How much does an AI image or video really cost? The exact prices, down to the cent

the real problem isn't the price, it's the fog

Ask around: how much does an AI-generated image cost? Nobody knows. The prices hide behind opaque subscriptions, capped "fast generations", waiting queues designed to push you toward the next tier up. You pay without understanding what you're buying, and you discover the bill at the end of the month.

Our conviction at Imaginode: AI creation has no reason to be a blurry subscription. Every generation has a real, known compute cost. So we might as well display it, to the cent, before you click. This article gives you all the numbers, including the uncomfortable ones, like the failure rate of video generation.

Here you'll find the price of every image model, the video prices with their two variables of duration and resolution, how refunds work, the full detail of subscriptions and top-ups, and concrete methods for spending less. By the end, you'll be able to estimate a project's budget before you've even started it. That's the whole point.

one credit is one cent, and everything becomes readable

The system fits in one sentence: 1 credit is worth about €0.01. An image at 3 credits therefore costs 3 cents, a video at 60 credits costs 60 cents. No exotic currency whose value shifts depending on the pack, no "gems" engineered to scramble your mental math. One credit, one cent, everywhere.

This single unit covers all 47 models on the platform, at the same prices whatever device you're on. It also covers the side services: a message to the assistant costs 1 credit, and so does a prompt rewrite by the magic wand. You can follow every single movement in the complete credit history, right on your profile.

Why credits rather than euros directly? Because the amounts are tiny. Nobody wants to see "€0.048" on a button. The credit keeps the numbers whole and readable, and the conversion stays trivial: divide by one hundred and you have euros. The poster at 31 credits costs 31 cents, period.

Balance1 250

Flux Schnell1 cr

Flux 2 Pro7 cr

Kling 2.5 · 5 s · 720p26 cr

Seedance 2.0 · 5 s · 4K330 cr

Generate · 26 cr

the price shows before you click, never after

On Imaginode, the Generate button displays the exact cost of the generation before you click. Switch models, the number changes. Push the video from 5 to 10 seconds, the number changes. Nobody discovers the bill after the fact: it's written on the front door, not slipped under the napkin.

That interface detail changes behavior. When the cost is visible, you dare to experiment, because you know precisely what you're risking: 1 credit per attempt with Flux Schnell, which is to say practically nothing. And you think twice before the 4K generation at 330 credits, which is exactly the reflex you want to have.

image prices, model by model

The entry level starts at 1 credit with Flux Schnell, perfect for roughing out an idea. GPT Image Mini follows at 2 credits. At 3 credits, you get Flux 2 Klein and Imagen 4 Fast, already very decent for social media visuals. A full iteration round of ten attempts at this level costs between 10 and 30 cents.

The mid-range plays out at 5 credits: Recraft V4.1 for design and typography, Seedream 5 Lite for recurring characters and references. The top shelf runs from 6 to 7 credits: Flux Pro 1.1 and Imagen 4 at 6, Flux Kontext at 6 for editing an existing image, Flux 2 Pro at 7 for the finals.

In other words, the most expensive image on the platform costs 7 cents. That number deserves a pause. It makes failure nearly free and experimentation reasonable by default. The question is no longer "can I afford one more attempt?" but "do I still have an idea worth testing?". That is the right question to be asking.

real case: a finished poster for 31 cents

Let's walk through an actual project. You're preparing a concert poster. Exploration phase: ten attempts with Flux Schnell at 1 credit, to test compositions, moods, framings. Cost: 10 credits. You keep the best direction, adjust the prompt, then launch three final versions with Flux 2 Pro at 7 credits. Cost: 21 credits.

Total for the operation: 31 credits, roughly 31 cents for a poster worthy of being printed. Add 1 credit if the magic wand rewrote your prompt into English, 2 or 3 if the assistant helped you build the workflow. Even inflating everything, you stay under 40 cents. That is the true order of magnitude for image work.

