The cheapest AI video API option, and the two levers that beat model choice

The short answer is Seedance 2.0 Fast at 5 credits per second of 1080p. The longer answer is that two other levers cut more off a bill than switching models does.

Per-second cost, ranked

Model	Credits per second	5 seconds
Seedance 2.0 Fast	5.0	25 credits
Kling 2.0 Standard	7.0	35 credits
Veo 3	12.5	not purchasable — 8s fixed

Seedance is 29% cheaper per second than Kling and 60% cheaper than Veo 3. (Put the other way round: Kling costs 40% more per second, Veo 3 150% more.)

Lever 1: 720p is exactly half

const factor = p.resolution === '720p' ? 0.5 : 1;

Not “cheaper” — half, then rounded up. A 5-second Seedance clip drops from 25 to 13 credits. Veo 3 drops from 100 to 50.

This beats model choice outright. A 720p Veo 3 clip costs 50 credits — the same as two 1080p Seedance clips, from the model that is otherwise 150% more expensive per second. If you are iterating on prompts and only need full resolution for finals, this halves the expensive part of the loop and changes nothing about which model you ship with.

Kling has no 720p tier.

Lever 2: pay for the seconds you use

Only Seedance takes an arbitrary duration:

Model	Duration control
Seedance 2.0 Fast	any integer, 3–15s
Kling 2.0 Standard	5 or 10 only
Veo 3	8, fixed

If your output is genuinely 6 seconds, Seedance charges for 6. Kling rounds you to 10 — a 67% overpay that has nothing to do with its per-second rate. This is why the headline per-second numbers understate the real gap for variable-length work.

Lever 3: the pack you buy

Credits are not linearly priced:

Pack	Price	Credits	Per credit	5s Seedance @1080p
Basic	$6.90	500	$0.0138	$0.35
Standard	$14.90	1,200	$0.0124	$0.31
Premium	$34.90	3,000	$0.0116	$0.29
Enterprise	$79.90	8,000	$0.0100	$0.25

Basic to Enterprise is a 28% reduction on the same call. Comparable to switching from Kling to Seedance, and it requires no code change at all.

Stacked

Cheapest model, 720p, at the Enterprise rate: a 5-second clip costs 13 credits = $0.13. The same five seconds at 1080p on Kling bought with a Basic pack is $0.48 — 3.7× more for the identical duration.

What “cheapest” does not tell you

This page ranks price and nothing else. It makes no claim about which model produces better output, and the cheapest option that does not meet your quality bar is not cheap — it is a render you throw away and pay for again.

There is also a cost that never appears on the bill: failed jobs you have to detect and retry. Those refund in full here, but the engineering time to handle them correctly is real either way — see job state failed and UPSTREAM_FAIL.

Models covered on this page

• Seedance 2.0
• Kling 2.0
• Veo 3