How much does AI video clipping actually cost to run? Our numbers, per video

Most tools in this category sell minutes or credits, and the implication is that processing video is expensive enough to need metering. We measure what each job costs us, per video, on production infrastructure. Here are the numbers, because they explain the pricing across the whole market better than any pricing page does.

All figures are what it costs us to run a job, in euros, measured in late August 2026. They are not what we charge.

What an upload costs

An uploaded file goes through four stages, and three of them are cheap:

Stage	What it runs on	Cost driver
Transcription	our own machine (whisper.cpp)	compute time, no per-minute fee
Moment detection	a language model, via API	a few cents per 15-minute window
Reframing + render	our own machine (ffmpeg, face detection)	compute time per clip
Storage + delivery	object storage	negligible

Measured on the machine class we run (4 vCPU, priced per second):

Job	Our cost
10-minute upload, 4 clips	€0.04
60-minute upload, 8 clips	€0.08

That's the whole thing. A one-hour podcast, transcribed, judged, framed, captioned and rendered into eight clips, for less than the price of the API call that picked the moments. A Pro customer doing 100 uploads a month costs us about €5 against a €15 subscription.

The reason this is so low is the transcription line. Transcription through a paid API is typically priced per audio minute, and it's the single largest cost in most clipping pipelines. Running it locally trades a per-minute fee for compute time we're already paying for. The render is the other big line, and it scales with the number of clips, not the length of the source, because only the clipped seconds get encoded.

What a pasted link costs, and why it's different

Paste a YouTube URL instead of uploading, and one new cost appears that dwarfs everything above.

YouTube serves cloud servers a 360p stream and refuses the HD ones (the reasons are written up here). Getting 1080p from a link means fetching it through a residential network, and residential bandwidth is metered at roughly $1 per gigabyte. A 48-minute 1080p video is close to a gigabyte.

The first version of our importer pulled the whole HD file:

Job	Our cost
10-minute link import (270MB HD)	€0.29
48-minute link import (900MB HD)	€0.90

Six to eighteen times the cost of the same video uploaded, all of it bandwidth. At that rate a Pro customer doing 50 link imports a month costs €14.50 against €15: break-even, before anything else.

So we changed what gets fetched. The free 360p stream is used for transcription and moment-finding (it's fine for that; the words are the same). Then only the seconds we're actually going to clip are fetched in HD, at render time. A 48-minute source becomes maybe four minutes of clips, and four minutes of 1080p is about 40MB, not 900.

Job	Whole-file fetch	Clip-window fetch
10-minute import	€0.29	~€0.05
48-minute import	€0.90	~€0.05
3-hour podcast	~€3.40	~€0.05

The cost stopped scaling with source length, because the number of clip minutes barely changes when the source gets longer. That single change is what makes unmetered link imports possible.

What this means for pricing

Three things follow, and they're worth knowing whichever tool you use.

Minute metering isn't about cost. At under ten cents for an hour of video, there's no economic reason to charge per minute. Metering is a pricing decision (it segments customers by volume), not an engineering necessity. That's fine, but it should be understood as such when you're doing the arithmetic on credits.

Link imports are where the real cost lives. If a tool's free tier allows link imports at HD without limit, it is either fetching 360p and upscaling, or losing money on you. Worth checking which, by looking at the output.

The expensive part is the judgment, not the plumbing. We moved moment detection to a larger, pricier model this summer, and it's now the biggest single line in the upload cost. It was still the right call: clip selection is the product, and the delta was a few cents per video. Why we did it.

What we don't count here

Fixed costs: the domain, the database, the error monitoring, the people. Failed jobs, which cost the same as successful ones and produce nothing (we measured one in three long videos failing before a fix in late August; those were real euros for zero clips). Customer support. None of that is in the per-video figure, and all of it is why €15 a month rather than €2.

But the marginal number — what one more video costs — is the one that decides whether "unlimited" is a sustainable promise or a marketing one. Ours is under a dime for an upload and about a nickel for a link. Unlimited is fine.