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.
Everything in the studio. Cancel whenever — the projects and takes stay yours.
The same thing at €6.67 a month. Both plans start with a 7-day trial.
Billed by BytePlus, Google or fal.ai on your own key. Our cut is €0.00.
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:
Provider list price, billed to your key. Ten takes of this shot: $7.56.
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.
| Take | Tokens | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 480p · 5s — the working draft | 50,220 | $0.35 |
| 720p · 5s — the usual delivery | 108,000 | $0.76 |
| 1080p · 5s — native high-res | 243,000 | $1.87 |
| 480p · 5s on Mini — throwaway tests | 50,220 | $0.18 |
| 720p · 10s on Seedance 2.5 | 216,000 | $2.31 |
| Upscale a 480p take to 1080p (fal.ai) | — | from $0.04 |
| Reference image (Seedream) | — | $0.035 |
| Character voice sample, 4s (Seed Speech) | — | ≈$0.008 |
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.
- 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?
- The studio locks, your projects and takes stay where they are, and your provider account is untouched — it was never connected to our billing in the first place.
- Is there a free trial?
- Seven days. You still need your own provider key to render during it, for the same reason as above.
- 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.