Descript vs Opus Clip: pricing, credits and cost per source hour

Nearly every AI video tool bills for output. You pay per finished video, per second of render, or per generation, and the number you budget against is the number you receive. Descript and Opus Clip both do the opposite. They charge for the footage you feed in.

Opus Clip states the rule in a single line: one credit per minute of the original video imported, with videos under a minute rounding up to a full credit and partial minutes rounding down. Descript's media minutes are consumed when you upload a file or record in the app, and still images count as one second each. In both cases a 90 minute interview costs the same whether you publish a two minute cut or nothing at all.

That shared choice is what makes this comparison possible. Cost per hour of source video is a unit both vendors can be measured in, and neither of them prints it.

Descript, dividing the published price by the published allowance: Hobbyist is $1.60 an hour billed annually and $2.40 monthly, Creator is 80 cents annually and $1.17 monthly, Business is $1.25 annually and $1.63 monthly.

Opus Clip, on the same arithmetic: Starter is $6.00 an hour ($15 for 150 credits, which is two and a half hours), Pro monthly is $5.80, and Pro billed annually is $2.90 ($174 for 3,600 credits, which is 60 hours).

Every Descript tier is cheaper per source hour than every Opus Clip tier. The gap at the sensible end is 3.6x: 80 cents against $2.90. Even Descript's worst rate, the entry plan on monthly billing at $2.40, still undercuts Opus Clip's best rate. If cost per hour of footage processed were the whole story, this comparison would be over in a paragraph. It is not.

An Opus Clip credit is all-inclusive. That one minute of import pays for the AI clipping, the virality score, the auto reframe that tracks a moving speaker, the animated captions and the filler and silence removal. Nothing else is metered. When you know how many source minutes you will process, you know your bill.

A Descript media minute pays for import and transcription. Everything the AI does afterwards spends a second currency. Underlord, Studio Sound, Remove Filler Words, Green Screen, Eye Contact, AI speech, avatars and generated video all draw on AI credits, and Descript publishes rules rather than a full rate card. It tells you that manual effects scale with the length of media and the model you select, that Studio Sound and Remove Filler Words cap at 30 credits per application, and that Underlord is non-deterministic, charging for both the agent working out what to do and the tool doing it. Even chatting with Underlord without generating anything costs a few credits per message.

So Descript's per-hour rate is real but partial, and the missing half is the half you cannot forecast. We are not going to invent a cost per clip for Descript, because Descript has not published the numbers it would take. That absence is itself the finding: one of these two tools lets you budget precisely before you subscribe, and it is the more expensive one.

Opus Clip Starter is strictly dominated by its own Pro plan. Starter is $15 a month and its card notes that it is available in monthly billing only, so a year costs $180 for 1,800 credits. Annual Pro is $174 for 3,600 credits released immediately, plus a two-seat workspace, the editor, AI B-Roll, extra aspect ratios, the scheduler and dubbing. It is $6 cheaper for double the processing and there is no dimension on which Starter wins except the right to cancel next month.

Descript Hobbyist is not dominated but it is poor value. It is $16 a month annually for 10 media hours against Creator at $24 for 30, so paying 50 percent more triples your allowance and halves your cost per hour. Hobbyist also carries a restriction the card does not mention: top-ups are available on Creator and Business only, so a Hobbyist user who runs out on the 20th cannot buy their way out and must upgrade.

The pattern is the same on both products even though the mechanism differs. Each vendor's cheapest paid plan is the one excluded from something, Starter from annual billing and Hobbyist from overage. Check what your entry tier cannot do before you buy it.

This is a genuine coincidence worth knowing. Opus Clip Free gives 60 credits a month, which is 60 minutes of source video. Descript Free gives 60 media minutes a month. Both free plans process exactly one hour of footage a month and both watermark the output.

They expire differently, and both expiries are easy to miss. Opus Clip states that after three days the clips will no longer be exportable, so the free plan is a 72 hour window rather than a working tier, and it offers no editing at all. Descript's limit is subtler: its 100 AI credits are a one-time grant, not a monthly allowance. Spend them on a few Studio Sound passes and some Underlord chat and the AI half of the product is finished permanently unless you upgrade, even though your media minutes keep refilling every month.

Both are fair offers for judging whether the tool suits you. Neither is a plan you can build on, and both companies would say the same.

Neither vendor makes running over cheap. Descript sells top-ups at $25 for 5 media hours, $80 for 20 and $150 for 50, so the cheapest overage hour is $3.00 against 80 cents inside an annual Creator plan, and the smallest bundle is $5.00 an hour. Even the best top-up rate is roughly four times the in-plan rate. Top-ups expire 12 months after purchase, are shared across the drive, and are final and non-refundable. Opus Clip does not sell credits on their own at all: its documentation says you cannot buy only extra credits or seats, you have to add a pack, which adds 300 credits a month with a multiplier running from 1 to 15 packs.

Seats flip the absolute cost. Descript is priced per person, so a three-person Creator team is $72 a month billed annually, not $24. Opus Clip Pro includes a two-seat workspace inside its $174 a year. For a duo processing a moderate amount of footage, Opus Clip is dramatically cheaper in absolute dollars despite losing on cost per hour, and that reversal is the single most common reason to pick it.

One more that matters to anyone automating: Descript's API and MCP draw on the same media minutes and AI credits at ordinary app rates on any plan, while Opus Clip's full API sits in the Business column, with Pro promising only limited API access without defining the limit.

Buy Opus Clip if your job is turning long recordings into short vertical clips and you want the price knowable in advance. It is the strongest tool in that specific category, the virality score is a real feature rather than a gimmick, the reframing tracks a moving speaker properly, and annual Pro at 4.83 cents a source minute is cheaper than any editor you could hire. Take the annual plan and skip Starter entirely.

Buy Descript if you need to actually edit. Text-based editing is a genuinely different way to work and it is faster than a timeline for anyone who thinks in sentences. Add multitrack audio, transcription in 25 languages, caption translation into 61 languages and dubbing into 30, custom avatars from an image upload on Business, Rooms for remote recording that bills the session rather than each participant, and an API that costs the same as the app. Descript is a production tool. Opus Clip is a distribution tool.

The honest summary is that they are not really substitutes, and the reason so many people compare them is that both promise short vertical video out of long horizontal video. Only one of them treats that as the entire product.

Both tools are subtractive. They rearrange, trim, translate and reframe footage that already exists, and neither can produce a shot that was never filmed. If your source video has no strong hook in the first two seconds, no clip cut from it will either. If nobody demonstrated the product on camera, no edit contains a demonstration.

That is the wall a lot of ecommerce teams hit after buying one of these. Paid social does not reward archive footage, it rewards a fresh angle tested against another fresh angle, and a brand that needs five new creative concepts this week cannot extract them from last quarter's webinar. The bottleneck was the filming, not the editing, and neither of these tools touches the filming.

AdsGen works from the other end. Paste a product URL and it reads the page, picks the angle, writes the spoken hook, casts an AI creator who reads as a real person filming on a phone, and returns native 9:16 video with captions burned in. Several distinct ads come back per run, so you are testing concepts rather than recutting one recording. Plenty of teams sensibly run both: a clipper or an editor for the footage they own, and a generator for the ads they need to exist.