i2v
Text-to-video	26	$0.0338/sec — google/gemini-omni-1.1-flash-t2v	$0.7800/sec — bytedance/seedance-2.0-t2v
Video-to-video	28	$0.0120/sec — skywork/sky-lipsync	$1.4400/sec — alibaba/happyhorse-1.0-video-edit

Every row above is a model page URL of the form https://www.modellix.ai/models/<model_path>. The cheapest number in the catalog belongs to a digital-human route, not a general-purpose generator — a reminder that “video model” covers lip-sync, avatar, upscaling and video editing, and those tasks price very differently from a five-second cinematic clip.

The ceiling is worth looking at for the same reason, because it makes the resolution mechanic visible before the tables get to it:

Modellix model page for alibaba/happyhorse-1.0-video-edit, captured September 15, 2026 — the highest per-second list price in the 112-model catalog. The resolution selector reads 1080P in the input panel below the badge, which is what puts this route at the top of its own range rather than the bottom.

The spread by provider is just as wide, and it does not sort the way people expect. Cheapest model per provider, on the same September 15 reading:

Provider	Models on sale	Cheapest route	List price
Vidu	22	vidu/viduq2-pro-digital-human	$0.0050/sec
Skywork	10	skywork/sky-lipsync	$0.0120/sec
MiniMax	10	minimax/hailuo-02-i2v	$0.0153~$0.0738/sec
ByteDance	12	bytedance/seedance-2.0-mini-v2v	$0.0210~$0.0450/sec
Google	13	google/gemini-omni-1.1-flash-t2v	$0.0338~$0.3041/sec
PixVerse	13	pixverse/lipsync	$0.0400/sec
Kling	12	kling/kling-avatar	$0.0448~$0.0896/sec
Alibaba	14	alibaba/wan3.0-t2v	$0.0500~$0.2000/sec
xAI	6	xai/grok-imagine-video-r2v	$0.0720~$0.0960/sec

Modellix model page for vidu/viduq2-pro-digital-human, captured September 15, 2026. The outlined badge is the exact field every per-second figure in this article was read from. Note what sits below it: a resolution selector — the parameter that turns a single price into the ranges in the tables above.

Why per-second pricing is not a unit you can subtract

The reason a video price table is harder to shop than a token table is that four different billing units are in circulation, and the SERP mixes them without warning. Each one answers a different question, and only one of them is the unit in the tables above:

Unit	What you are paying for	Where it shows up	Why it breaks a direct comparison
Per second of output	Duration of the generated clip	All 112 routes on this page	Multiplies by length; a “cheap” rate on an 8-second cap is not cheap if your clip is 3 seconds
Per image	One generated still	Image routes, same catalog (49 on sale)	Not convertible to seconds at all — no duration exists
Per million tokens	Input plus output text	The LLM gateway routes	Token counts change per prompt; the same clip described twice can bill twice
Per generation, flat	One finished output, whatever it took	Some upstream platforms and hosted tiers	Hides the parameter that drove the cost, so you cannot forecast a downgrade

fal.ai’s own pricing page puts the distinction plainly — video models there are “billed by output unit — per second or per video — depending on the model” (fal.ai/pricing, read September 15, 2026). That single sentence is the honest description of the market, and it is also why a table that mixes the two units cannot be used as a budget.

There is a fifth unit that is not a unit at all, and it derails more budgets than any of the four: the monthly seat. Consumer video tools sell a subscription, so a reader who is comparing “the API” against “the tool I already pay for” is comparing a per-second bill against a flat monthly fee. Those only become comparable at one point — the volume where your monthly billed seconds cost exactly what the seat costs — and below that volume the subscription usually wins on paper. Which of them is actually cheaper depends on how many of your generated clips you would ship, and that is a question the seat plan’s price cannot answer either.

Flat versus parameter-driven pricing across the 112 video models, measured September 15, 2026. Text-to-video is almost entirely parameter-driven — 25 of 26 routes publish a range — while video-to-video is nearly split down the middle, because lip-sync and upscaling tasks do not have a resolution dial to turn.

