AI Video Cost Calculator
Price a faceless video end to end: narration, visuals, music and captions. Compare a budget, balanced and premium stack side by side, and see the monthly and annual cost at your real upload volume.
List prices checked 2026-09-05
Compare production stacks
The same video length and volume, priced three ways.
Cheapest setup that still produces a watchable video.
- VoiceOpenAI TTS
- VisualsStills & Ken Burns
- MusicFree
What most working faceless channels actually run.
- VoicePlayHT
- VisualsStock footage
- MusicLicensed
Best quality available, and priced accordingly.
- VoiceElevenLabs
- VisualsFully AI generated
- MusicLicensed
Two lines decide your whole bill
Scripts cost almost nothing — a full ten-minute script is a few cents of tokens. What actually moves the number is narration and visuals, and they scale differently. Narration is priced per character, so it tracks your script length almost exactly. Generated video is priced per second and climbs faster than anything else on the list.
The monthly figure is the one that matters
Three dollars a video sounds like nothing. Publishing daily, that is ninety dollars a month against a channel that may earn nothing for its first six. Set the volume to what you will realistically upload rather than what you hope to, then compare the result against a realistic month of revenue.
Where you can cut without it showing
Narration is the easiest saving: the gap between the cheapest usable voice and the most natural one is roughly eight times the price, and for a documentary-style channel most viewers do not notice. Visuals are the opposite — that is where viewers do notice, and where generated video earns its cost if the topic genuinely needs it.
Common questions
Does this include editing software or my own time?
No. These are per-video running costs only. Editing subscriptions are a flat monthly fee, so add yours to the monthly figure rather than the per-video one — and your own hours are the largest cost of all, but only you can price those.
Why is fully AI-generated video so much more expensive?
It is billed per second of output and most generations get discarded. These figures assume roughly three takes per usable clip, which is realistic — a calculator that assumes a perfect first render will understate your bill by two thirds.
Are these the prices I will actually pay?
They are list prices. Annual billing, volume tiers and promotional credits all reduce them, so treat this as an upper bound for comparing stacks rather than an invoice.
What does a realistic faceless channel cost to run?
A balanced stack publishing three videos a week generally lands between twenty and sixty dollars a month. The premium stack at the same volume can pass three hundred, which is why the monthly figure matters far more than the per-video one.