Guides
Guides
How the work is actually done, plus pricing snapshots read straight from each vendor's own page with the date on every table.
What a guide here is
A method guide answers the question in its title and stops. It does not open with a definition of the category, it does not spend four paragraphs establishing that short video is popular, and it does not end by telling you the answer is to buy something. Where a step is genuinely easier with a tool we say which one and move on; where it is not, we say that too.
Where a guide has a matching checklist or worksheet, the guide teaches the method and hands you to the artefact rather than reprinting it. Terms that carry a specific meaning in this trade are defined once, in the glossary, and linked rather than re-explained on every page.
Where the pricing numbers come from
Every price on these pages was read directly from the vendor’s own pricing page and carries the date it was read. Where a vendor renders its prices with JavaScript, the page says so and either cites a verifiable third-party record or gives no figure at all. An estimated price is worse than a missing one: it reads as fact, and it is not.
Three products in this category returned four, ten and thirteen words of body text before scripts ran when they were checked on 23 August 2026. That is why some comparisons here have gaps in them rather than guesses, and why a plan whose two columns could not be told apart in a single reading carries no figure either.
Read the billing period, not the number
Most pricing pages in this category display the annual rate by default and charge the monthly one unless you switch. The tables here name which rate each figure is, on every row, because the difference between the two is routinely more than a third.
What a pricing page does not tell you
Three things decide what a tool actually costs, and none of them is the headline number. The first is what a credit buys: a plan quoting credits per month is not comparable to one quoting finished videos until you know how many credits a finished video consumes, and some pages never say. The second is whether unused credits roll over, because a monthly allowance that resets is a use-it-or-lose-it bill. The third is per-seat pricing, which turns a modest figure into a large one the moment a second person needs access.
Where a vendor publishes enough to work out a cost per finished video, these pages show the arithmetic rather than the conclusion. Where it does not, they say so and stop.