The practical consequence: when a page puts a video model and an image model in one “cost per generation” column, the column is doing arithmetic on units that do not share a denominator. We saw exactly that pattern in one of the pages ranking for this query — per-generation pricing and per-second billing presented side by side in a single table without a conversion rule (Renderful’s comparison, read September 15, 2026). It is a readable table. It is not a comparable one.

And a second, subtler trap: 88 of the 112 routes publish a range, not a price. A page that quotes one number for bytedance/seedance-2.0-t2v is quoting either its floor or its ceiling and telling you neither. The range is the honest unit for these models, because the number moves with a parameter you control.

The price spectrum inside one model: resolution is the multiplier

Here is the parameter that moves a bill the most, in the catalog we measured: resolution. It is not a small adjustment. Ranking the 112 routes by how far apart their own floor and ceiling sit:

Route	Low end	High end	Spread
bytedance/seedance-2.0-t2v	$0.0700/sec	$0.7800/sec	11.1×
bytedance/seedance-2.0-v2v	$0.0430/sec	$0.4670/sec	10.9×
google/gemini-omni-1.1-flash-t2v	$0.0338/sec	$0.3041/sec	9.0×
bytedance/seedance-2.5-t2v	$0.1030/sec	$0.5690/sec	5.5×
kling/kling-v3-t2v	$0.0672/sec	$0.3360/sec	5.0×
alibaba/wan3.0-t2v	$0.0500/sec	$0.2000/sec	4.0×

None of the competing pages we read gave this multiplier. They say resolution affects price — true, and unusable as a budget input on its own. The usable version is the ratio: the same prompt, same model, same provider, and a 4.0× to 11.1× swing on one dropdown. If your budget assumes the floor price, you are budgeting for the lowest resolution you can ship, and nothing else.

The same logic applies downward, which is where the savings live. google/veo-3.1-lite-t2v prices at $0.0450~$0.0720/sec — a 1.6× spread, narrow enough that a forecast built on its floor stays close to the actual bill.

Per-second list price span for each provider’s video catalog, measured September 15, 2026. The horizontal scale is logarithmic because the spans are: Alibaba’s own catalog runs from its cheapest Wan 3.0 route to happyhorse-1.0-video-edit at $1.4400/sec, a 28.8× multiple inside one provider.

One more honesty note on the numbers themselves. 24 of the 112 routes publish a single flat per-second price — mostly lip-sync, upscaling and avatar tasks where resolution is not the variable. skywork/sky-lipsync at $0.0120/sec and pixverse/upscale-video at $0.0500/sec are flat; kling/kling-v3-t2v at $0.0672~$0.3360/sec is not. Flat is not the same as cheap, and neither is the same as predictable — a flat rate with a long minimum duration can cost more per usable clip than a ranged rate at its floor.

Stack the 112 floor prices against each other and the catalog has a clear centre of gravity, which is useful for a first sanity check on any quote you are handed:

Where the 112 video models sit by cheapest published list price, measured September 15, 2026. The largest single group — 52 routes — floors between $0.05 and $0.10 per second, which is why a five-second clip at the median lands near 36 cents rather than near the catalog’s headline floor.

A worked example: 5-second clips, 10,000 a month

Related searches for this query are full of calculator language — people want to end up with a number, not a table. So take a concrete volume: 5-second clips, 10,000 of them a month. That is 50,000 seconds of output, and the arithmetic is one multiplication once you know the unit:

Route	Per 5-second clip	10,000 clips/month
vidu/viduq2-pro-digital-human	$0.0250	$250
minimax/hailuo-2.3-fast-i2v	$0.1440–$0.2475	$1,440–$2,475
google/veo-3.1-lite-t2v	$0.2250–$0.3600	$2,250–$3,600
kling/kling-v3-t2v	$0.3360–$1.6800	$3,360–$16,800
bytedance/seedance-2.0-t2v	$0.3500–$3.9000	$3,500–$39,000
xai/grok-imagine-video	$0.4200–$0.5400	$4,200–$5,400
google/veo-3.1-t2v	$1.8000–$2.7000	$18,000–$27,000
alibaba/happyhorse-1.0-video-edit	$4.2000–$7.2000	$42,000–$72,000

