List price puts a minute of AI video between $5 and $25

The figure or the record

Three companies that publish a video-generation rate card, as retrieved on 16 September 2026, price the same rough act — a minute of AI-generated video — at markedly different figures once tier and resolution are named rather than left implicit. Google's own Vertex AI pricing page lists Veo 3.1 standard video-with-audio generation at $0.40 a second at 720p or 1080p, which is $24 for a minute; its faster Veo 3.1 Fast tier runs $0.12 a second at 1080p, or $7.20 a minute. Runway's pricing page prices its Gen-4.5 model, at 1080p, in credits rather than cash: 60 credits per five seconds, which converts to roughly $13.82 a minute on its cheapest annual Standard plan and around $5.76 a minute on its highest-volume Max plan. An archived capture of Kling's pricing page, dated 16 May 2026, lists standard-tier video generation, without a reference clip or audio, at $0.084 a second, or $5.04 a minute, rising to $0.42 a second, or $25.20 a minute, at its explicitly named 4K tier.

What the documents establish

Named tier and resolution matter to the arithmetic. Google's and Kling's cards state a resolution against each price row; Runway's states resolution against its credit-to-output conversion rather than the credit price itself. All three price by output unit — seconds, or a fixed clip length — not by subscription month alone, though Runway's and Kling's per-minute figures above still depend on which subscription or volume tier a buyer holds, since neither sells single seconds without a plan or top-up behind them. Google's is the only card of the three pricing a single second directly in dollars with no subscription layer at all.

Scope and caveats

List price is not production cost. None of these figures include the retries a generation call typically needs to produce a usable shot, the editing and sound work around it, or the human review a finished episode requires; a per-minute list price describes compute alone. The Kling figure is an archived snapshot, not confirmed against the live page on 16 September 2026, since Kling's current pricing page renders its numbers by script after loading rather than in static markup; this record could not verify whether the archived rate still holds. Runway's and Kling's 'standard' and 'pro' labels do not name a resolution on every row, so a like-for-like comparison is possible only at the tiers that do state one.

What to watch

Editorially, the roughly fivefold spread between the cheapest and priciest named tier — before any retry is paid for — is the number worth carrying into a budget conversation, not any single headline rate.

• Does Kling's live, script-rendered pricing page still match the archived 16 May 2026 figures?
• What retry rate do producers report for a usable shot at each service, and how does that change the effective per-minute cost?
• Do any of the three companies offer a volume-committed enterprise rate below the listed self-serve tiers?

A published per-second price is a genuine, checkable number; a per-minute production budget built from it still has to add everything the price list leaves out.