Cost formula
Video cost = video minutes (or frames) × price per minute (or per frame); Multimodal LLM cost = media input tokens / 1M × input price + output tokens / 1M × output price
Calculator
Video / multimodal cost estimator
Plan spend for video understanding (minutes analyzed) and generation-style workloads (seconds generated) with clear disclaimers.
Video multimodal
GPT-4o video understanding (approx) estimate
$3.00total
60 minutes analyzed
GPT-4o video understanding (approx)$3.00
Minutes60
Unit rate (lead)$0.05
Per 100 units$5.00
Models1
Inputs
Minutes analyzed
Duration times modality unit rate for each selected model.
Models (up to 4)
Duration × modality
Stacked cost by model
Each bar is duration × that model's unit price.
Approximate planning rate for video-as-input workloads.
Video rates are rough planning figures and vary by resolution, provider, and plan. Updated 2026-07-31. Approximate static list prices for planning only. Always verify against each provider’s official pricing page before production budgeting.
Guide
How to get value from this calculator
Plan rough spend for video understanding and multimodal API workloads billed by duration, frame count, or tokenized media units. Video and multimodal pricing is newer and varies more across providers than text APIs. Use this for early budgeting, not final procurement quotes.
Why it matters
Video workloads consume orders of magnitude more compute than text, and pricing models differ by provider. Shipping a video feature without a unit-cost model risks bills that scale faster than user revenue.
How to use it
- Select the multimodal or video model and provider.
- Enter average video length or frame count per request.
- Estimate daily or monthly video processing volume.
- Add expected text output tokens if the model generates descriptions or analysis.
- Review combined media and generation cost per request and monthly total.
- Review the stacked modality cost to see how video, frames, and text each contribute.
- Verify official video and multimodal rates—this category changes frequently.
Planning tips
- Extract key frames instead of sending full video when quality allows—it cuts input cost sharply.
- Pre-process video to shorter clips or lower resolution before API upload where supported.
- Separate one-time catalog indexing from per-user query costs in your architecture.
- Multimodal input may tokenize images and video differently—test with provider token counts.
- If video dominates the stack, extract key frames before cutting generation quality.
- Treat all figures as rough planning estimates until you have production usage data.
Frequently asked questions
Why is video pricing less standardized than text?
Providers use different units (minutes, frames, tokens, pixels). CentsPerToken applies approximate planning figures—always verify officially for video workloads.
Does this cover video generation?
This estimator focuses on video understanding and multimodal input costs. Generated video output may use separate per-second or per-clip pricing not fully captured here.
How should I plan monthly volume?
Estimate uploads or analyses per day, multiply by average duration, then by 30. Add headroom for retries and QA review pipelines.
Are CentsPerToken video estimates binding?
No. All numbers are approximate planning aids. Video pricing evolves quickly—confirm current rates before launch.