How video tools count a minute

On 23 August 2026 we pulled the pricing pages of 17 short-video tools directly from their servers, without running JavaScript. We could read a usable price from 17 of them and could not read one from 7. This article explains why that gap exists, how each tool converts a subscription into minutes of video, and what to check before you pay.

The short answer

Most video tools do not sell minutes. They sell credits, and each tool defines what one credit buys differently: a minute of export, a second of generated video, or a finished clip. On 23 August 2026, TubeGen was the only page in our set that published a real cost per minute of video, $2.47 on its Starter plan, calculated from actual credit spend divided by video length. Every other tool leaves you to do the division yourself from credits, plan price, and an assumed video length. Compare tools by dividing the plan price by the videos you actually need, not by the credit count alone.

What one credit buys is different everywhere

A credit is a unit of account, not a unit of output. The same number means different things across tools:

Tool	Entry plan	Price read	Credit allowance	What the page says it buys
Revid	Hobby	$39/month	Listed as AI credits	Generated shorts
Crayo	Hobby	$13/month equivalent, billed annually at $160/year	50 credits/month	40 export minutes
Opus Clip	Starter	$15/month	150 credits/month	Clips from your own upload
Faceless.so	Starter	$24/month equivalent, billed annually at $290/year	500 credits/month	Page claims about 25 videos
Short.ai	Basic	$19/month equivalent, billed yearly	1600 credits/month	Page claims up to 40 videos
Fluxnote	Rise	$10/month	1000 credits/month	Page claims 10 videos
Vicsee	Starter	$15/month	500 credits/month	Page claims up to 33 videos
Clippie	Lite	$19.99/month	300 credits/month	Credits plus export minutes on higher tiers
Virvid	Lite	$39/month, billed monthly	400 credits/month	Page claims 60 shorts
Klap	Basic	$14/month equivalent, billed yearly	100 clips/month	Clips only, not generated video
TubeGen	Starter	$149/month	33,000 credits/month	Page states $2.47 per published minute
Quso	Lite	$29/month	100 credits/month	Captioned clips from long uploads

All figures come from each tool's own pricing page, read on 23 August 2026. Two things stand out when you put them side by side.

First, the claimed videos-per-month numbers are the seller's own arithmetic, not ours. Faceless.so says generation starts at 20 credits per video, so 500 credits implies about 25 videos. Short.ai's credit table lists an AI story video of 30 seconds at 20 credits, which supports its claim of 40 videos from 1600 credits. Whether those assumptions match your use case is the question that matters, not whether the arithmetic is right.

Second, some plans bill per clip rather than per video. Klap charges for clipping an existing long upload into shorts, so its 100 clips per month cannot be compared against Fluxnote's 10 generated videos per month. They are different products with different units.

Monthly versus yearly changes the number you see

Several pages show a yearly rate while hiding the monthly one, and others show both. If you compare a yearly-equivalent figure against someone else's monthly figure, the comparison is wrong.

Crayo's page displays "Annual Discount Save 30%" and shows Hobby at a $13 monthly equivalent, $160 billed yearly. Its monthly-only rates were not visible in that state. Faceless.so defaults to showing the yearly rate: $24 per month equivalent against a $49 monthly price. Short.ai shows all three tiers as billed-yearly rates: $19, $30, and $60 per month equivalent. Klap likewise shows three yearly rates: $14, $39, and $94 per month equivalent.

Quso does something rarer in this category: paying yearly doubles your credit. Its Lite plan carries 100 credits monthly, but the yearly invoice raises it to 200. Essential goes from 300 to 600, Growth from 600 to 1200. If you are comparing Quso against another tool, decide first whether you will pay yearly, because that choice changes the effective credit price more than any other variable on the page.

One page contains its own contradiction. Medeo's pricing page shows Pro at $28 per month but also shows a yearly total of $314, which works out to $26.17 per month. Both figures appear on the same page. We report both rather than pick one.

