Kling's own price list turns a video minute into a per-second bill

The figure or the record

Kling is the video-generation model Kuaishou's AI unit publishes at kling.ai (the klingai.com address now redirects there), currently offered as the Kling 3.0 series: Video 3.0, Video 3.0 Omni, Image 3.0 and Image 3.0 Omni. The platform's own product page describes a 'fully upgraded architecture' with cross-task instruction handling, but states no launch day for the family, so this record treats the model as a living product rather than a dated release. What is dated is the price: an archived capture of Kling's pricing page, taken on 16 May 2026, lists per-second charges for its video model, broken into three quality tiers the page itself calls std, pro and 4k.

What the documents establish

The archived rate card prices standard-tier video generation, without a reference clip or synthesised audio, at $0.084 a second, or roughly $5.04 for a minute of output; the same standard tier rises to $0.112 a second with audio and no reference clip, or $0.126 a second with a reference clip and no audio. The only row that names a pixel resolution is the 4k tier, priced at $0.42 a second, about $25.20 a minute. None of this is a subscription; it is metered API pricing, billed per unit of output rather than per month. Separately, the industry white paper from China's network video association states, in Chinese, that surveyed practitioners reported roughly a 50 per cent average gain in creative efficiency after adopting AIGC tools generally; it does not name Kling specifically or attribute the figure to a controlled study.

Scope and caveats

Three gaps matter here. First, the pricing record is archived, not live: Kling's current pricing page renders its numbers by script after the page loads, so this ledger could not confirm the archived figures still held on 16 September 2026, and rates may have moved since May. Second, std and pro are the platform's own labels, not resolutions; only the 4k row states pixel dimensions, so a producer cannot infer picture quality from a tier name alone. Third, no document opened for this record names a creator programme or fund tied to Kling, despite that framing in early coverage of Kuaishou's AI push; the current site surfaces only an unelaborated affiliate link.

What to watch

Editorially, the detail worth tracking is whether Kling's live pricing page ever exposes its rate card to a plain fetch rather than only to a signed-in, scripted session, since that would let this figure be refreshed without relying on an archive.

• Does Kling's current, unarchived pricing page confirm or revise the May 2026 per-second rates?
• What pixel resolution do the std and pro tiers actually deliver, and does that change by model version?
• Is there a documented Kuaishou fund or incentive specifically for micro-drama creators using Kling, as distinct from a general affiliate programme?

A per-second API price is a real number, but it prices compute, not a finished episode; multiplying it by run time says nothing about the retries, editing and review that sit around a generation call.