AI Video Editor Pricing Comparison

Measure the Cost on Your Own Footage

50 free credits, no card. The only reliable way to price a usage-metered tool is to run it once.

Every Published Price, Checked 5 August 2026

Fifteen tools. Prices are US dollars, read from each vendor’s own pricing page on 5 August 2026. The annual column shows the effective monthly cost when billed annually, which is the number vendors put in large type; the monthly column is what you pay if you want to be able to leave. Vendors change prices without notice — several tools here moved their pricing inside the last twelve months — so treat this as a dated reading, not a live feed, and click through before you buy.

Two kinds of blank in that table, and they are not the same failure. “Not published” means the vendor’s pricing page does not serve a number a non-browser reader can get at. VEED and InVideo build their pricing tables in the browser; the HTML that arrives contains plan names and no figures. Vizard’s page serves its plan names, its credit allowances and a 50%-off annual badge, but no dollar figure. CapCut publishes no public price on its site and sends you to check inside the app. Submagic’s pricing page lists its three paid tiers in full and no free tier at all, which is why the free-tier table below has no Submagic row. Clipchamp is a different case again: there is no standalone price to publish, because its paid features are bundled into a Microsoft 365 subscription rather than sold separately.

“Not verified” is our failure, not theirs: Adobe’s plans page and Canva’s pricing page did not return readable content to our checker on 5 August 2026, so we print no figure for either. Both are per-seat subscriptions with metered generative credits layered on top, and that structural fact is what matters for the comparison below — but a number we could not read is a number we will not quote.

Which means a third of this category does not serve a readable price at all, and two more did not load for us on the day — close to half of it is not price-comparable from the outside. If you have read an article confidently listing CapCut’s or VEED’s current price to the cent, it was quoting something it could not read either — usually another article, usually months old. That is the mechanism by which stale pricing propagates through this entire SERP.

Five Pricing Units, Five Places It Gets Expensive

This is the part the listicles skip, and it is the only part of a pricing comparison that survives the next price change. Every tool in the table meters something, and what it meters decides which axis of your work inflates the bill. Draw cost against the axis each unit is sensitive to and the five curves have five different shapes.

Several tools charge on more than one of these at once, and that is worth spotting. Descript is per seat and per transcription minute and per AI credit — three ceilings, and the one you hit first is not the one on the pricing card. Submagic is per member and per video and capped on each video’s length. When a plan has three limits, the plan is the tightest of the three.

Scenario 1 — The Weekly Podcaster

Four episodes a month, each recorded for about 70 minutes and published as one long episode. That is 280 minutes of source a month becoming four deliverables. No clips, no vertical cutdowns. The editing job is dead air, filler words, a repeated take or two, and a level pass.

Gling Plus at $10/mo annual wins on price, and it is not us. Its unit — hours of AI-edited media — is the right shape for this job, and 4.7 hours of the 10 included leaves headroom for a re-upload. If all you need is the pauses and the ums gone from four long episodes, $10 a month is hard to beat and there is no honest argument for spending three times that.

The instructive row is the last one. Submagic’s prices are among the lowest in the whole table — $12 per member per month at annual billing — and it cannot do this job at any tier, because its top plan caps each video at 30 minutes. That wall is not on the pricing card next to the price; it is inside the plan description. A cheap tool that cannot process your file is not cheap.

Where the extra money goes if you spend it: at $25/mo annual, Valmera does the cuts, the captions, the music bed and the reframe from one sentence and sequences them in the right order, then takes “looser cuts” as the next instruction rather than a re-run. At $16, Descript gives you a transcript-based editor with a genuine track record and a 1080p ceiling on that tier. Three different products, three defensible prices, one job.

Scenario 2 — The Daily Short-Form Creator

Thirty vertical clips a month, each under 60 seconds, cut out of two long recordings of roughly 90 minutes each. So 180 minutes of source becoming 30 deliverables — the inverse ratio of scenario one, and the reason a different unit wins.

Opus Clip wins this one, and again it is not us. Its flat tier is the right shape because the expensive part of this job is not editing, it is selection — deciding which thirty moments out of three hours are worth posting. One upload becomes a batch of candidates ranked for predicted virality, and you curate. Nothing metered per deliverable competes with that, because per-deliverable pricing charges you for the ones you throw away.

Submagic is the close second and a different trade: $23/mo annual buys 40 videos at up to 5 minutes each, which fits 30 shorts with room to spare, but Submagic expects you to bring the clip. Sourcing them from a 90-minute recording means the Magic Clips add-on at $12/mo annual on top, so $35 all in. Kapwing Pro at $16 is the cheapest line in the table and the most work: 1,000 credits and a timeline, and you make all thirty cuts yourself.

