The monthly price on an AI video tool is close to useless. You are not buying a month; you are buying some number of finished videos, and almost nobody prices it that way on the page you land on.
I keep pricing records for every tool in this directory, read off the vendor's own page and dated. There are 53 video tools in there, 49 with a checked record. Here is what that set actually looks like, and how to get from a monthly price to the number you care about.
"Free" means three different things
Of the 49 video tools where I could establish what the free offering is:
- 20 have a real free tier. It continues indefinitely, usually watermarked or limited.
- 12 have a free trial only. It ends. Calling this free is the most common piece of pricing theatre in the category.
- 17 have nothing free at all.
So when you see "free" on a video tool, it is closer to one chance in three that it means "free for fourteen days". Two tools in the set are even labeled freemium by their own submitters, yet have no free tier at all, which is why I check rather than take their word for it.
The price you see is often the annual one
Here is Pictory's pricing page as it loads:
The annual toggle is already on. You see $25, $35, and $119. The real month-to-month prices are the struck-through ones: $29, $59 and $199. That is not a trick unique to Pictory; it's pretty standard. It means the number in your head when you compare two tools is often a prepaid annual rate rather than what it would cost month to month.
Every price in our directory is the month-to-month figure for exactly this reason. Annual prepay is a separate decision from which tool to use.
Cost per video, from one of the few who publish it
TapVid does something unusual and genuinely helpful: it states credits and an estimated video count on the same card.
That lets you do the division the page is usually hiding:
| plan | monthly | videos | per video |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pro | $49 | about 20 | $2.45 |
| Max | $99 | about 42 | $2.36 |
| Ultra | $199 | about 150 | $1.33 |
Note what the per-video column does that the monthly column cannot: the $199 plan is the cheapest one per video. Four times the monthly cost, roughly half the cost per video. If you compare entry tiers across vendors, you are comparing the worst rate each offers.
The asterisks matter too. "About 20 videos" assumes a length and a model. A longer clip or a better model eats more credits, so treat these as a ceiling.
What I actually paid
I tested Fotor Video Agent properly and wrote it up. Three finished videos, including one with an AI presenter, cost 949 credits. That is 316 credits each.
On their monthly plan, that works out to $12.65 a video. On the annual plan, $3.54. Same tool, same videos, a 3.5x spread depending only on how you pay.
Which is the real finding here: on a single tool, how you pay can move the cost per video more than switching vendors would.
So what do you actually try
I am not going to tell you which makes the best video, because I have not tested 53 tools. What I can tell you is which ones let you find out for yourself without paying, and that depends entirely on the job you are doing.
Making video from a text prompt. Runway and Pika both run $0 to $95 and both have a real free tier, so you can try either before deciding. OpenAI Sora has nothing free. Start with Runway or Pika, and see the three side by side in Runway vs Pika vs Sora.
Talking-head and avatar video. Synthesia is $0 to $89, HeyGen is $0 to $149, and both let you test for free. Synthesys starts at $29 and has no free tier. Synthesia has the lower ceiling of the two you can try, which matters because the top tier is where you end up. Full breakdown in HeyGen vs Synthesia vs Synthesys.
Cutting long video into shorts. Opus Clip at $0 to $29 is the cheapest ceiling of anything here and has a genuine free tier. Descript is $0 to $65 and also offers a free trial. Pictory is the one from the screenshot above: $29 to $199, and trial only. See Descript vs Opus Clip vs Pictory.
Notice the pattern across all three. In every group, the tool with no free tier is the one you cannot evaluate without a card, and in two of the three it is also not the cheapest. No group offers a better entry deal for paying up front.
If you want the smallest possible commitment in the category regardless of job, Screenweaver runs $0 to $9.99, the cheapest ceiling of any video tool I have a record for.
Now the part I did not expect. I sorted the whole category by entry price to find the bargains. Here are the eight cheapest:
seedance-2-0 $7.99 · artaivo $9 · animate-photo $9.90 · ray-3-2-ai $9.90 · seedancetwo $9.90 · recapo-ai $9.99 · youart $9.99 · kaiber $10
None of them have a free tier. ** Five are trial-only; three have nothing free at all. The cheapest-looking options in the category are precisely the ones where you cannot try before you commit a card.
That is not a conspiracy. It is just what a low entry price has to do: if you are charging $8 a month, you cannot also give the product away. But it does mean "cheapest" and "try it first" point at completely different shortlists, and the cheap end of a pricing table is the last place to start if you have not decided yet.
Every comparison above is in the full comparison index, which puts the real month-to-month prices side by side with the date each was checked.
Work it out before you subscribe
Three questions, in order:
- Is the free thing a tier or a trial? If it ends, it is a sales process, not a price.
- What is the month-to-month price? Toggle annual off before you compare anything.
- How many finished videos does that buy? Divide. If the vendor will not tell you how many credits a video costs, generate one on the trial and read the balance before and after. That is the only number that survives contact with actual work.
The two tools I have real per-video numbers for range from $1.33 to $12.65. That is a 9x spread across two products, and the monthly sticker price on either one wouldn't have told you where you'd land.
Pricing in this directory is pulled from each vendor's page and includes the date it was checked, so you can see how stale it is. The video tools are all there.
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