Another frequent case: a month of posts for a professional account. Twenty published visuals, each preceded by four attempts at 1 credit and finalized with Imagen 4 at 6 credits, comes to 200 credits, so €2 for the month. Even doubling the iterations on the bad days, a freelancer's monthly image budget stays under €5. The barrier is no longer financial.

video costs ten times more, and that's normal

Now for the part that stings: video. Generating 5 seconds of video demands vastly more compute than a still image, and the prices reflect that. Kling 2.5 Turbo, the platform's best value for money, runs around 26 credits for 5 seconds in 720p. Seedance 2.0 Fast, further upmarket, comes in around 48 credits for the same format.

Translate that into euros: between 26 and 48 cents for 5 seconds in 720p. For perspective, that's the price of a hotel coffee for a shot nobody could have produced without a film crew three years ago. But video deserves more preparation than images, precisely because every failed attempt is counted in tens of cents rather than single units.

duration and resolution: the two dials that inflate the bill

First dial, duration. Going from 5 to 10 seconds pushes the price up to between 60 and 100 credits depending on the model, as much as €1. The relationship doesn't feel linear in your head, but it is linear in the servers: twice as many frames to compute. Seedance 2.5, the high end, goes up to 30 seconds in a single take, so budget accordingly.

Second dial, resolution. The very same Seedance 2.0 generation goes from about 48 credits in 720p to about 330 credits in 4K for 5 seconds, a little over €3. So 4K is reserved for the final approved shot, never for exploration. Note also that Veo 3.1 costs more when you enable generated audio: sound is one more computation.

The method that follows from this is simple. Explore in 720p and in 5 seconds, with the cheapest model that holds up. Only raise the duration or the resolution once the movement, the framing, and the light are validated. That single reflex easily divides the video budget of a complete project by three.

when it crashes, you're refunded without asking

Model providers have outages, saturated queues, generations that fail technically. On Imaginode, a technical failure on the provider's side triggers an automatic refund: the credits return to your balance within seconds, immediately visible. No form to fill in, no support ticket, no email to write.

Every refund appears in the credit movement history on your profile, line by line, right next to every expense. You can audit your month's consumption in a minute. That traceability seems trivial right up until the day you wonder where your 900 credits went; on that day, it's worth its weight in gold.

The typical scene: you launch a Kling video at 26 credits on a busy evening, the provider saturates, the generation fails after a minute. By the time you've reread your prompt, the 26 credits are already back in the balance shown at the top of the screen. You relaunch, and that's it. A technical failure becomes a non-event rather than a complaint.

the honest nuance: ugly but delivered still gets paid

Let's be precise about what the refund does not cover: the disappointing result. If the model delivers an image, even one you consider a failure, the generation is paid for. The machine really did compute; that's the contract. Refunds based on feelings would be unworkable and, let's say it plainly, massively abused. No serious platform offers them.

This point weighs most heavily on video, where you have to be clear-eyed: roughly one generation in three or four disappoints, with the genre's classic defects, strange hands, illegible text, questionable physics. Build that rate into your budgets. A 5-second shot at 26 credits will in practice cost you more like 35 to 50 credits, failed attempts included.

This is also why the low image prices matter so much: they let you lock down everything that can be locked down before paying video rates. Composition, style, and character get validated at 1 to 5 credits per attempt. The video model then receives a start image that's already right, and its waste rate drops accordingly.

the subscriptions: 13, 42, or 145 euros per month

Three monthly plans, before tax, with credits arriving every month. Starter at €13 for 900 credits: enough to produce about thirty finished posters or a handful of short videos, ideal for discovering the platform without a heavy commitment. Creator at €42 for 3,100 credits, the heart of the range for anyone publishing every week.

And finally Studio, at €145 for 10,500 credits, designed for teams producing video continuously or serving several clients at once. Run the internal exchange rate: the Studio plan brings the credit down to €0.0138 before any promo, versus €0.0144 on Starter. The gap exists, but it stays modest: choose based on your actual volume first.

Cancellation happens at any time, from the dashboard, with no phone call and no retention form. We would rather have a customer who leaves cleanly and comes back than a trapped customer who stews. In a market where cancelling is sometimes an obstacle course, it's worth saying in black and white.

top-ups, for people who hate commitments

Don't want a subscription? One-off top-ups exist, with no commitment of any kind: 1,000 credits for €15, 2,000 for €29, 3,000 for €42, 5,000 for €69, and 10,000 for €135. The credit thus drops from €0.015 to €0.0135 depending on volume. You buy when you need it, and that's the whole story.

