What Should I Charge for an AI Video Project?

The floor is the pipeline's own charges

Every stage of a project has a price per action, so the cost side of a quote is computable before the client says yes. The read is charged once for the whole script, by its length and language. Each episode's storyboard is charged separately, by that episode's length — and a re-run costs the same as the first pass. Video is charged by the second of output, per segment, at the rate of the resolution tier you choose. The composite is charged once per episode, by the finished length. Reference images are billed individually, with the first fifteen per account free across characters, scenes and props.

The pricing page costs a concrete example out, and it is a realistic freelance job — a ten-episode micro-drama, ninety seconds an episode: reading the script about 36 credits, the ten storyboards about 90, the video at the entry tier about 9,000, assembling the ten episodes about 900 — roughly 10,026 credits in all, about $62 at the lowest credit price. Note the shape of that number, because it is the shape of every AI video quote: the seconds of video are the bill, and everything else is rounding next to them.

Two things keep the floor honest. A shot that needs five attempts is five purchases at the same per-second rate, so the floor moves with how hard the material is. And the cheapest way to change your mind is free: editing the storyboard text costs nothing and re-renders only the segments you actually changed — the micro-drama cost walkthrough builds the same ledger episode by episode.

Time is the other half of the quote

The machine time is measurable: the median episode is seven segments and the median segment is fourteen seconds, machine time for a video segment runs a few minutes at the median, and segments generate in parallel — so a typical episode is around a quarter of an hour of machine time, not a day. Your time is the part the platform cannot meter for you: the read and the retries, watching the cuts, and the client conversation itself.

The corpus gives one honest calibration point for what dominates the budget. It comes from a fan-trailer project thread in the collection, where the comparison with physical production is the reply's whole point:

compared to physical production, the big cost for this is time. The credits were way less than $1000.

That reply sits under a personal project thread on a tool-specific board in the collection — no link, for that reason — and the observation transfers to client work directly: the hours you spend producing and revising are the line item nobody besides you can price.

Revision rounds are a metered line item here

Revision policy is where freelance quotes quietly die, and the corpus has an answer for it: the highest-scored reply in a thread about endless client feedback is to meter revisions past the second round.

2 revisions free. Additional revisions $100/hr. Watch how quickly they start approving your videos.

That comment sits in a working-pros thread on client feedback, and it transfers to AI video more cleanly than it first looks. A changed line of dialogue updates the text for free, a changed shot re-renders that segment, and a changed storyboard re-runs the board before anything re-renders — three different sizes of "one more tweak", each with a visible price on this side. Quote two rounds free with the third metered and the conversation about taste becomes a conversation about numbers.

What the corpus says a quote can carry

In a build thread pricing animated and generated content, the rule of thumb the commenter offers is a rate per finished minute:

Roughly $50 - $100 per minute is a good rule of thumb, depending on how exacting your vision and complicated your shot is.

That is a pipeline thread on a general board, and the range should be read the way it was written: per finished minute of exacting output, before your platform costs and before any retries. Around it, the corpus shows how the pricing question splits by scope: the brand-video pricing ask is rare compared with the cost-a-high-end-film question at 83 posts, and the ads and commercial cluster — where most paid work lives — runs to 11,000 posts:

The counts follow the collection method used across this section — rule-matched labels over a fixed window, rounded, not a survey of rates.

Limitations: what a floor cannot decide for you

• The floor is a cost, not a price. What your time is worth, what the market pays in your niche, and what a client will accept are outside this page and outside the corpus counts.
• Retries are the one variable that can outrun a quote. If the material is hard — crowds, stunts, long takes — budget attempts per shot explicitly instead of assuming the median.
• The example ledger uses one specific script length and tier; a different resolution tier changes the video line, which is most of the total.
• Prices here are read from the live pricing page when this page is built; a quote you gave last month should be re-priced against today's ledger.

FAQ

For the cost side in more detail, why video costs more than everything else breaks the bill down by stage, and the retry multiplier explains why the attempt count — not the runtime — is what eats a budget. If the client work is still hypothetical, what the corpus says about making money is the honest version of that picture.

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