Cheapest Text to Video AI

Subscription video tools sell you a monthly credit allowance. The arithmetic only works out in your favour if you actually spend it, and most months you will not — which is why allowances reset.

Runway is the clearest comparison because it publishes both halves of the equation. Its Standard plan is $15 a month for 625 credits, and Gen-4.5 text-to-video bills 12 credits a second. That works out at roughly $1.44 for a five-second clip if you use the whole allowance, and more if you do not, because Standard and Pro credits do not roll over — they reset within 24 hours of your billing date. Its free plan cannot run text-to-video at all; the only video model on it is image-to-video.

Against that, Hailuo 2.3 on Reelfo is $0.36 for the same five seconds with no monthly floor, and the credits sit in your balance until you use them. At the top of the roster Veo 3.1 is $3.00 — Runway resells the same model at 20 credits a second without audio or 40 with, which is $2.40 to $4.80 for five seconds on Standard-plan credits.

Canva does not publish a per-generation price at all. Video clip generation is an Ultra-tier feature, so a free account cannot make one, and Canva Pro at $18 a month estimates around twenty Ultra generations — an upper bound the vendor itself says most people will not reach, since Ultra usage is shared with its other AI tools.

This is the trap in the whole category. If you are making one clip, take the lowest per-second rate and stop reading. If you are making anything with more than one shot in it, the cheap model will cost you more.

Three of the ten published models take a starting frame and nothing else. Ask them for a second shot of the same person and you get a different person, so you re-roll until something matches — and each re-roll bills. HappyHorse 1.0 is the clearest case: it reads the first frame only, and the drift is visible by the second shot.

Worked example. A 40-second piece cut from five eight-second shots is 288 credits ($2.88) on Hailuo 2.3 if every shot lands first time, and 392 credits ($3.92) on PixVerse C1, which carries the cast. Three re-rolls on the cheap model erases the difference.

Signing up puts 100 credits in your account, once, with no card. That is enough for the script, character and shot-list stages plus about one keyframe — it is a look at the pipeline, not a free finished reel.