Photos are the cheap part
In our pricing a 1K image is 10 tokens, and a token is one cent — ten cents a photo. The underlying provider invoice is about $0.034 per image, so the retail number carries the platform's margin and is still small enough to ignore for planning purposes. Ten photos a week is roughly $4 a month. Whatever is straining your budget, it is not the photos, and this matters practically: it means you should generate far more than you post. A session that produces twelve images and keeps four is a normal session, not a wasteful one, and it costs 120 tokens.
Video is where the money goes
Video is billed per second, at 20 tokens per second for Seedance 2.0 — so a ten-second clip is 200 tokens, about $2, or the price of twenty photos. The provider cost behind that is $0.092 per second at 480p. Seedance 2.5 costs the platform $0.138 per second, 50% more, and is priced at 30 tokens per second to match. That single ratio should shape your whole posting plan: photos are something you experiment with, clips are something you plan.
The billing detail that surprises people
Reference-driven video is billed on input plus output — the duration you generate plus the duration of the reference clip you fed in. An 8-second clip generated from an 8-second reference is 16 billed seconds, not 8. A reference shorter than the clip is billed as long as the clip. The failure mode this creates is expensive and easy to hit: pointing a 5-second generation at a 60-second reel bills 65 seconds. Trim the reference to the part you actually want the motion from before you generate. Any tool that does not show you this in the estimate is hiding half your bill.
Voice and editing should cost nothing
Local editing — trimming, subtitles, audio mixing, filters — has no marginal cost, because it runs on hardware someone already paid for. The same is true of a locally-run voice model. Hosted premium voice does cost something real: we price it at 1 token per 20 characters with a 5-token minimum, so a 1,000-character script is 50 tokens, about the price of five photos. That is worth knowing but not worth optimising. Any platform charging you separately per edit or per export is charging for a step that costs it nothing.
What a month actually looks like
Work backwards from output rather than from a budget. A daily photo post is 30 photos, or 300 tokens. Add two 10-second clips a week and you add roughly 1,700 tokens once reference seconds are counted. That is a little over 2,000 tokens a month for a genuinely active account — which fits inside our Creator plan at 3,000 tokens for $29. Photos only, at a post a day, fits inside the 1,000-token Starter plan at $9 with room to experiment. An operation running four characters at that cadence needs something closer to the 15,000-token Studio plan at $149, and an agency running many characters, the 45,000-token plan at $399. The step that jumps is always video, never anything else.
The cost nobody budgets for: regeneration
The largest avoidable expense is not any single generation, it is doing the same work twice. A character whose face was never properly anchored produces photos that are almost right, and almost right is what you regenerate. Fifty regenerated photos is 500 tokens spent producing nothing new. The same applies to clips at twenty times the price: a 10-second clip regenerated three times because the prompt asked for two camera moves at once costs 600 tokens, and the fix was one sentence. Spending an hour on a proper anchor set is the highest-return hour in the whole workflow — see our guide on keeping an AI influencer's face consistent for how to build one.
Failures you should not be paying for
Generations fail. A refused request or a broken render should be refunded automatically, and on our platform it is — but check this wherever you are working, because at 200 tokens a clip a provider that charges for its own failures is expensive. One specific trap is worth naming: on reference-to-video, the words edit, remove, replace and extend cause the request to be interpreted as an editing task and rejected — while still being billed. “Change the style to comic” is fine; “replace the background” is a paid rejection. Describe the scene you want rather than the change you want made.
How to know a price before you commit
The rule we hold ourselves to is that no cost is ever a surprise: the estimate is shown before the run, broken down per setting, so removing a video reference visibly drops the total. Ask this of any tool you use. A platform that shows a monthly credit balance but not a per-run cost is a platform where you discover the price of a habit at the end of the month, and the habits that turn out to be expensive — long references, high resolutions, repeated regenerations — are exactly the ones you would have changed on day two if you had seen the number.