What 74 AI video generations actually cost us
· 2 min read
Most write-ups about AI video pricing quote the provider's rate card and stop there. That number is almost never what you pay, because it ignores the way real renders are actually composed.
Here is a month of our own production spend, taken from the credit ledger rather than from a pricing page.
The month in one table
Seventy-four generations. 11,920 credits. About $143 at $0.012 a credit.
| What was generated | Cost | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Long-form video (30s and 60s) | $102.24 | 71% |
| Music video shots | $35.52 | 25% |
| Short clips (4–12s) | $3.36 | 2% |
| Music track generation | $1.68 | 1% |
| Re-renders | $0.24 | 0% |
The finding that surprised us
Seventy-one percent of a month's spend went to one category, and it was not the one we spent most of our time using.
Short clips — the thing you reach for when checking whether a caption renders correctly or a voice sounds right — cost $0.24 each. A sixty-second video costs $3.60. That is fifteen times more for something that, most of the time, was being generated to verify a bug fix rather than to be published.
Duration is not linear, and this catches people out
The intuitive model is seconds times a per-second rate. A thirty-second video at five credits a second should be 150 credits.
It is 160.
Durations above twelve seconds are not generated in one pass. They are
composed from chained segments of four, eight and twelve seconds, and thirty
seconds plans as [12, 12, 8] — thirty-two seconds of generated material,
trimmed back to thirty. You pay for what was generated, not what survived the
trim.
The gap is small in isolation and compounds quickly. It also means a "cost per second" figure is only accurate at the exact durations that happen to divide cleanly.
What we changed
Three things, in order of how much they saved:
- A monthly ceiling on internal spend. Not a warning, a refusal. Testing stops when it reaches the number rather than when someone notices the bill.
- Automatic top-ups turned off at every provider. A balance that refills itself is a bill that never announces itself.
- Short durations for anything that is not about the video. If the thing under test is captioning, posting or layout, four seconds proves it as well as sixty does.
The first two took an afternoon. The third was just a habit.
The number worth knowing
If you are budgeting for AI video, the useful figure is not the per-second rate. It is cost per published video, including the renders you threw away. Ours was roughly $1.93 across the month — against a headline rate that would have suggested well under a dollar.
Budget for the discards. Everyone generates more than they publish.
See what Virloq costs — the first full video is free, no card needed.