Free AI clip generators: what "free" actually gets you on each tool

"Free AI clip generator" is one of the most-searched phrases in this category, and every tool answers it with a free tier. They are not the same free tier. Most are measured in source minutes, and the number that keeps appearing is 60: one hour-long episode, then you pay. One is measured in videos. That difference decides whether "free" covers a month of your content or an afternoon of it.

The free tiers side by side, from each vendor's public pricing page as of 2 September 2026. We make one of these tools, so read it knowing that; the figures are the vendors' own and each row links to a full comparison.

The free tiers

Tool	Free allowance	Max source per month	Export	Clips kept for	Watermark
GetClipMachine	3 videos/month, up to 45 min each, clips not metered	up to 135 min	1080p	until you delete them	Yes
Opus Clip	60 processing minutes/month	60 min	1080p	3 days	Yes
Vizard	60 credits/month, 1 credit = 1 min	60 min	720p	3 days	Yes
Descript	60 media minutes/month + 100 AI credits once	60 min	720p	-	-
Spikes Studio	"limited demo", 5-min web editor cap	-	720p	7 days	Yes
Riverside	2 hours multi-track, one-off (a recording trial)	one-off	720p	-	Yes
Klap, Munch	no free tier on their pricing pages	-	-	-	-

What the table is actually saying

Ours is the only free tier measured in videos, not minutes. Three a month, and a video can be anything up to 180 minutes. A podcaster with a weekly 90-minute episode gets three of four episodes clipped free, every month, indefinitely. On a 60-minute allowance the same podcaster is paying from the first episode. The gap is not small: up to 540 source minutes against 60 is nine times the allowance, and none of it is metered per clip.

Clips are not metered. A 60-minute allowance is a cap on what goes in. A 45-minute episode with eight good moments is eight clips here, and none of them costs a credit; on a minute-metered tier it's 45 minutes you no longer have.

1080p, not 720p. Only Opus Clip matches this on free. A 720p vertical export is 720x1280; posted to a platform that re-encodes to 1080x1920, it comes out visibly softer, and the platform's compression makes it worse still. Why that happens. Free clips that are going to be posted rather than tested want 1080p, and on most free tiers that's the first thing you lose.

Your clips stay. Three-day expiry on Opus and Vizard, seven on Spikes, means "clip it and download it today, or it's gone". Ours keeps every clip in your library until you delete it. Come back next month for the one you didn't post yet and it's there.

The watermark is most of the price. Every free clipping tier watermarks, ours included. What differs is what else is taken away. On ours, very little: a free account gets the same face-tracked reframing, the same word-timed captions and the same 1080p as Pro, with a watermark on it. The one other difference is how hard the AI looks: Free runs our standard clip selection, and Pro runs the most thorough one, which finds more moments and cuts them more cleanly. Pro also removes the watermark, adds unlimited videos, and costs €20. There's no card to enter to start, and it isn't a trial that ends.

Free also gets both layouts, including Framed, which puts your own logo, name and @handle above the uncropped video. A Free Framed clip still carries the GetClipMachine logo badge and the getclipmachine.com watermark; Pro removes both.

Where another free tier is the better deal

Honestly, two cases:

• Short videos, lots of them. Thirty two-minute videos a month is 60 minutes of source: exactly Opus Clip's or Vizard's free allowance, and ten times our three-video cap. If your content is short-form to begin with, a minute-metered tier fits it better. Download the same day.
• You re-cut every clip by hand. Descript and Vizard are editors with clipping attached; if the editing surface is the point, that's what their free tiers are for. Mind Vizard's 10-minute export cap.

For everything long (podcasts, streams, webinars, lectures, interviews), three videos free is the widest free tier on this list by a distance, and it's the case a clipping tool exists for.

One video through two tools

The free tiers exist so you can test, so test. Take one real video, run it through two of these, and compare the clips: where they start and end, whether the speaker is in frame, whether the captions spelled the guest's name right. The pricing pages will never disagree with each other as much as the output does. Ours publishes its own measurements on exactly those questions: clip boundaries and framing, so you know what to look for.

When you outgrow free

Opus goes to $15/month for a metered Starter plan, Vizard to $14.50/month on annual billing for 600 credits, ours to €20/month with nothing metered at all: unlimited videos, no credits, no watermark. What each paid tier meters and the arithmetic on credits are the next two things to read before a card goes in anywhere.