What a finished minute actually costs
A tool advertising two cents per second sounds like a finished minute costs $1.20. It does not.
The number you need is cost per usable second, and it is always higher. The gap between the two is the retry ratio — how many generations it takes before one is good enough to cut.
The arithmetic
Start with the sticker price. Multiply by the length of a clip. Now multiply again by your retry ratio, which for narrative work typically lands between three and eight.
A one-cent-per-second tool at six retries costs six cents per usable second. A seven-cent-per-second tool at two retries costs fourteen. The cheap tool is cheaper, but by less than half, not by seven times.
Then add what the pricing page leaves out:
- Sound. If the model does not generate audio, you are paying a separate tool and a separate pass over the timeline.
- Upscaling. Delivery specs are usually higher than generation specs.
- Regeneration after the edit. Cutting for rhythm always breaks a shot, and the fixed shot has to be generated again.
In our experience the post-generation costs roughly match the generation costs on a first season. That is the number to plan around.
Where the tools separate
The three tools on our production tools ranking differ less on price than on how much of that hidden work they absorb.
Tools that output audio with the picture remove an entire post pass. Tools that keep a character reference across sessions remove a chunk of the retry ratio. Tools that do neither are cheap per second and expensive per episode.
That is why the ranking is ordered on cost per finished minute rather than on list price. List price is a marketing number; cost per finished minute is the one that decides whether a season gets made.