The closer of Act One. We tie the single-shot primitives together with the money discipline: the difference between the advertised price and what you actually spend.
The core shift. Advertised price is cost-per-generation (pressing the button once). What you pay is cost-per-finished-clip: every roll, draft, failed gen, audio pass, and upscale before one shippable shot. Because these tools are non-deterministic, it's easy to "burn through $20 in credits without noticing". A "$0.40 video" rolled eight times is a $3.20 clip.
Take ratios. Expect to "generate 300-500 seconds of raw footage for a three-minute short", roughly a 2-5x multiplier; realistic iteration is 3-5 takes per final output. A worked short prices at $0.34 per finished second ($48 across 140 clips / 500s raw); full shorts land $40-$165.
June 2026 pricing (verify, prices churn). Lab per-second from Google Gemini API and OpenAI: Veo 3.1 Standard $0.40/s, Fast $0.10/s, Lite $0.05/s; Sora 2 $0.10/s, Pro 1080p $0.70/s. Hosted via fal.ai and Atlas Cloud: Wan ~$0.05-0.07/s, Kling 2.5 Turbo Pro $0.07/s, Seedance from ~$0.025/s, Hailuo 02 $0.045-0.08/s. Credit labs: Runway credits at $0.01; Kling consumer credits expire monthly, Ultra up 41% in six months.
Draft cheap, finish sharp. Lock composition and motion on the cheapest path; reserve 1080p/4K, pro mode, premium model for the approved hero. One $5 Sora Pro render = ~50s of Veo Lite drafts.
Gotchas. You pay for completed gens even when bad; failed rolls are inconsistently refunded; conversational edits, audio passes, upscale, and extend all bill full credits.
Budget workflow. Cost-per-finished-second = per-second x take ratio; cap at three rolls then select or branch; batch drafts; reuse seeds (enhance-prompt off); tier your models; bench your own shots on the Artificial Analysis Video Arena.
AI-generated podcast by OCDevel.