Opus Clip Pricing 2026: $15 Starter vs $29 Pro Plans

Opus Clip pricing in 2026 is four tiers: Free at $0 for 60 credits a month, Starter at $15 a month for 150 credits, Pro at $29 a month or $14.50 a month billed annually ($174 a year) for 3,600 credits, and Business at custom pricing. One credit equals one minute of the original video you import, not one finished clip. We read the pricing page and the credit documentation live on August 31, 2026.

Opus Clip is the best known AI clipping tool: you hand it a long video, it finds the moments worth cutting, scores them for virality, reframes them vertically and burns in animated captions. The pricing looks simple on the card. It is not, and the reason is the unit. Opus does not charge you for the clips it gives back. It charges you for the footage you feed in, and that single decision changes what every plan is actually worth.

Opus Clip pricing plans at a glance

Those cost-per-minute figures are ours, computed from the published price and the published allowance. Opus does not print them.

The $15 Starter plan costs more per year than the $29 Pro plan

This is the finding that should decide your purchase, and it falls straight out of the arithmetic on Opus Clip's own page.

Starter is $15 a month and its card carries a line most people skim past: "Starter plan only available in monthly." There is no annual Starter. So a year of Starter is 12 payments of $15, which is $180 for 1,800 minutes of video processing.

Pro billed annually is $174 for 3,600 minutes, and the card says those credits are "available instantly" rather than dripping out monthly.

Pro annual is therefore $6 cheaper over a year than Starter and gives you exactly twice the processing. It also adds a two-seat team workspace, a second brand template, six social connections, AI B-Roll, export to Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, 1:1 and 16:9 output alongside 9:16, the social scheduler, custom fonts, speech enhancement and video dubbing. There is no dimension on which Starter wins. If you are confident enough to pay for a year, Starter is not the cheap option, it is a strictly worse one.

The catch is commitment. Starter's appeal is that you can cancel after one $15 month, and Pro annual asks for $174 up front. That is a real difference in risk, not in value. Judge it that way rather than by the sticker price.

The "save up to 50%" banner does not apply to the entry plan

Above all four cards, Opus Clip prints "Save up to 50% with annual billing." On Pro that claim is exactly true and unusually honest: $29 monthly against $14.50 a month annually is precisely 50% off. On Business it is unknowable, because Business is quoted.

On Starter it is unreachable, because Starter has no annual option at all. The discount is advertised above a plan that cannot receive it.

We have now seen this same shape at three unrelated vendors in this category. Higgsfield's annual toggle produces "No difference compared to monthly" on its entry tier while a discount banner sits above every card. MakeUGC ties its 50% off badge to annual billing and prints "lowest cost per credit" under tiers that are not. Opus Clip advertises a 50% annual saving over a plan sold monthly only. Treat a discount banner above a plan grid as a claim about the most expensive plan on it, and check the entry tier separately, every time.

How are Opus Clip credits consumed?

One credit is one minute of the original video you import. Opus Clip's documentation states the rule directly: "1 credit per minute of the original video imported." Videos shorter than a minute round up to a full credit, and partial minutes on longer videos round down to the nearest whole minute. Publishing a clip to X costs an extra credit per clip, refunded automatically if the post fails or is deleted.

Read that twice, because it is the opposite of how most AI video tools bill. Nearly every ad generator in this category meters output: you pay per finished video, per second of render, or per generation. Opus meters input. The consequence is that your cost is set by your source library, not by how much usable creative you get out.

A 45 minute podcast episode costs 45 credits whether Opus returns three clips you post or twenty. On Starter's 150 credits a month that is three episodes. On Pro annual's 3,600 credits a year it is 80 episodes, roughly six and a half a month. If your raw footage is long and your clip yield is low, the effective cost per usable clip climbs fast and nothing on the pricing page warns you about it.

The rounding is asymmetric and worth knowing if you work in short pieces. A 40 second video costs a full credit. A 10 minute 59 second video costs 10. Feeding Opus lots of very short files is the least efficient way to spend a plan.

Is Opus Clip free?

There is a genuine Free Forever tier at $0 with 60 credits a month, which is 60 minutes of imported footage. It renders up to 1080p, does auto reframe, and adds AI captions with emoji and keyword highlighting. It is a real product, not a countdown trial.

Three limits define it. Every clip carries a watermark. There is no editing at all, so you take what the model produces. And the exports expire: Opus states that "after 3 days, the clips will no longer be exportable," with media storage listed as expiring after 3 days. That last clause is the one that catches people. The free plan is not a place to build a library, it is a place to evaluate output quality inside a 72 hour window.

Does Opus Clip cost money for commercial use?