Read that table as a budgeting exercise, not a ranking — the routes do different jobs, and the digital-human row is cheap because it animates a face, not because it is a better deal on cinematic footage. What the table does show is the size of the decision: at the same volume, the range across the catalog is $250 to $72,000 a month. Nobody picks a video model by the headline rate; they pick it by which column they can live in.

At one fixed workload — 5-second clips, 10,000 of them a month — the same catalog spans $250 to $72,000. The per-second rate is not the decision. Which column you can live in is the decision.

Two levers move that column faster than switching providers:

• Drop the resolution. The multiplier from the previous section applies directly: the same route at its floor instead of its ceiling can cut a line item by more than half.
• Cap the duration. A 5-second clip is one price; the same model at 8 seconds is 60% more per clip before any resolution change. Duration and resolution multiply, they do not add.

One accounting detail worth knowing before you compare our numbers to an invoice: Modellix’s 10% first-top-up discount is a checkout discount on your first purchase of each top-up tier — an account-level concession, not a per-model rate. It does not appear in the model-page prices above — those are the list rates a GET /logs call will report against a model, not a promotional rate.

Why the pages you already found are priced against a 2026 lineup that has moved on

The three pages that actually attempt video pricing — the ones ranking alongside the token tables — were all published in the first quarter of 2026, and their model lists show it:

Page	Published	Video models it prices
TeamDay, AI Image & Video API Pricing 2026	January 29, 2026	Wan 2.6, LTX 2.0, Kling 2.6, Veo 3.1, Sora 2, Runway Gen-4 / Gen-4 Turbo / Gen-4.5
Renderful, AI API Pricing Comparison	March 4, 2026	fal.ai, Replicate, and its own per-generation routes
Crazyrouter, AI Video Generation API Pricing Comparison 2026	March 12, 2026	Sora 2, Runway Gen-4, Veo 3, Kling 1.6, Luma Ray 2, Pika 2.2

Those are the dates and the model names printed on the pages, read on September 15, 2026. Both facts matter. Runway and Replicate publish their own rates on their own pricing pages (Runway, Replicate), so nothing stops a page from quoting them accurately — the issue is coverage, not accuracy. Between them, these three pages name 16 video models: 9 rows in TeamDay’s per-second table, plus 4 names Renderful adds (Kling 1.6, Runway Gen-3, Hailuo MiniMax, Wan 2.1), plus 3 more that Crazyrouter adds (Veo 3, Luma Ray 2, Pika 2.2). The catalog measured above has 112, and seven of the names on the current list — seedance-2.0 and seedance-2.5, kling-v3, viduq3, wan3.0, hailuo-2.3, grok-imagine-video — appear on none of the three. One current name does cross over, and it is worth naming: TeamDay prices Veo 3.1 at $0.20/sec on a table whose own footnote reads July 2026, so that page has been refreshed since publication — while veo-3.1-lite, the cheaper Veo route in today’s catalog, is still absent from all three.

That gap is the whole reason a per-second table is worth maintaining. Video model pricing is not a stable list you can publish once and leave; the models turn over faster than the articles about them do.

One name deserves a straight answer rather than a row in a table. Sora. It appears on most competing lists, and it is the video brand readers most often arrive looking for, but it is not in the 112-model catalog this page measured, so there is no first-party per-second number we can give you for it. Rather than estimate, we are saying so: for Sora’s API rates, read OpenAI’s own pricing page. For Google’s Veo rates on Google’s own platform, the comparable first-party source is Vertex AI’s pricing page, and for MiniMax’s Hailuo family it is the MiniMax platform.

