I've been paying for 18 AI video model APIs since June. Here's what one second of video actually costs on each.

I run a product that generates video, so I ended up wiring 18 different image-to-video models into one pipeline and paying real invoices on all of them.

Here's what one second of 720p video costs on each, cheapest first. These are `fal` list prices as of August 2026.

• $0.030 — Veo 3.1 Lite
• $0.037 — Seedance 1 Pro
• $0.050 — Hailuo 02
• $0.070 — Kling 2.5 Turbo
• $0.071 — Grok Imagine
• $0.075 — Minimax Video-01 (flat $0.45 per ~6s clip, no duration control)
• $0.100 — Kling 2.1
• $0.100 — Sora 2
• $0.100 — Wan 2.7
• $0.100 — Veo 3.1 Fast
• $0.112 — Kling v3 Pro
• $0.130 — Gemini Omni Flash
• $0.140 — Kling v3 Turbo (1080p only)
• $0.140 — HappyHorse
• $0.142 — Grok Imagine 1.5
• $0.155 — Seedance 2.0 Mini
• $0.242 — Seedance 2.0 Fast
• $0.310 — Seedance 2.0

The spread is 23x. The same 10-second clip costs $0.30 on Veo 3.1 Lite and $6.90 on Seedance 2.0 at 1080p.

Six things that surprised me:

1. Veo 3.1 Fast charges the same for 720p and 1080p, $0.10/sec either way. If you're rendering it at 720p you're throwing away resolution for free.
2. There is no standard 1080p markup. Seedance 1 Pro quadruples ($0.037 to $0.150). HappyHorse doubles ($0.14 to $0.28). Wan 2.7 goes up 50%. Veo 3.1 Fast doesn't move at all. You have to check every model individually.
3. Native audio is billed separately and it's brutal. Veo 3.1 Lite adds $0.03/sec, which is +100%. Veo 3.1 Fast and Kling v3 Pro both add 50%. Turning audio on quietly doubles some of these numbers.
4. Version numbers don't track price sanely. Seedance 2.0 costs 4.6x Seedance 1 Pro at 1080p. And Seedance 2.0 Mini is still 4x more expensive than Seedance 1 Pro at 720p.
5. "Fast" and "Turbo" don't mean cheap. Seedance 2.0 Fast is 8x the price of Veo 3.1 Lite.
6. Cheap isn't cheap if it's slow. Hailuo 02 is $0.05/sec but takes 5-6 minutes per clip. On a multi-scene render that's the difference between a user waiting 90 seconds and a user giving up.

Caveats: list prices, not negotiated. Quality isn't in this list, and it doesn't correlate with price the way you'd hope. The cheapest tier here is genuinely usable for a lot of work.

Happy to answer questions about any specific model. What's actually held up for you in production?