Removing the watermark is what you are really buying at $15. Watermark-free export is listed as unavailable on Free and available from Starter upward, so any clip you intend to run as paid creative or publish under a brand account needs a paid plan. Opus does not gate commercial use behind a separate license tier the way some vendors do.

Opus Clip API pricing

The API is not on the self-serve plans in any meaningful sense. Pro's feature list says "Limited API Access" without defining the limit. The full comparison table puts the Video Editing API, the Scheduler API, the MCP connector, CMS integration and Zapier integration all in the Business column only, marked unavailable everywhere else.

So if you are building automation on top of Opus, the answer to what it costs is a sales call. This is the standard shape across the category and it is worth budgeting for: API access is a separate commercial conversation at most of these vendors, not a checkbox on the plan you already pay for. Opus has leaned into it further than most by shipping an MCP connector, which puts clipping inside the same agent tooling as the rest of an automated workflow stack, but that surface sits behind the Business tier too.

Is Opus Clip worth it?

It is worth it if you already own long footage. Podcasters, webinar hosts, livestreamers and anyone with a YouTube back catalog get the clearest return here, because the raw material is a sunk cost and Opus turns it into vertical clips faster and cheaper than an editor would. At 4.83 cents per source minute on Pro annual, a weekly hour-long show costs about $2.50 a month to process. That is not a close call against freelance editing.

It is a poor fit if you have no footage. This is the honest limit of the whole clipping category and it is why "Opus Clip alternative" is such a common search. Opus Clip cannot create a shot that does not exist. If you are a direct-to-consumer brand that needs fresh creator-style ads every week, there is nothing to clip: you would first have to film or commission the source video, and the tool that clips it is the cheapest part of that chain.

That is the split to be clear-eyed about before you subscribe. If your problem is that you have too much footage and no time, Opus Clip is excellent and priced fairly. If your problem is that you have no footage at all, a clipper is the wrong purchase, and an Opus Clip alternative that generates the video from scratch is the category you actually want.

How Opus Clip pricing compares to AI ad generators

Comparing entry prices across that table is misleading and we would rather say so than let the number stand on its own. Opus Clip looks like the cheapest serious option and it is, for its job. It is also the only one that will not produce anything unless you supply video first. The tools further down the table cost more per month because the price includes making the footage, which is the expensive part.

The useful question is not which entry price is lowest. It is whether you are paying to compress footage you already have or to create footage you do not. Those are different purchases, and a team that buys the wrong one usually discovers it a month in.

Opus Clip pricing FAQ

How much is Opus Clip per month? Opus Clip costs $0 for the Free plan, $15 a month for Starter, and $29 a month for Pro billed monthly or $14.50 a month billed annually at $174 a year. Business pricing is custom and quoted on request. Prices read live from opus.pro on August 31, 2026.

Does Opus Clip have a free trial? The paid plans advertise "Start your free trial" with "No credit card required" on both Starter and Pro. There is also a permanent Free Forever tier at 60 credits a month, watermarked, with exports that expire after three days.

Do Opus Clip credits roll over? Opus Clip does not publish a rollover or expiry policy in its plans and credits documentation. Pro annual is described as 3,600 credits for the year "available instantly" rather than 300 a month, which implies a yearly pool rather than a monthly reset, but the vendor does not state what happens to an unused balance. We are not going to guess at a number Opus has not published. Ask support before you buy if a large unused balance matters to you.

Can I buy extra Opus Clip credits? Not on their own. Opus Clip's documentation says "you can't only buy extra credits or just extra seats for your team. You will need to purchase an additional pack," and a pack adds 300 credits a month. The Pro card carries a multiplier that runs from 1 pack up to 15 packs, with "Contact us for more credits" past that.

What is the cheapest way to use Opus Clip seriously? Pro billed annually at $174. It costs $6 less per year than paying $15 a month for Starter and includes twice the credits plus the editor, team seats, extra aspect ratios and B-Roll. The only reason to choose Starter is if you want the option to cancel next month.

Where this leaves you

Opus Clip is priced honestly for what it does, with one real asterisk: the entry plan is worse value than the tier above it, and the discount banner points at a saving the entry plan cannot take. Work in cost per source minute rather than cost per month and the ladder becomes obvious, with Pro annual at 4.83 cents beating everything else on the page by a factor of two.

The bigger decision sits above the pricing table. Clipping and generating are different purchases. If you need a steady stream of creator-style ads and you do not have hours of footage waiting, no clipping plan at any price solves that. AdsGen takes a product URL and returns finished vertical UGC ads with the angle, hook, creator and captions handled, which is the other half of this market. Paste a link above and see what comes back before you commit to either approach.