How much does a 30 second AI Reel cost in 2026?

Thirty seconds of generated footage costs between $1.50 (Veo 3.1 Lite 720p, fal.ai) and $17.06 (Seedance 2.5 1080p, Sume) at list prices checked on October 29, 2026. That is the generation fee for one clean take. Your real bill depends on how many takes you throw away, so most of this article is about that gap.

The numbers come from our AI video model pricing tool, which reads each provider's own price page. If a price changes there, the tables below change with it.

How video models bill you

Almost every video model charges per second of output. A 30 second Reel is 30 billed seconds, whatever the model. What changes is the rate, and the rate moves with resolution and, on some models, with whether audio is switched on.

The other thing that changes is how many generations you need. Each model has a longest clip it will make in one go. Veo 3.1 makes clips of 4, 6 or 8 seconds, so 30 seconds means 4 generations that you cut together. Kling 3.0 and Seedance 2.0 reach 15 seconds, so you need 2. Seedance 2.5 reaches 30 seconds, so a Reel of that length fits in 1. The total cost per second does not change, but consistency across clips does become your problem when you stitch.

Cost of 30 seconds by model

Two patterns stand out. First, tiers inside one family differ a lot: Veo 3.1 at 1080p is $12.00, while Veo 3.1 Lite at 720p is $1.50. Second, resolution matters more than people expect. For Seedance 2.5, 1080p costs $17.06 against $6.94 at 720p, and Reels are watched on a phone screen where 720p is often enough for a draft.

Providers also differ for the same model. Seedance 2.0 at 1080p is $11.10 from BytePlus ModelArk, and the same model costs noticeably more at some resellers. The pricing tool shows every provider side by side, so check it before you commit to one.

Budget for retakes

The table is the price of one take. Prompts rarely land on the first try, so the useful number is the cost per take you keep. As an illustration, not a measurement: if you keep one take in three, Kling 3.0 Pro 1080p costs $15.12 for 30 seconds instead of $5.04. If you keep one in two, it is $10.08. Your own ratio will vary with how specific your prompts are and how forgiving your scenes are.

Ways to spend less

• Draft cheap, finish expensive. Test the shot at a lower resolution or a cheaper tier, and only render the keeper at full quality. Seedance 2.5 documents a draft mode that renders a 480p preview and lets you complete it at 1080p within seven days.
• Approve a still frame first. An image costs far less than video, and a bad composition is cheaper to catch in a still than in a rendered clip.
• Switch audio off when you will add your own. On Veo and Kling the audio off rate is lower. If you plan to lay music and a voiceover on top anyway, you are paying for sound you will mute.
• Keep clips short. Cut to a new shot every few seconds, which also suits the format. You pay for the seconds you use rather than for a long take you trim.
• Compare providers. The gap between the cheapest and dearest host of one model is often larger than the gap between neighboring models.

A worked example: a product Reel with eight shots

Say you want a 30 second product Reel made of eight shots of about four seconds each. You generate 32 seconds of footage and cut it down to 30. On Kling 3.0 Pro 1080p that is $0.168 per second, so $5.38 for one pass. On Veo 3.1 Lite 720p it is $1.60, and on Veo 3.1 1080p it is $12.80.

Now suppose three of the eight shots need a second take. That adds twelve seconds of footage, so Kling 3.0 Pro 1080p comes to $7.39 for the whole Reel. Retakes added $2.02, which is more than a third on top of the first pass. This is why a cheap first pass matters more than a cheap rate.

How to read a price page

• Check the unit. Some providers bill per second, others per token, per credit or per clip. A per token rate has to be converted before you can compare it, and the conversion depends on resolution and duration.
• Check the resolution. The same model has several rates, and a page that shows one headline number is usually showing the lowest.
• Check the audio setting. Veo and Kling price audio on and off separately. A page that does not say which it covers is hard to compare.
• Look for the word roughly. Several Seedance pages describe their per second figure as approximate because the real bill is a token count.

What the generation fee leaves out

Generation is one line in the budget. Music, voiceover, captions, editing time and exporting for each platform sit outside it, and they depend on the tools you already pay for. A model with native audio can remove the music and sound effects line, but not the editing. Treat the numbers in this article as the cost of raw footage.

Where Raytake fits

Raytake is a Mac app that makes short videos for Reels, TikTok and Shorts by chatting with an AI assistant. It shows the price of each model before it runs, and it asks you to approve still frames before it pays for any video. That is the cheap draft step from the list above, built into the workflow, so a weak first frame costs you a few cents rather than a full render.