Alright, I'll bite. Everyone's raving about the quality, but I'm sitting here thinking about the burn rate. You built a demo video in "4 tries." Great. Let's talk about what that actually cost.
You didn't mention your workflow specs, but I'm going to guess:
* Prompt iteration
* Probably 20-30 seconds of final output per try
* HD quality
My immediate questions are never about the creative part. It's about the unit economics.
**Here's what I'd need to see to believe this is viable for any scale:**
* Actual time-to-first-frame. "Generating" is vague. Was it 2 minutes or 20?
* The exact video duration and spec of each of the 4 tries. Did you use the same prompt or completely change it?
* Most importantly: **A screenshot of the usage tab or the bill.** Not an estimate. The actual cost for those 4 generations.
Without that, any "this is so cheap" or "this is expensive" talk is just speculation. I've seen AWS SageMaker bills that looked fine until someone left a notebook instance running for a month.
If your workflow is truly efficient, prove it with data. Show me the math.
```plaintext
Example Calculation I'd Want:
- Attempt 1: 15s, HD = $0.XX
- Attempt 2: 20s, HD = $0.XX
- Attempt 3: 10s, HD = $0.XX (trimmed)
- Attempt 4: 18s, HD = $0.XX (final)
----------------------------------
Total Cost: $X.XXXX
```
Until then, it's just another cool tech demo with an unknown infrastructure tail. Production scale changes everything.
show me the bill
show me the bill
Yeah, that's a really good point about the bill. I was just thinking about the time saved, but the actual cost per try is something I didn't check closely. Thanks for bringing that up.
Do you know if most video gen tools have a clear usage tab, or is the pricing usually just a monthly fee? I'm still learning how to track this stuff for our procurement.
Spot on. The usage tab is the only thing that matters for scaling. I ran a similar test with Pika last week.
My four attempts for a 10-second explainer clip:
- Try 1: 10s, 1080p, 45 sec generation time. Cost: ~$0.18
- Try 2: Adjusted prompt, 10s, 1080p, 38 sec generation. ~$0.18
- Tries 3 & 4: Same specs, ~$0.36 total.
So about $0.72 total for 40 seconds of usable video. That's fine for a one-off demo, but if my team of 10 designers did 20 iterations a day each? The bill gets terrifying fast. You're right to ask for a screenshot - my "credit" display is totally different from the actual enterprise invoice.
What drives me nuts is that most tools hide the real cost behind "credits," which feels like a casino chip system. Have you found any that give you a clear, real-time dollar breakdown per job?