How to check what you actually paid, and pull the price parameters yourself

A price table is a forecast. The invoice is the truth, and the two disagree for boring reasons — a parameter you did not realize you changed, a task routed to a different variant. Three things make the reconciliation mechanical instead of forensic.

1. The per-request cost log. Every call returns a log record you can read back at GET /api/v1/logs, and the response carries the model that actually ran and what it cost:

curl --request GET \
  --url 'https://api.modellix.ai/api/v1/logs?page=1&page_size=10' \
  --header 'Authorization: Bearer <token>'

The response shape, exactly as documented: a requests array whose entries carry task_id, status, the resolved model.provider and model.model_name, created_at, and cost. The model.model_name field is the one that settles arguments — it is what ran, not what you asked for. Field names and endpoint come from the Get Logs reference, read September 15, 2026.

The GET /api/v1/logs response documented on docs.modellix.ai, captured September 15, 2026. The cost field on each request is what makes a list-price table checkable against your own bill.

2. The price parameters, without guessing. The reason a table row is a range is a field in the request body — resolution, duration, task variant. You do not have to take a blog’s word for which field it is: modellix-cli model get-schema returns any model’s request and response schema, and it needs no API key:

modellix-cli model get-schema bytedance/seedance-2.0-t2v

Use the exact provider/model slug, as it appears in the table above. JSON is the default output; --output human summarizes the contract and --quiet prints just the inference URL. Pull the schema for two routes you are choosing between and diff them. That is a more reliable answer to “what actually moves this price” than any comparison post, including this one — the CLI reads the public schema endpoint described in Get schema, and its own usage is documented under Ways to use the CLI, both read September 15, 2026.

3. The input side, capped at seven days. Per-second billing describes the output. The inputs — a reference image, a first frame, a video to restyle — have to get to the model somehow, and the File API takes an upload without charging for it: POST /api/v1/media/files accepts an image, video or audio file as multipart form data and returns a file_id plus a url you pass straight into a prediction input field such as image_url. One constraint to plan around, quoted from the changelog: uploaded files are “retained for about 7 days by default.” Build for that window rather than treating the upload as permanent storage — File API changelog entry, and the endpoint at Upload media file. Audio belongs in that sentence as an input format only; the models on this page generate video.

curl --request POST \
  --url https://api.modellix.ai/api/v1/media/files \
  --header 'Authorization: Bearer <token>' \
  --form 'file=@first-frame.png'

Video Model Schemas and Logs

Read the request schema for any video model and get the per-request cost back from the logs endpoint.

View Docs

Two boundaries on the above. Video generation is asynchronous — the call returns a task you retrieve rather than a finished file, so a per-second price is always the price of an accepted job, and the retrieval path (polling or a delivery URL) is what makes the cost field appear in the log afterwards. Model paths no longer carry an /async suffix either; the old form still works, so existing code does not need a rewrite. And nothing here is a claim that Modellix is the cheapest place to run these models. We distribute all 112 of them, which means the most expensive per-second price on this page is also one of ours.

How to choose when the table will not crown a winner

A price table cannot pick for you, because the cheapest per-second rate and the right model are different questions. Narrow it with the reason you are shopping:

If your main reason is	Start with
Lowest possible cost per clip at scale	vidu/viduq2-pro-digital-human for talking-head work, minimax/hailuo-2.3-fast-i2v for general image-to-video
Forecastable spend, not the absolute floor	A route with a narrow range — google/veo-3.1-lite-t2v at 1.6× rather than a 9× model
Highest output quality regardless of rate	The top of google/veo-3.1-t2v or alibaba/happyhorse-1.0-video-edit, and plan for the ceiling price
Editing or restyling existing footage	The video-to-video group — 28 routes, from skywork/sky-lipsync at $0.0120/sec
One key and one bill across several providers	Any of the 112 routes, all reachable through the same REST API — see running multiple video models on one API

Three habits that survive contact with a real budget. Run the same prompt across two candidates for a week before committing — per-second rates are published, but how many usable clips you get per hundred attempts is not, and that ratio dominates the arithmetic. Set a low-balance alert so a batch job that silently switched to a pricier resolution surfaces in hours rather than at month end. And re-read the model page before you sign off on a forecast, because a rate captured in September is a September rate; this page says September 15, 2026 on every number for that reason.