Some prices are not readable at all

Seven tools in our set did not return a usable price from their server-side HTML on 23 August 2026. Their pricing pages render through JavaScript, so a direct fetch returns navigation text but no dollar amounts:

• StoryShort: tiers of $39, $69, $129, and $199 are known from a third-party revenue tracker dated 18 August 2026, not from the pricing page itself.
• AutoShorts: server returned 10 words.
• CapCut: server returned 13 words.
• Hooked: the pricing page returned 776 words from the server with no price inside.
• VEED: returned only navigation, 531 words.
• Vizard: rendered every tier as $0 server-side; the real price depends on a slider computed in JavaScript. The free tier of 60 credits per month was readable, defined as one credit per uploaded minute.
• Submagic: the page shows two columns per plan and the monthly-versus-yearly split could not be resolved in one pass, so no price is published here in a readable form.

This matters beyond curiosity. If a vendor's own pricing requires JavaScript to display, any comparison table built from cached or scraped data can silently go stale. When you evaluate such a tool, open the live page and screenshot the numbers on the day you decide.

How to work out your own cost per minute

The useful calculation takes three inputs: what you pay per month, how many videos you actually ship, and how long each video runs. Here is the sequence:

1. Pick your realistic volume, not the plan maximum. If a plan claims 40 videos and you ship 12, your effective cost is the plan price divided by 12.
2. Convert credits to minutes using the seller's own table where one exists. Crayo maps 50 credits to 40 export minutes on Hobby. Vizard defines one credit as one uploaded minute. Short.ai prices a 30-second AI story video at 20 credits.
3. Divide plan price by resulting minutes to get a comparable figure. For example, Crayo Hobby at $13 monthly equivalent over 40 export minutes gives a rate you can hold next to TubeGen's published $2.47 per minute, though note that TubeGen's figure is median user spend, not a fixed rate.

ViewMade publishes this arithmetic on its own pricing page instead of leaving it implicit: the Starter plan costs $29 per month for 50 renders, stated as $0.58 per short, measured 22 August 2026. It counts renders rather than minutes because each output is a complete vertical documentary with a fixed format, sourced from real archive footage rather than generated frames. That is a different unit again, and the reason cross-tool comparisons should always start from the seller's own definition of one unit of work.

What this does not tell you

These measurements come from single snapshots taken on 18 to 23 August 2026, at one location, using one fetch method. Sellers change plans frequently, and a page that showed monthly rates today may default to yearly next week. We did not measure overage pricing, what happens when credits run out mid-month, refund policies, or output quality. The claimed videos-per-month figures are the sellers' own statements, and we have not verified them against rendered output. Similarweb-derived traffic figures sometimes cited in comparisons carry high error margins for small sites and are not used here. This article also does not answer which tool produces better video, because cost per minute measures accounting, not quality. If you need current prices for StoryShort, AutoShorts, CapCut, Hooked, VEED, Vizard, Submagic, or Fliki, check their live pages; we have not measured them in a readable form.

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Frequently asked questions

Why does my tool charge per credit instead of per minute? Credits let one product cover several operations with different costs: script writing, voiceover, image generation, and rendering each consume differently. A flat per-minute price would force the seller to average these. The trade-off is that you cannot know your true cost until you know the credit-to-minute mapping, which is usually buried in a help page or a footnote like Short.ai's "AI story video 30s = 20 credits".

Is a yearly plan always cheaper? In this category, yes, wherever both rates were visible on 23 August 2026. Faceless.so drops from $49 to $24 per month equivalent. Quso adds a twist: yearly payment doubles your credit allowance rather than lowering the sticker price. But several pages show only the yearly rate by default, so verify which billing period a displayed figure assumes before comparing.

Can I trust the "videos per month" claims on pricing pages? Treat them as the seller's assumption made explicit. Faceless.so derives about 25 videos from 500 credits at 20 credits per video. Your videos may be longer or shorter than the assumed length, changing the real yield. The safest approach is to compute your own expected credit consumption from the seller's credit table before subscribing.

Which tool has the cheapest entry point? Fluxnote's Rise plan at $10 per month was the lowest readable entry price in our set on 23 August 2026, followed by Vicsee's Starter at $15 per month. Lowest entry price is not lowest cost per video, because credit allowances differ: Fluxnote includes 1000 credits claiming 10 videos, while Vicsee's 500 credits claim up to 33.