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What costs credits

Generation is the only paid step. Rendering - stitching your generated clips into the final video - is free, and it’s reuse-aware: it folds in clips you already generated and never re-charges them. So “generate the scenes, then render the video” costs exactly the scenes, and re-rendering to tweak the edit or audio is free. Use estimate_cost to see the price before you spend.

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How limits actually work

Every paid generation goes through a server-side credit gate:
  1. The API estimates the action’s credit cost from the model + duration (or text length, for voice).
  2. It reserves that many credits from your balance. Reserve fails → immediate 402 insufficient_credits with the exact needed / have you can show in your UI.
  3. The work runs and the hold is settled to what was actually delivered: every clip we produced is charged (it’s a clip the provider billed us for), and any clip that never generated is released.
That means you only pay for clips actually produced. A render that fails after making some clips charges only for those - you keep them and re-render for free - and one that produces nothing costs nothing. A timeout, a model outage, or a content-policy rejection on a clip never charges for that clip.

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What hitting the limit looks like

The SDK and the canvas both surface a “Top up” CTA on this code, clicking it sends the user straight to Pricing.

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Per-plan ceiling

Unspent credits carry over every month, the monthly refill tops you back up to the plan ceiling, it doesn’t reset you to zero.

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Allowlisted accounts

Internal accounts on a server-side allowlist bypass the credit gate entirely. The monthly USD cap still applies, it’s not a free pass to infinite spend.

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The reserve / settle pattern

Every paid action holds credits first, then settles to what was delivered:
Why hold first? Because a multi-scene generation can fail mid-flight. Reserving up front ensures you can’t oversell credits even if 50 renders fire in parallel and one hits a model timeout 90 seconds in. Settling to the delivered fraction means a partial failure charges only for the clips that were actually produced - never a blanket refund of work the provider already billed us for, and never a charge for clips you never got. The SDK does this for you transparently. Agents talking to the API directly just reserve before generating; the server settles the hold when the job reaches a terminal state.

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Plans

Unspent credits carry over month to month. The “monthly pool” just refills up to the plan cap, it doesn’t reset to zero.

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Per-action cost

Costs are denominated in credits, not dollars, so we can adjust upstream pricing without you re-budgeting. Roughly:
  • 720p video, 5 s: 5-10 credits depending on the model picked
  • Voiceover, 30 s: 2 credits
  • Music bed, 30 s: 3 credits
  • Still image: 1 credit
The authoritative per-model numbers come from get_status, your agent should read those before committing a multi-shot plan.

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Monthly cost cap

Independent of credits, every account has a monthly upstream cost ceiling. When that ceiling is hit, paid endpoints return 402 monthly_cost_cap until the next month rolls over. This is a safety belt for autonomous agents, even an unlimited plan won’t let a runaway loop burn an arbitrary amount of money in a weekend. See GET /v1/usage/monthly and the cost-aware skill.

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Per-video limits

Independent of credits and the monthly cap, every single generation is bounded by two hard guardrails so a prompt - or a runaway agent - can’t queue an absurdly long or expensive video: The duration cap is the sum of all scene durations; the budget cap is the estimated upstream cost of the clips actually being generated (reused clips cost nothing). create_render, generate_scene, and the single-clip video endpoint all enforce them before queuing, returning 400 video_too_long or 402 video_over_budget with an actionable message. Both are operator-tunable via the env vars above - no code change needed to raise or lower them. Call estimate_cost first to see where a workflow sits against these limits before you spend.