Best AI video generators, priced per second

Three ways to buy generated video in August 2026: per second through an API, as monthly credits with every model in one place, or as credits tuned for iteration. The same ten-second 1080p clip costs anywhere from $0.80 to $7.00 depending on which door you walk through.

This is a comparison of published terms, not a test of footage. Every figure below was copied from the vendor's own price list on August 21, 2026, and the derived cost of a ten-second 1080p clip is arithmetic on those figures. Quality is a matter of taste and shot type; price is not, and price is what most people actually decide on. How to read the numbers Google sells Veo by the second through the Gemini API, with audio included in the listed price and three speed tiers. Runway and Luma sell monthly credits, so the real unit price depends on which plan you are on: the same clip gets cheaper as you buy a bigger bundle. That is why the table below shows both the list unit and what a ten-second 1080p clip works out to. One structural difference matters more than any single number. Runway resells other people's models alongside its own, so a Standard subscription reaches Gen-4.5, Veo 3.1, Kling 3.0 and Nano Banana Pro from one account. Buying Veo directly from Google is cheaper per second; buying it through Runway means you can switch models mid-project without a second invoice. Veo 3.1 Standard: $0.40 per second at 720p and 1080p, $0.60 at 4K, audio included. Veo 3.1 Fast: $0.10 per second at 720p, $0.12 at 1080p, $0.30 at 4K. Veo 3.1 Lite: $0.05 per second at 720p, $0.08 at 1080p. No 4K output. Luma Ray3.2 at 1080p: 400 credits per 5 seconds, 1200 per 10 seconds. Runway Standard: 625 credits a month, which the price list equates to 52 seconds of Gen-4.5. What this comparison does not cover It does not rank output quality. Nobody can honestly rank that from a price list, and a ranking based on a handful of prompts would say more about the prompts than the models. It does not test audio. Audio pricing for Luma and Runway is set separately from the video rates quoted here, and Runway's credit-to-seconds ratios come from its own price list rather than our measurement. Kling and Hailuo appear only as models reachable through Runway, not on their own terms. Which one to pick If you are generating video from your own code and want the lowest price per finished second, go to the Gemini API and start on the Lite tier: at $0.08 a second for 1080p, a ten-second clip costs less than a coffee, and you move up a tier only when the output is not good enough. If a person rather than a program is doing the generating, and that person wants to try Kling against Gen-4.5 against Veo on the same shot, Runway is the cheaper answer even though its per-second price is higher. One subscription, one asset library, no procurement. If your work is iterative and the drafts outnumber the finals, Luma's tiering rewards that pattern: draft resolution costs a twentieth of 1080p, so twenty throwaway attempts cost the same as one final.