"How much does an AI ad cost?" usually gets a vague answer: a few dollars, depending on the model. We wanted the real number, so we logged every provider call for one finished ad, from the first line of the script to the last frame of the edit.
The ad: a 42-second vertical video for a small wearable gadget, made by one of our AI influencers. She tells a short story to her phone camera in a laundromat (she's shrunk two jumpers, so this time she asks the gadget on her collar how to wash wool), with b-roll of her at the machine and a close-up of the product answering. It's the talking, creator-style format that real product ads on TikTok use, which we wrote about in what top creator gadget ads have in common.
Every call logged, from the script to the final cut.
The total: about $6.12
All figures come from our own cost ledger, which records each call at the provider's list price. The planning steps cost very little; the video is nearly everything.
Step
What it is
Cost
Script and shot plan
One call to a strong language model writes the whole production, plus the team's smaller planning calls
We made the same 10 to 15 second AI influencer reel on four video models and tracked every cent. Here is what each one cost, what it got right, and the one setting that made a reel cost ten times more.
Three setups drawn as photos (the talking setup, the machine, the product close-up)
$0.11
Planning subtotal
$0.41
Her voice
Five spoken lines, 383 characters, in a voice cloned from her voice sample
$0.10
The product's reply
One short line in a second voice, 72 characters
$0.01
Lip-synced talking shots
Two shots of her talking to the camera, 30 seconds in all
$3.47
B-roll
Two shots filmed from the stills, 13 seconds rendered
$2.04
Background sound
The laundromat's hum and drum, 33 seconds
$0.10
Video subtotal
$5.71
Total
42-second finished ad
about $6.12
Where the money goes
Lip-sync is 57% of the bill. A talking shot is priced by the second, and in this ad she talked for 30 seconds. It's also the part that makes the ad work: our research found that almost every high-performing creator ad has someone talking. So the question isn't whether to pay for it, but how to spend it well:
Keep talking shots short. One or two sentences, around 8 seconds, then cut away. That's better pacing anyway; our first version had two long talking stretches that felt slow.
Put the rest of the words over b-roll. A line said over a shot of her hands or the product costs the price of a voice line (about two cents), not the price of lip-sync.
B-roll is the other third. Video models bill by the second rendered, with a minimum per clip (3 seconds for the one we used), so many very short clips get expensive. A 1.5-second cutaway still pays for 3.
Voice and sound are almost free. Five lines of cloned voice cost ten cents; the whole sound bed cost ten cents. If an AI ad sounds thin, the budget is not the reason; see why AI video ads sound fake for the fixes.
Planning is cheap even with a top model. The single call that wrote the whole script and shot plan used the most capable model we have and still cost under a third of a dollar. Spending a little more on thinking and much less on re-rendering is the best trade in the whole pipeline.
What a redo costs
Generation fails in small ways: a clip where the face drifts, a model inventing a line nobody wrote, a hand that goes wrong. So the price of a fix matters as much as the price of the first render.
Redrawing one still: a few cents.
Re-rendering one b-roll shot: about $0.50 to $1.
Re-rendering one talking shot: about $1.50 to $2.
Re-rendering the whole video: the full $5.71 again.
This is why we make each shot as its own clip and check every clip before editing. A problem caught in one shot costs one shot, and a problem caught in a still costs cents.
Fix one shot, not the whole film.
The same ad, made another way
To check our numbers, we made the same ad brief with OpenMontage, an open-source "agentic" video production system that runs inside an AI coding assistant. We gave it the same inputs: the request, the character's reference images, the product photo and the product research. It could use the same video provider account, but it had no lip-sync tool available, so it made a voiceover version: her narration and the product's reply over five generated shots of her in the city, with music.
Cost: about $5.10 at the provider, by the change in the account balance (its own tracker estimated $5.39). That's in the same range as ours, for a 23-second video instead of 42.
Time: about 39 minutes, against about 20 for ours.
What it did better: the look. A consistent warm grade, beautiful light and a varied shot list (a hand clipping the product on, a walking shot, a point-of-view shot into her bag, a wide closer). It also reviewed its own first render, rejected it for being too dark and cutting the last shot short, and rebuilt the composition.
What ours did better: the format. A person talking about a real problem sells better than narration over beautiful shots, and ours had other people in the background where its streets were empty.
The cost lesson from both: a finished 25-to-45-second AI ad costs around $5 to $6 to generate either way. The expensive part isn't the generation; it's making something worth watching.
Your own costs will differ
Length: most of the cost scales with seconds of video. A 25-second version of the same ad would cost roughly half.
Talking vs voiceover: a voiceover-only ad skips lip-sync and is the cheapest format, at the price of being less personal.
Models: prices differ widely between video models and change often. Our AI video cost calculator lets you plug in the models and lengths you plan to use.
Resolution: some video models charge the same for 720p and 1080p, others charge more for the higher one. On a phone screen 1080p is worth having for close-ups of the product, where small details like a logo have to stay sharp.
Retries: budget for at least one redone shot per ad.
How Influgen prices it
Influgen charges credits that cover what each generation costs at the provider, with a margin, so an ad like this one costs a predictable number of credits, shown before you approve the video. The stills come first, for a few cents' worth of credits, and the video is only made after you approve them. See the pricing for what's included in each plan, or create your influencer for free now; their team starts when your spot opens.
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