What AI Video, Audio & Image Costs in 2026

The median entry price for AI Video, Audio & Image in 2026 is $17 a month. Across all 252 tools we price-check the median is $19.99, so this category runs 1.2x below the software average.

That comes from 10 tools in the category whose monthly price the vendor publishes on its own site. The range runs from Pika at $8 to Luma at $25 — a spread of 3x for products that sit on the same shortlist.

Every published price in the category

How much of this category is free

9 of 10 have a free tier (90%), against 56% across all categories. Free is the norm here, so treat a vendor who will not offer one as telling you something — and never pay before you have run real work through the free plan.

Per seat or flat

1 of 10 charge per seat (10%). Where that is the model, the entry price is not the price: it is the price of one person. Multiply by your real headcount before comparing anything, and check whether viewers are free — on a team with more readers than writers that distinction can halve the bill.

Where to start

The floor is Pika at $8, which also has a free tier. Below $17 the category is Pika at $8, Suno at $8, Runway at $12, OpusClip at $14.50 and Descript at $16. Those are real products, not trials, and for a small team they are usually the right place to start: the expensive tiers in this category buy scale and administration, which are worth paying for once you have the problem and not before.

What the headline price leaves out

An entry price is a plan, not a bill. The caveats we recorded while verifying this category are the ones most likely to change what you actually pay:

• CapCut — Restructured again: the $9.99 Standard tier has gone, so Pro at $19.99 is the entry plan, with Ultra at $79 above it. Prices can still vary by region and device; verify on capcut.com.
• Runway — pricing unchanged; site moved from runwayml.com to runway.com
• Descript — Creator is now $24 annual / $35 monthly; the old $15 Creator rate is gone
• Synthesia — Credit model can run out quickly with no rollover.

The free tiers in this category, for the record: CapCut, Descript, HeyGen, Murf AI, OpusClip, Pika, Runway, Suno, Synthesia. Whether each is usable or decorative varies, and the only reliable test is running a real piece of your own work through it before the card comes out.

For what each of these actually does rather than what it costs, see our AI Video, Audio & Image comparison. Every price here is verified from the vendor’s own page on a recorded date and kept in our public pricing dataset.