Money
What an AI video service actually costs, priced against doing it yourself
October 22, 2026 · 6 min read
A honest breakdown of the three costs behind a daily video channel: the subscription, the hours, and the tools you would otherwise buy separately.
Three costs, not one
Comparing a subscription price to a monthly bill is the wrong comparison. A daily channel costs you the tool, the hours it takes to run, and the smaller tools you buy to fill the gaps: stock footage, a voice generator, a caption app, a scheduler. The subscription is usually the cheapest of the three, and it is the only one a pricing page shows you.
Price the hours honestly
Take your realistic weekly figure for making one film by hand: research, script, footage, narration, captions, export, upload. Multiply by five. If you value your time at even a modest hourly rate, the weekly cost usually exceeds a year of most subscriptions. That is the number to compare against, not the sticker price, and it is also the number that decides whether the channel survives past the first month. The plans themselves are laid out in the pricing table.
What you still pay for either way
Some costs do not move. You still need footage rights or generated visuals, you still need a captions pass if the tool does not burn them in, and you still spend time checking facts before a history film goes out. A service that removes editing, narration, assembly and posting has done the expensive part; a service that only writes the script has removed the cheap part and left you the evening.
Watch for usage floors and overage
Two pricing traps in this category. The first is a per-minute charge dressed as a subscription, which turns a daily posting habit into a bill you cannot predict. The second is a plan whose monthly limit is below your posting cadence, so you either stop posting or pay overage every month. Work out your true monthly minutes first, then compare. Two films a day at a minute each is about sixty minutes a month, not six.
The test that settles it
Run one week by hand and write down the hours. Then run one week on a trial and write down the hours plus the subscription. If the second number is lower and the output is as good, the decision is arithmetic rather than taste. If it is not lower, you have learned that cheap enough is still too expensive for your channel. What the subscription should include is spelled out in an AI video generator that posts for you.
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