How Much Does AI Video Actually Cost Per Second?
Google and Runway both publish real per-second rates for their video models — and each one has an 8x spread between its own cheapest and priciest tier. We calculated the true cost per second across both, and found a third tool whose pricing doesn't scale in a straight line at all.
AI video pricing looks more transparent than AI image pricing, right up until you try to compare two tools. Google publishes an actual per-second dollar rate for Veo. So does Runway, through its API. That should make this the easiest cost comparison on the site to build. It isn't — because each of those two tools has multiple tiers with an 8x price spread on its own, and three of the other most popular video tools don't publish a convertible per-second rate at all.
This piece does two things. First, it lays out the real, official cost per second for the tools that publish one — Veo 3.1 and Runway — across every tier, not just the headline number. Second, it's honest about which popular tools (Kling, Pika, Luma) use credit systems too inconsistent to convert into a trustworthy per-second figure, and shows exactly where that inconsistency shows up in their own published numbers.
The Tools With a Real Per-Second Rate
Google Veo 3.1 (Standard, with audio) — $0.40/second
Google's Gemini API prices Veo 3.1 Standard at $0.40 per second at 1080p with native synchronized audio, per Google's own developer pricing page — meaning an 8-second clip with sound runs roughly $3.20.
Google Veo 3.1 Lite (no audio) — $0.05/second
The same model family's cheapest published tier: $0.05 per second at 720p without audio. That's an 8x difference from the Standard tier above, for the same underlying model line — the gap is almost entirely resolution and audio, not a different product.
Runway Gen-4 Turbo — $0.05/second
Runway's Turbo tier runs 5 credits per second at $0.01/credit, landing at exactly the same $0.05/second floor as Veo's cheapest tier — an 8-second clip costs roughly $0.40.
Runway Gen-4.5 (flagship) — $0.12/second
Runway's top model, currently leading independent text-to-video benchmarks, runs 12 credits per second — $0.12/second, or roughly $0.96 for an 8-second clip. Still meaningfully cheaper than Veo's top tier, at a lower price for its flagship model than Google charges for its mid-tier one.
Cost Per Second, Side by Side
| Tool & Tier | $ / Second | Cost of an 8-Second Clip | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Veo 3.1 Lite (no audio) | $0.05 | ~$0.40 | Official Google Gemini API |
| Runway Gen-4 Turbo | $0.05 | ~$0.40 | Official Runway API rate |
| Runway Gen-4.5 (flagship) | $0.12 | ~$0.96 | Official Runway API rate |
| Veo 3.1 Standard (with audio) | $0.40 | ~$3.20 | Official Google Gemini API |
Two tools, four tiers, and the floor and ceiling are set by resolution and audio, not by which company you pick. Veo 3.1 Lite and Runway's Turbo tier land on the exact same $0.05/second rate — a genuine tie at the budget end of the market.
The Credit-System Tools We Couldn't Cleanly Price
Which Tier Fits Which Use
Drafts, iteration, and testing prompts: Veo 3.1 Lite or Runway Gen-4 Turbo, both at $0.05/second — cheap enough to throw away most of what you generate while you dial in a shot.
Final hero shots with dialogue or sound design: Veo 3.1 Standard's $0.40/second is the cost of native synchronized audio done well — an 8x premium over Lite that's easiest to justify on the one clip that actually ships, not on every draft along the way.
✅ Pay-per-second makes sense if...
Your volume is unpredictable or low, and you want the bill to match exactly what you generated — no unused subscription capacity, no credit expiration to track.
❌ A subscription is worth checking first if...
You're generating dozens of clips a month on Kling, Pika, or Luma — at that volume, doing the credit math against their subscription tiers usually beats paying API rates per second.
Expert Editorial Opinion
Video is where AI pricing complexity peaks, and it's not close.
An image is one output; a video's cost scales with a second dimension — duration — on top of resolution and quality, which is exactly why Veo's own pricing spans 8x within one company's lineup. That's not padding or price gouging; audio synthesis and longer temporal coherence are genuinely more expensive to compute than a silent, short clip. The spread is a legitimate reflection of cost, and Google deserves credit for publishing it plainly enough that anyone can do this math themselves.
Luma's non-linear scaling is the more interesting finding here, because it breaks an assumption most buyers walk in with: that doubling clip length roughly doubles the price. A 5-to-10-second jump tripling the cost instead of doubling it means Luma's real "cost per second" depends on which length you're asking for — a single published rate would actively mislead. That's worth knowing before you budget a project around a handful of test clips at 5 seconds and then scale up to 10.
The three credit-based tools we couldn't cleanly convert — Kling, Pika, and Luma — aren't necessarily worse value than Veo or Runway. They're just harder to verify from the outside, and "harder to verify" is worth treating as its own kind of cost.
Final Verdict
Veo 3.1 and Runway agree almost exactly at the cheap end ($0.05/second) and diverge sharply at the premium end ($0.12 vs. $0.40), largely explained by audio and resolution rather than raw compute markup. Kling, Pika, and Luma may well be competitive on price — Luma's own numbers suggest they can be, at certain clip lengths — but none currently publish pricing clean enough to state a verified per-second figure with confidence. Until they do, Veo and Runway remain the only two tools in this space you can budget against with real math instead of an estimate.
Before you commit to a 10-second render...
Check whether your tool's price actually doubles from a 5-second clip, the way you'd assume. Luma's own numbers prove that assumption can be wrong by 50% or more.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
🔗 Related ToolRadar Reviews
Official pricing/docs used: Google Gemini API (Veo) · Runway · Kling · Luma
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