Valmera is the wrong shape here and the reason is structural, not a missing feature: one deliverable per request. Thirty shorts is thirty directed requests, which is the right tool when each clip needs its own judgement — B-roll over a specific line, a zoom aimed at a specific face, a caption fix — and the wrong tool when what you want is volume. If you need a hundred candidates a month, a clipping agent beats a deliberative one on the only axis you care about.

Scenario 3 — The Agency, 20 Client Videos a Month

Twenty client videos a month, mixed lengths from 90 seconds to 20 minutes, three people who all need access. Here the volume barely matters — every tier in the table clears 20 videos. The number three is what decides the bill.

The lesson is not which row is lowest, it is that a $23 tool becomes a $69 tool and a $24 tool becomes a $72 tool purely by adding two colleagues who might each edit twice a week. Per-seat pricing is priced against headcount, and an agency’s headcount is not a proxy for its output. That is why the pooled-usage rows — Kapwing Business at $50/mo for 4,000 credits, Valmera Pro at $42/mo annual for 4,000 credits — look cheap on this table and why you should read their seat terms before assuming three logins are allowed. Sharing one login to dodge a seat charge breaches most of these vendors’ terms, and it is the most common way a small shop ends up out of compliance without ever deciding to be.

Length is the second decider. Submagic Pro’s 5-minute cap fails on the 20-minute client videos, so a mixed roster forces Business at $41 per member — $123/mo at three people, which is now the most expensive row rather than the cheapest. Read the cap against your longest deliverable, not your median one.

Valmera is disqualified from this scenario as stated. There are no team seats, no shared workspaces, no comments and no brand kits — three people who each need their own login and a shared project list cannot have that here. Valmera fits the version of this agency where one operator does the editing and the other two brief and review, in which case 4,000 credits at $42/mo annual covers all twenty with no seat multiplier at all. If that is not your shape, one of the rows above is your answer.

The Hidden Costs

None of the following appears on a pricing card, and all of it decides what you actually pay. Start with the free tier, because “free” is the most-quoted and least-examined word in this category. A free export has to get through four gates before it is a file you can publish, and vendors put their wall in different places.

Watermarks are not only a free-tier thing. Opus Clip’s paid Starter tier at $15/mo still marks animated captions; watermark-free export starts at Pro, $29. That is the single most expensive footnote in this table, because it is the one people discover after paying.

Resolution ceilings follow the tier, not the plan name. Descript’s free tier exports 720p and its $16 Hobbyist tier exports 1080p; 4K starts at Creator, $24 annual. Kapwing, Vizard and Riverside all cap free exports at 720p and unlock 4K on the entry paid tier. Valmera is the outlier and it is worth stating plainly, because it is checkable: every export renders from the original uploaded file at source quality, on every plan including free. There is no resolution tier, because the resolution is whatever you uploaded.

Length caps are walls, not charges. Kapwing’s free tier stops at one-minute exports and its paid tiers at two hours per project. Submagic caps each video at 2, 5 or 30 minutes by tier. Vizard’s free exports stop at ten minutes. You cannot pay your way past these within a tier — you either move up or the file does not process. Valmera’s equivalent is an upload ceiling of 14 GB or 3 hours, identical on free and paid, with no cap on export length below it.

Storage clocks are the quietest one. Opus Clip, Kapwing and Vizard all delete free-tier media after three days, and Opus Clip’s Starter tier extends that only to 29. If you treat a cloud editor as an archive, you are treating a rental as a shelf. Download what you finish.

Annual-only discounts are steep enough to be a signal. Gling is 50% off annually, Submagic 37–41% depending on tier, Descript and Kapwing about a third. A discount that large is buying something worth that much to the vendor: a year in which you cannot leave. In a category where plan names, limits and prices at several of these vendors have moved within twelve months, that is a real cost and not a paranoid one. Pay monthly until the tool has survived a month of your actual work.

What Happens When You Cancel

The last hidden cost, and the one almost nobody checks before subscribing. Three things are at stake and they have different answers: the entitlement, the files, and the balance.

• The entitlement stops. Assume access to paid features ends at the end of the period you have paid for, and that anything gated behind the tier — 4K export, watermark removal, extra seats — is gone with it. A file you exported at 4K stays 4K; a file you have not exported yet may now only export at the free tier’s ceiling.
• Exported files are yours and cannot be reached. This is the only category of the three that is unambiguously safe everywhere. Anything already downloaded is a file on your disk. It is also the reason the practical advice is always the same: export as you go, do not treat the editor as the archive.
• Unused balance generally does not survive. Credits and included minutes are an entitlement for a billing period, not a balance you own, and this is true at essentially every tool that meters. At Valmera, cancelling sets the monthly credit pool to zero — we would rather write that here than have you find it in a support thread. Previously exported files are unaffected.
• Cloud-stored source media is on the vendor’s clock, not yours. Where free tiers delete media after three days, assume a lapsed paid account is on some equivalent schedule. The specific retention window belongs in each vendor’s terms; the safe assumption is that it is shorter than you think.

