AI Video directory for creators and small businesses

Category note: the Sora shutdown is on 24 September 2026

OpenAI's deprecations page schedules the Videos API and the sora-2 model aliases for removal on September 24, 2026, with no replacement model named, and the Sora consumer app closed in April 2026. Re-verified 21 September 2026: the date has not moved, and three days out none of OpenAI's four model, guide and reference pages carries an end-of-life notice at all — only the deprecations page says anything. Priced against what replaces it, leaving is free: Sora lists at $0.10 a second at 720p and up to $0.70 at 1080p, so matched resolution for resolution every exit is cheaper or the same — Veo 3.1 Fast ties it at $0.10 and Veo 3.1 Lite halves it. Two practical notes for anyone still calling it: OpenAI does not document what a request returns after the date, and its own guide says download URLs last one hour after generation, so there is no archive on OpenAI's side to rescue. See the Sora profile for the full rate card and the migration shortlist for the destinations.

Category note: if you need 4K, check the rate card twice

Corrected 2026-09-17. This note previously said Kling is the cheap route to 4K, comparing it against Veo 3.1 Standard at $0.60 a second — the dearest second Google sells, but not Google's only 4K rate. Veo 3.1 Fast does 4K at $0.30, exactly half, on the same page. Kling's 4K rate of 30 credits a second is $0.4545 at its own published top-up rate of $1 to 66 credits, and roughly $0.21 to $0.37 at reported plan prices — so Kling comes in under Google at 4K only on its top plan, reported at around $180 a month. The documentation gap is the part that held up: Kling's VIDEO 3.0 model user guide prices 720p and 1080p only, its 4K rate sits on a separate credit cost guide, and no official page says which plans may use it. Full side-by-side working is in Veo vs Kling. Price says nothing about how the output looks.

Category note: avatar video is no longer only the avatar specialists

Checked in September 2026, Descript, VEED and Pictory all generate a presenter avatar from a script, not just HeyGen and Synthesia — so if you already pay for an editor here, check its built-in avatars before buying a second subscription. The constraint that actually decides the purchase is usually length rather than price: HeyGen's most realistic model caps at three minutes per video on every plan. Full breakdown in best AI avatar video tools.

Category note: the lane sets the price, not the vendor

Converted into one unit — dollars per finished minute at each vendor's best annual rate — the three jobs in this directory do not overlap on price. Editing footage you filmed runs about $0.07 a minute on Descript, an avatar reading a script runs $0.16 to $1.92 on HeyGen and Synthesia, and video generated from a prompt starts at $3.00 and reaches $90.00 across the full field. Every avatar minute here costs less than the cheapest generated one, which is why prompt-to-clip models are priced per second rather than per minute — they are a B-roll budget. Full arithmetic in best AI video tools.

Category note: in generated video, the rate card is the easy part

Every published per-second rate in this lane — Veo 3.1, Kling, Sora, Runway and Seedance — is now costed side by side in what AI video generation costs per second, read first-party on 23 September 2026. The field runs $0.05 to $1.50 a second, or $3.00 to $90.00 a finished minute, and three products tie at that $0.05 floor. The reason that page is longer than one table is that the rate is rarely what decides the bill. Nobody sells you a minute: Veo documents durations of 4, 6 and 8 seconds, Kling 3 to 15, so a finished minute is between four and eight separate generations with joins nobody guarantees. Resolution and duration are coupled: Google states the duration must be 8 seconds when using 1080p or 4K, so asking for the higher resolution doubles the shortest clip you are allowed to buy — forty test takes of a 4-second cutaway on Veo 3.1 Standard cost $64.00 at 720p and $128.00 at 1080p, exactly double, with no change in the per-second price. And audio is priced three incompatible ways: included free by Google and OpenAI, surcharged 50% by Kling, and discounted 50% by Runway, which sells a silent Veo 3.1 second for $0.20 that Google does not list at any price.

FAQ

Are these hands-on reviews?

No. These entries are public-data reviews unless specifically labeled as tested. Every price, credit rate and limit on this page is transcribed from the vendor's own published pages, with the date it was checked; CartSignal generates no video and runs no quality benchmarks, so nothing here ranks how the output looks.

What is the first CartSignal vertical?

AI voice and AI video tools for creators and small businesses. The video side is this page; the voice side is AI voice tools.

Publishing AI video in the EU

Since 2 August 2026, EU AI Act Article 50 requires generative output to be marked machine-readably, and requires you to disclose deepfakes you publish. The tool's watermark does not discharge your own disclosure duty. See labeling AI video and voice under the EU AI Act for what each tool here documents about marking its output.

Methodology

CartSignal checks official product/pricing pages when reachable, public category signals, disclosure status, buyer-fit limits, and AI-readable structured data. Pages are labeled public-data review unless CartSignal has actually tested the product.