The rate is published. The yield is not. Until you have run your own prompts through a route, you are comparing the half of the arithmetic that everybody else already knows.

Compare the Video Routes Yourself

Log in to run any of the 112 video models on one key and read your own per-request cost.

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Frequently Asked Questions About AI Video Model API Pricing

How much does an AI video model API cost per second?
Across the 112 video models on sale at Modellix on September 15, 2026, per-second list prices ran from $0.0050 to $1.4400. The median lowest price was $0.0710/sec, which is about $0.36 for a five-second clip. The floor belongs to a digital-human route (vidu/viduq2-pro-digital-human) and the ceiling to a video-editing route (alibaba/happyhorse-1.0-video-edit), so the honest answer to “what does a video second cost” depends on which task you are buying.

Why do some video models list a price range instead of one number?
Because the price is a function of parameters you set — most often resolution, sometimes duration or task variant. 88 of the 112 routes publish a range for that reason. bytedance/seedance-2.0-t2v runs $0.0700/sec at the low end and $0.7800/sec at the top, an 11.1× spread on the same model. To find which field controls it for a specific route, pull the model’s request schema rather than trusting a table.

How much does Kling API access cost?
Kling’s cheapest route in the catalog is kling/kling-avatar at $0.0448~$0.0896/sec, and the text-to-video routes start at $0.0672/sec (kling/kling-v3-t2v, up to $0.3360/sec) with kling/kling-v3-turbo-t2v from $0.0896/sec. Kling accounts for 12 of the 112 video models, all measured September 15, 2026. For the full single-vendor breakdown, see our Kling 3.0 cost breakdown.

How much does Veo API pricing come to per second?
In this catalog, Google’s Veo routes start at $0.0450/sec for google/veo-3.1-lite-t2v (ceiling $0.0720/sec) and reach $0.3600~$0.5400/sec for google/veo-3.1-t2v. google/veo-3.1-fast-t2v sits between them at $0.0900~$0.2700/sec. Google’s own platform prices the same family on its Vertex AI pricing page; the higher-tier Veo numbers are also broken out in our Veo 3.1 price page.

How much does Seedance API pricing run?
ByteDance’s Seedance routes are among the widest ranges in the catalog: bytedance/seedance-2.0-mini-t2v starts at $0.0400/sec, bytedance/seedance-2.0-t2v spans $0.0700~$0.7800/sec, and bytedance/seedance-2.5-t2v spans $0.1030~$0.5690/sec. The mini and video-to-video variants are the low-cost entry points; the per-generation price ladder is in our Seedance per-second price page.

Is there a free tier for video model APIs?
No. Modellix’s registration credit was discontinued on August 19, 2026; trial allowance is now handled by request through support rather than automatically at signup. Modellix does not charge for File API uploads, but that is an input-transfer exception, not free generation. Treat any “free video API credits” claim on a third-party list as needing a date attached.

What is the cheapest way to compare video model APIs fairly?
Normalize to cost per usable clip, not cost per second. Take your real prompt volume, run two candidate routes at different resolutions for a week, count how many outputs you would actually ship, and divide the total spend by that number. 24 of the 112 routes publish a flat per-second price, which makes them easier to forecast; the other 88 will move with a parameter, so the comparison only holds if you hold that parameter fixed across both sides.

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Model counts, list prices and catalog figures on this page were measured from live Modellix model pages on September 15, 2026, and change frequently — validate against the model page or each provider’s own pricing before committing to a forecast. Third-party pages cited by publication date were read on the same day. Access image and video models, including the leading Chinese models, through a single API key at modellix.ai.