The practical version of all four: before you commit to an annual plan, export one finished video and check that the file on your disk is the thing you would want if the account vanished tomorrow. If it is not — because it is watermarked, or 720p, or a project rather than a video — the subscription is doing more work than you thought.

How Valmera Is Priced, and What We Cannot Tell You

Valmera is Free ($0, 50 credits granted once, no card), Creator $30/mo or $300/yr with 2,000 credits, Pro $50/mo or $500/yr with 4,000, and Frontier $100/mo or $1,000/yr with 10,000 credits on a stronger model for both reasoning and vision. Paid plans open with a 3-day free trial, during which the account can spend 10% of the plan’s credits — enough to judge the tool, not enough to finish a season before the first charge.

The unit is a credit, and a credit is a unit of model work: reasoning and rendering that a request actually consumed. Charging is proportional — there is no flat per-edit price, and a simple request costs the least. Footage length is not billed directly, which is why the 280-minute podcast month and the 180-minute shorts month are priced by what you asked for rather than by what you uploaded.

Here is what we will not do: quote a credits-per-video number. We do not have an honest one. A 6-second clip and a 20-minute documentary are not the same request, and landing an edit in one pass costs a fraction of landing it in four. Any figure we printed would be an average of things that are not alike, and you would find that out in month two. Every per-minute and per-video vendor on this page can quote a firm number precisely because their unit is a proxy for the work rather than the work — which is the advantage of those units and, in the podcast scenario above, also their problem.

So the answer to “what will this cost me” is measurement, not a table. The 50 free credits exist for exactly this — they are spendable, they require no card, and they buy real agent turns on your own footage. Run the edit you actually intend to run, watch what it costs, and multiply. That is the only forecast worth having for a usage-metered tool, and it is the reason the free plan is not a demo.

Where Another Tool Is Cheaper Than Us

Stated plainly, because a comparison whose every scenario ends with the author is an advertisement.

• You only need cuts on long-form. Gling at $10/mo annual covers ten hours of edited media. If the job is dead air and filler words on a weekly podcast, that is a third of our Creator tier for the part you need.
• You need volume, not judgement. Opus Clip turns one upload into a batch of ranked candidates. We produce one deliverable per request, so thirty shorts is thirty requests. Their shape is right for that job and ours is not.
• You need $0 to mean $0. Clipchamp’s free tier exports unlimited 1080p video with no watermark, which is more generous than ours — our free exports carry a small mark and a brief end card. The comparison is honest about what you give up in return.
• You need a team. We have no seats, shared workspaces, comments, brand kits or share links. Per-seat pricing at Descript or VEED is more expensive per person and is buying something we do not sell at any price.
• You need subtitle files or platform publishing. Our captions are burned in — no SRT or VTT, either direction — and export is a file you download and post yourself. Several tools in this table do both, and if compliance requires a subtitle file, price is not the deciding factor.
• You want generated video rather than edited footage. InVideo and Runway are the right category and we are not one: Valmera edits footage you already have.

What our price is buying, when it is the right answer: an agent that performs the whole edit from a described outcome, sequences dependent steps in the right order, looks at the frames it rendered before it answers you, and exports from your original file at source quality on every plan. That is a different product from a cheaper timeline, and on some months it is a worse deal. The scenarios above say which months.

How to Compare AI Video Editor Pricing Without Getting Caught Out

1. 1
   Find the unit before you look at the price

   Per seat, per source minute, per deliverable, per feature credit, or per unit of model work. Write down which one each shortlisted tool uses. Two tools at the same monthly price under different units can differ by several times on your month of work, and the unit is the thing that will not change when the price does.
2. 2
   Compute one honest month, not a feature list

   Count your real inputs: people who need access, minutes of raw footage, number of deliverables, and the length of the longest one. Run those four numbers through each plan's limits. The longest deliverable is the number that most often disqualifies a tool outright, because length caps are walls rather than charges.
3. 3
   Read the four free-tier gates and the cancellation terms

   Check the watermark (including on the entry paid tier), the resolution ceiling, the per-export length cap and the storage clock. Then export one finished video on the free tier or trial and confirm the file on your disk is the thing you would want if the account vanished. Pay monthly until the tool has survived a month of your actual work.

Prices on this page were read from each vendor's own pricing page on 5 August 2026 and are a dated reading, not a live feed. Vendors change prices, plan names and per-plan limits without notice — several of these did within the last twelve months.

Frequently Asked Questions

Price It on Your Own Footage

50 free credits, no card, source-quality exports. Run the edit you actually intend to run and watch what it costs.