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What one second of AI video costs, by model

Vendor per-second rates for Seedance, Kling and Happy Horse at 480p, 720p and 1080p, from the cost table atelier.space runs on — with the error bar the table itself declares.

Updated 2026-07-25 · figures verified 2026-04-28


If you are pricing a short AI-generated film, the number you need is cost per second at a given resolution — not a monthly plan, and not a credit that means something different on every site. This page is that number, for the video models atelier.space runs.

Every figure below is read at build time from server/cost/pricing.ts. Be precise about what that file is: it is atelier's own vendor-cost table, used for quota burn-down rather than as a billing substrate, and for video its values come from the providers' published pricing pages — video APIs do not return a cost with the result, so nobody can meter them directly. The file declares its own error bar: expect ±15% on video until reconciliation against real workloads narrows it.

So: these are the vendor's own published rates as atelier records them, before any margin. They are not a receipt.

Per second, by model and resolution

Model480p / sec720p / sec1080p / sec10 seconds, best tier
Seedance 2.0$0.063$0.137$0.342$3.42
Kling 3.0$0.126$0.168$1.68
Kling 3.0 Omni$0.200$2.00
Happy Horse 1.0 · text to video$0.124$0.221$2.21
Happy Horse 1.0 · image to video$0.124$0.221$2.21

Source: server/cost/pricing.ts, PRICING.video.models. Rates last checked against the vendor consoles on 2026-04-28.

What that means in practice

A ten-second 1080p clip on Seedance 2.0 is a little over three dollars. The same ten seconds at 480p is under seventy cents. Resolution, not duration, is the expensive axis: on Seedance 2.0 the jump from 480p to 1080p multiplies the rate by roughly five and a half, while doubling the length only doubles it.

That is the case for exploring at 480p and finishing at 1080p — but the arithmetic has a limit, and it is worth doing rather than sloganising. Taking shots of equal length, five 480p passes plus one 1080p finish comes to $0.657 per second of delivered footage, against $0.684 for finishing two shots blind and keeping one. Explore more than five times and the blind approach is cheaper. The margin is thin because 480p is not free; it is 18% of 1080p.

The two prices that are not the same price

A rate published by a reseller is not the rate published by the model's own platform. atelier's billing notes record one case in detail: fal resells Seedance at roughly 1.8× what ByteDance's own English console, BytePlus ModelArk, charges for the same model. A comparison anchored on the reseller looked like a discount and was in fact a premium.

Source: server/billing/README.md, the vendor-anchor section.

If you are comparing quotes, check whether each one is the model platform's own price or a reseller's.

How atelier prices this on top

atelier sells generation as ink, at a flat $1 = 100 ink at every pack size, with no volume tiers. The stated rule is that a lane a user can price-check elsewhere carries cost plus a fixed packaging margin, and the margin lives on the part only atelier runs — the deep-model Muse turns and the workflows around them. Chat with Muse on the Sonnet-class model costs nothing at all.

Source: server/billing/README.md; src/billing/refillPackContract.ts for the pack ladder.

Caveats worth stating