Captions app review: Captions AI review, pricing and is it worth it for ad teams

Captions is worth paying for if you film yourself or your team talking to camera and need it cut, captioned and cleaned up every week. That is what 37,895 App Store ratings averaging 4.75 are about, and it is good at it: auto captions, eye contact correction, noise removal and AI Edit save real hours.

For ads, the answer depends on volume. Max at $24.99 is the cheapest way in this category to try avatar ads built from a URL, and a handful of ads a month on it is fair value. The trouble starts when you scale. Every paid tier costs the same 5 cents a credit, so moving from Max to Scale 4x multiplies the bill by 11.2 and the credits by 11.2, and nothing else about the unit price moves. On our estimate a 30-second ad costs about $4.00 on every plan, which makes Captions one of the dearer tools per finished ad that we have priced, next to HeyGen at 62 to 75 cents for a talking ad.

So buy Max if you want an editor that can also make the occasional ad. Do not buy Scale expecting the unit cost to fall.

Divide each price by its credits: $24.99 for 500 is 4.998 cents, $69.99 for 1,400 is 4.999, $139.99 for 2,800 is 4.9996 and $279.99 for 5,600 is 4.9998. The ladder is a straight line. We have now priced more than a dozen vendors in this category and almost all of them give at least a little back for buying more: HeyGen's Pro ladder improves about 14 percent from bottom to top, MakeUGC's Pro slider more than that.

What Scale adds instead is access. The pricing page says Scale unlocks the "most sophisticated tier of generative AI models" and faster generation, and only Scale 4x can buy extra credits once the month runs out. Those are real reasons to buy it. More ads for less money is not one of them.

The practical move is to size the plan to your steady monthly volume and let rollover absorb the lumps. Unused credits roll over up to three times your monthly allowance, so a Max user can bank up to 1,500 credits. Just be aware the rollover disappears on cancellation, and downgrading to a smaller plan forfeits anything above the new cap.

If you read an older Captions review you will see a Pro plan at $9.99. It still exists. Captions renamed it Basic, "formerly Pro" in its own help centre, and took it off the web pricing page between March and August 2026. The iOS App Store still sells it at $9.99 a month, $64.99 a year or $5.99 a week, with 200 credits a month.

Two things about Basic matter to an advertiser. First, it is not an ad plan: if you use AI Creator, AI Edit, the Co-Editor or AI media on Basic, Captions puts a watermark on the export. Second, it is the only tier whose annual price is published anywhere, and $64.99 a year against twelve months at $9.99 is 45.8 percent off. The annual prices for Max and Scale are shown only at checkout, so you cannot check the "discounted rate" claim for the plans you would actually buy until you are halfway through paying.

The pricing page adds one more footnote worth reading: "Features and prices reflect iOS plans only." If you subscribe on Android or on the web, check the price at checkout rather than assuming the page applies. Our full Captions pricing breakdown has the rest of the fine print.

Captions AI Ads starts where we do. You paste a website URL, Captions pulls the title, product name, description and images, and you edit them. It then drafts a script, which you can rewrite, you pick an avatar, and it renders the ad. You can add your own images and GIFs. The default output is 9:16, and 16:9, 1:1 and 4:5 are available, which is more formats than we offer.

The limits are in the help article. The script runs to one minute at most and between 10 and 800 characters. Captions writes one script per run rather than a set of competing angles, so testing five hooks means five runs and five charges. And there is no published credit rate for AI Ads or AI Creator, which means you find out what an ad costs after you make it. Render two ads at the length you will really use, check the credit balance, and budget from that number.

The help article is clear that AI Ads output can be used commercially. The web terms add a duty that applies to every ad you run: you must disclose that AI was used and that the video is an advertisement, including FTC endorsement disclosures. An avatar is not a customer, so never caption one as a testimonial.

The ownership clause is good. Section 2.2 of the terms says that as between you and Captions you own all rights in your input and output, subject to the rights in the Captions content that appears inside it, such as a stock avatar or music.

Three other clauses matter if you make ads for clients. The same section grants Captions a sublicensable licence to your input and output to improve its services and develop new products, and that licence survives termination. Opting out of training is sold as "Training data exclusion" on the Enterprise plan only, so if a client contract bans vendors from training on their footage, a self-serve plan does not meet it. Second, Captions may terminate your licence to your output without notice if you breach its acceptable use policy, which is broader than most. Third, there is no clause that names sublicensing to clients the way Higgsfield's terms do. Handing finished files to a client follows from ownership, but get the training point settled before you upload a client's product footage.

Subscriptions are single-user and cannot be shared, per the help centre, so an agency needs one account per editor or an Enterprise contract.

The terms say, in capitals, that payment is non-refundable except as stated or required by law, and the help centre says monthly plans are non-refundable. If you subscribed through the App Store or Google Play, any refund request goes to Apple or Google, not to Captions.

The clause to put in your calendar is the cancellation deadline. Section 5.2 requires you to cancel at least 24 hours before the current period ends. Cancel on the renewal day and you have bought another month. Deleting the app or your account does not cancel the subscription either, which explains a steady share of "charged after I deleted it" reviews in this category.

There is no pause option, and credits are spent the moment you generate, whether or not you export. On cancellation you keep access to the end of the period, then any rolled-over credits are gone.

Captions holds 4.4 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 449 reviews as of 21 September 2026: 67 percent five-star, 8 percent four, 2 percent three, 2 percent two and 21 percent one-star. That is a barbell, the same shape we found on HeyGen, Higgsfield and Zeely, but with a larger happy side than most.

The two sources measure different customers. The App Store rating, 4.75 from 37,895, comes overwhelmingly from people using the editor, and for that job the product clearly works. The one-star Trustpilot reviews in this category are almost always about commerce rather than craft: renewals, refunds and credits. With a non-refundable policy, a 24-hour cancellation deadline and no pause, Captions has the clauses that produce those reviews, so read them before you commit to Scale rather than after.

If you already film yourself and need it edited, buy Captions. Auto captions, eye contact, denoise, AI Edit and the chat editor are a complete phone editing workflow, and we do not edit footage at all.

If you need square, landscape or 4:5 ads, Captions renders them and we render 9:16 only.

If you need a digital twin of yourself, Max includes up to 30 AI Twins, and we do not clone real people.

If you want to try avatar ads for $24.99 before committing to anything bigger, Max is the cheapest serious way to do it that we know of. Just use the terms above to decide how long you stay.

Where the comparison turns is ad testing at volume. Paid social is a search for the angle that works, and finding it takes a dozen attempts. On a flat 5-cent credit meter with no published AI Ads rate, every losing attempt is a line on the bill. That is the case for a plan counted in finished ads, and plenty of teams run both: Captions to edit the founder video, a batch tool for the hooks. If that is where you are, our Captions AI alternative page compares the two workflows side by side.

You paste a product URL. We read the page for the product, its claims and its images, write UGC-style scripts with several different hooks and angles, and return finished vertical video ads with AI presenters and burned-in captions, ready to upload to TikTok, Meta or Shorts. There is no credit meter and no script to write.

The limits, stated before you sign up. Output is 9:16 only, with captions burned in, so it suits paid social and does not suit a landscape YouTube pre-roll. It works from a product URL, so a thin or image-only product page gives the model less to work with. The presenters are generated, so they are not customers and must never be presented as testimonials. We do not edit your own footage and we do not clone your face, which are exactly the things people buy Captions for.

You can see the output on your own product before paying. The demo above runs the real engine on a URL you paste.