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. The number of tokens a take burns is duration × width × height × 24 ÷ 1024, and the studio shows you that 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.

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.

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.

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?

There are no credits. Whatever you top up sits in your own provider account, on that provider's terms — a Longtake billing month has no claim on it.

Which key do I need to start?

One: a BytePlus ModelArk key, which covers video and Seedream images. The Google, Seed Speech and fal.ai keys unlock image generation, voice samples and upscaling, 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; we write to you two weeks before that date. 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.

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.