What it costs — and where the money actually goes

Two separate bills, and only one of them is ours. A flat subscription pays for the studio. Every render is billed by the model provider straight to your own API key, at the price on their public rate card. We never touch the tokens, so there is nothing for us to mark up.

Work out any take before you shoot it

Video models bill by pixels and seconds, not by clip. BytePlus counts tokens — a take burns duration × width × height × 24 ÷ 1024 of them; Veo and Kling are billed by the second of output, at a rate per resolution; Gemini Omni is billed in tokens after the render. The studio shows the figure on the render button before you commit. Here is the same arithmetic, unattached to an account:

The usual shots, priced

Five seconds, 16:9, on Seedance 2.0 unless noted. These are provider prices — the same numbers you would pay calling the API yourself with no studio in the middle. They are list prices: BytePlus runs limited-time discounts, and the calculator above applies whichever are live today, exactly as the render button does — a discount that has lapsed disappears from it on its own. Veo and Kling are billed by the second rather than in tokens, so their rows carry a rate per second instead of a token count.

Why this comes out lower than a credit plan

Credit-based tools buy tokens wholesale and resell them to you inside a tier. That spread is their margin, and it is invisible: you see credits, not seconds, so there is no way to check what a clip cost. Three things follow from it, and all three disappear when the key is yours.

• The spread. You pay the platform's rate for a model, not the model's rate. With your own key, the provider's invoice is the whole bill.
• Expiry. A monthly credit pool that does not roll over is a deadline to spend. Money in your own provider account has no month attached to it.
• Tier ceilings. Resolution, length and queue priority get rationed by plan. On your own key the ceiling is your balance and the provider's rate limit — three concurrent renders, in our case.

The trade is honest to state: you set up a provider account and paste a key, which takes about fifteen minutes the first time. The guides walk through each one. If that sounds like a chore, it probably is — right up until the month you render a lot.

Questions people actually ask

Does the subscription include any renders?

No, and that is deliberate. The subscription pays for the studio; renders are billed by the provider to your key at list price. Nothing is resold, so nothing is marked up. An exception: studio credit from invitations. A render paid with it costs the list price plus 15%.

How much does one AI video take cost?

On Seedance 2.0, a 5-second take costs about $0.35 at 480p, about $0.76 at 720p and about $1.87 at 1080p. Tokens are charged as duration × width × height × 24 ÷ 1024, so the price scales with resolution and length rather than with a plan tier. Veo 3.1, shot through an OpenRouter key, is billed per second of output with sound included — an 8-second 720p take is $0.40 on Lite, $0.80 on Fast and $3.20 on Veo 3.1 — and Kling 3.0 comes to about $0.63 for 5 seconds at 720p with sound. Gemini Omni 1.2 is billed in tokens after the render — about $0.07 per second at 720p on Google's rate card, so a 10-second clip comes to about $0.70.

Do Veo, Kling and Omni cost the same as on their own APIs?

Yes — the rate card is the vendor's, and the studio quotes it on the render button before you shoot. Veo 3.1 runs through an OpenRouter key, which adds nothing to the model's rate, and is billed per second of output, sound included: Lite $0.05 at 720p and $0.08 at 1080p; Fast $0.10, $0.12 at 1080p and $0.30 in 4K; Veo 3.1 $0.40 and $0.60 in 4K. Kling bills per second in units of $0.14: Kling 3.0 is $0.084 a second at 720p, $0.126 with sound and $0.42 in 4K; Turbo is $0.112 with sound included. Gemini Omni 1.2 is billed in tokens after the render, at $12 per million: Google counts 5,792 video tokens per second of 720p output — about $0.07 a second, $0.023 at 360p, $0.104 at 1080p and $0.209 in 4K — so the studio quotes that rate for the length you pick, and the settled figure arrives with the take.

Is it cheaper to render at 1080p or to upscale a 480p take?