Top-ups suit spiky usage: a big project in March, nothing in April, two campaigns in May. The subscription, on the other hand, rewards regularity with a slightly better rate at comparable volume. Many users combine the two, a small monthly plan as working capital plus a top-up during the peaks.

One example to settle it. You estimate 2,000 credits of consumption this month, then almost nothing afterward: the €29 top-up wins, because a Creator subscription billed at €42 would leave you with 1,100 credits sitting idle. Conversely, 2,500 credits consumed every single month argues for Creator: two 1,000 top-ups plus one 2,000 top-up would cost €59, versus €42 on subscription.

SIMPLE15: the code we hand you upfront

Rather than saving promotions for abandoned carts, we might as well write it right here: the public code SIMPLE15 takes 15% off everything, subscriptions and top-ups alike. The Creator plan drops from €42 to €35.70 before tax, and the 5,000-credit top-up from €69 to €58.65.

With that code, the Studio plan's credit comes down to about €0.0117, which makes a complete poster cost 36 cents... sorry, still 31 credits, but billed at €0.36 instead of €0.42 on a basic top-up. The cents pile up quickly when you're producing every day. Take the discount, that's what it's there for.

the art of spending less: iterate at the floor price

The golden rule: never explore with a premium model. The first ten attempts at a visual exist to find the composition and the mood; Flux Schnell at 1 credit is more than enough for that. Save Flux 2 Pro at 7 credits or Imagen 4 at 6 for the two or three finals. That simple sorting divides a project's cost by two, with zero loss of quality at the finish line.

Second lever, the magic wand at 1 credit. A prompt rewritten into precise English by Kimi noticeably raises the rate of usable results. Spending 1 credit to avoid two failed generations at 6, the arithmetic settles itself. Same logic for the assistant: a 1-credit question that saves you from a badly built workflow is the best investment on the platform.

Third lever, the history of the last 12 generations kept on every node. Before relaunching, look at what you already have. It happens that an attempt discarded yesterday is exactly what the client is asking for today. A generation you don't relaunch is still the best price on the market: zero credits.

validate as an image before paying video rates

The most profitable lever of all deserves its own section. Before any video, generate the start image and validate it completely: framing, light, character, setting. An image gets corrected for 1 to 7 credits; a video that fails for the same mistake costs 26 to 100. The ratio is one to fifteen.

A costed example. You want a 10-second shot of a character walking in the rain. The spendthrift version: three 10-second Seedance 2.0 Fast videos launched on instinct, two of them failures, about 290 credits. The methodical version: five test images at 5 credits with Seedream 5 Lite, then a single video on the validated image, about 122 credits. Half the price, better result.

31 cents per poster: comparing with the world before

Let's put these amounts in context. A single licensed photo from a classic stock library commonly bills between €10 and €50 depending on the rights. A half-day product shoot with a photographer, a studio, and retouching quickly passes several hundred euros. On the other side: 31 cents per poster, €3 for 5 seconds of 4K video.

The comparison has its limits, let's admit that. A photographer brings art direction, an eye, and a contractual responsibility that no model replaces, and some subjects genuinely demand the real thing. But for everyday visuals, posts, mockups, concept iterations, internal materials, the cost gap is not 20%: it's a factor of one hundred. These are two budgets that do not live in the same world.

which plan for which profile, and what comes next

A simple benchmark by monthly usage. You mostly produce images, a few dozen a week: Starter at €13 covers you comfortably. You publish short video every week: Creator at €42, because three or four 10-second shots per week already consume 1,200 to 1,600 credits a month. You're a small team or an agency: Studio, without hesitation.

When in doubt, start small. Take Starter with SIMPLE15, so €11.05 before tax, track your actual consumption on your profile for a month, then adjust: changing plans and cancelling both happen from the dashboard. The worst strategy is oversizing out of caution, paying every month for credits that just sleep.

The logical next step: learning to lower your waste rate, because every failed generation you avoid is worth more than any discount. Our article "writing a prompt that works" is devoted to it. And if you often create away from your desk, "creating AI images and videos on your phone" shows how to iterate at 1 credit from a train platform.