What a minute of AI video really costs: the clip is the cheap part

I build Ziztu, an AI studio for micro dramas and anime, so weigh that. I wrote this because comparing AI video prices is harder than it looks, and I had to work out how to do it fairly for our own price page.

Most price lists give you a cost per second. That is the price of the clip and nothing else. A finished episode also needs a script, a shot list, a cast that looks the same in every shot, voices, a score and a cut. If a tool sells only the clip, the rest of the job is billed somewhere else, in other software or in your time.

From our rate card: 12 shots of 5 seconds at 768P, a cast drawn once, 8 spoken lines, one score cue and 5 Director chats come to about 775 credits. Retakes cost extra. This is a worked example from the rate card, not a quote.

It is not the cheapest for everything. For a single clip, some tools sell it for less than we do, and the page says which. If you only need one clip, compare the per-second prices in the table with the tool pages linked from it.

The full table, with the date it was last checked, is here: https://getziztu.com/ai-video-price-index

If you are choosing between presenter tools and story tools, this page sets out who each one fits: https://getziztu.com/alternatives/heygen

If a price on the page is wrong, tell me and I will fix it.