For delivery, upscaling is far cheaper: a native 1080p 5-second take costs about $1.87 in tokens, while upscaling a finished take to 1080p starts around $0.04. It is not a substitute for rendering the final on the full model, though — upscaling enlarges what was generated and cannot add the detail a stronger model would have produced. The bigger saving is drafting on the cheap models: a 5-second draft on Mini at 480p is about $0.18.

Do unused credits expire?

Whatever you top up sits in your own provider account, on that provider's terms — a Longtake billing month has no claim on it. Studio credit from invitations is separate, and it expires 30 days after it is added.

How does the invitation programme work?

Every account has a personal link, longtake.studio/?ref=CODE, and the code itself. When a friend with a new account pays for their first subscription on the web, they get 25% off that payment, on any plan, and you get 25% of what they paid as studio credit in US dollars, at the euro rate in force at the moment of the payment (about $2.06 for a monthly plan, $19.80 for a yearly one). The credit is added 14 days after the payment, if the payment has not been refunded or disputed and your friend still has the account. A friend can also enter your code by hand within 7 days after signing up, before their first payment: the discount is applied at checkout. If that first payment had a promo code or any discount other than the invitation's, there is no reward, and a later payment does not earn one either. App Store purchases do not count yet. The payment has to be made within 180 days after your friend signed up. The number of friends is not limited. The rules are in the terms, section 10.

Where can I spend studio credit?

On BytePlus only: renders on the Seedance and Seedream models and Seed Speech voice samples, in the web studio and through an agent token (MCP). Google, Kling and fal.ai are paid with your own keys only. It does not pay for anything in the iPhone and iPad app yet. Credit is spent before your own key is used. A render paid with credit costs the provider's list price plus 15%, rounded up. A render that fails or is rejected returns what it was charged. Credit expires 30 days after it is added.

Why can't studio credit be paid back as money?

Studio credit from invitations is a reward, and it has no cash value. It is never paid back as money, cannot be withdrawn or passed to another person, and what is left expires 30 days after it was added. It can only be spent in the studio, on BytePlus renders and voice samples.

Which key do I need to start?

One: a BytePlus ModelArk key, which covers the Seedance models and Seedream images. A Google key adds Gemini Omni and Nano Banana, and an OpenRouter key adds Veo 3.1; the Seed Speech, fal.ai and Kling keys unlock voice samples, upscaling and Kling 3.0, and can wait.

What happens if I cancel?

You keep shooting — the tools are free. Your existing projects lock rather than expiring straight away, and a project that belonged to a paying account is kept for 90 days after the paid period ends; the date is shown on the project, and the iPhone and iPad app notifies you two weeks before it. Paying for one more month unlocks everything, which is also how you get work out of a locked project. Your provider account is untouched either way; it was never connected to our billing in the first place.

Is there a free trial?

There is no trial, because the studio itself is free to use: sign in, add your provider key and shoot. What the subscription buys is that your work stays — a free project can be worked on for its first 24 hours, then locks, and is deleted a week after it was created. Subscribing unlocks every project on the account and stops the clock. It also opens the Supercomputer, the project's assistant: a chat on your own Claude, OpenAI or OpenRouter key that helps with the idea, the shots and the prompt of each take.

How much storage do I get?

A free account holds 300 MB of takes, references and Art Dept frames — roughly 70 to 80 five-second takes, since a 480p take and its last frame come to about 4 MB together. A subscription raises that to 20 GB. When the ceiling is reached the studio refuses new renders rather than quietly deleting anything, and deleting takes or assets frees the space again. One catch worth knowing: a locked project takes no edits at all, so takes inside it cannot be deleted one by one — reclaiming that space means deleting the whole project, or subscribing, which unlocks it.

Can an agent drive it?

Yes — the studio ships an MCP server, so an AI agent can create scenes, cast characters and fire off takes with a personal token. Same billing: your key, provider prices. If you have studio credit, an agent spends it just as the studio does.