What Runs Underneath

A tier is configuration, not a product name

Every generation goes through a tier. The tier says which service to call, which model on it, what resolution to ask for, the longest a single segment may be, and a multiplier that turns a baseline price into that tier's price per second.

All of it is configuration we can change without shipping code. That is deliberate — model services add, rename and retire models on their own schedule, and a platform that needed a release to follow them would always be a month behind.

It is also why this page does not list model names. Anything printed here would be a snapshot. The picker in the editor and the pricing page read the live configuration; they are the answer, and this page is the explanation.

All three are yours, but video is the one that matters

Video is where the cost is, by an order of magnitude, and where the difference is visible. Its picker is in the editor's top bar, next to the progress counter, and lists each tier's resolution and the longest segment it will take; the credit cost of the shot you are about to generate is on the generate button itself. The default is a low-resolution tier, because that is the sane place to find out whether a shot works.

The text and image tiers live in Settings, under Model Preferences, and you can change them too. We would gently suggest not to. The text model breaks your script into episodes and writes the storyboards, and a storyboard is a format the rest of the system parses literally — shot markers, durations, asset references. The image model produces the setup images every later segment references for consistency. Both defaults are the ones the pipeline's rules were written and tested against, and a mismatch there shows up as a project that behaves oddly rather than as an error message.

What the multiplier means

One tier is the baseline at one hundred. Every other tier's number is its cost relative to that: roughly what the upstream price ratio is, so a tier that costs us twice as much costs you about twice as much. It is a ratio, not a quality score.

The number on the button and the amount actually taken come from the same function, so a quoted price is the price. There is a safety cap on the multiplier and one on segment length, so a bad configuration cannot quietly produce a bill ten times what anyone intended.

What happens when a call fails

If a call fails in a way that looks transient — the service says it is busy, rate-limits us, or returns something retryable — it is retried once on a different account for the same model. Most transient failures are per-account, so this clears them without changing what you asked for.

Two kinds are deliberately not retried. A content-moderation refusal is a judgement, and sending it again is asking the same question twice. A parameter error will fail identically the second time. Both end the job rather than burning another call.

A retry does not change your tier. You get what you picked, or you get a failure and the credits handled as described on the failures page.

How to choose

Use a low tier for everything until the shot is right, then re-generate the keepers on a higher one. Both takes stay in that segment's history, so the comparison costs you one extra generation and nothing else. One caveat if you do this: re-shoot every segment in the episode on the final tier rather than some of them, because compositing an episode whose segments have different resolutions has to re-encode instead of copying them.

The resolution is the honest headline. A higher tier is more pixels and usually a longer maximum segment; what it is not is a guarantee of a better take, because the thing that most determines whether a shot reads correctly is the text you gave it, not the tier you paid for.

Why there is no league table here

We do not score or rank other companies' models, and you will not find a “best model” claim anywhere on this site. Scoring a competitor's product on our own storefront is not a comparison anyone should trust, and in several of the markets we operate in it is also a legal problem.

What we will publish is our own parameters — resolution, segment length, price per second — and those are on the pricing page. The only benchmark that answers your question is your own shot, run twice, which is exactly what the cheap tier is for.

FAQ

Updated September 21, 2026