Budget for 500 AI video clips a month: plan fee and slots

At $1.00 per clip, 500 ten-second H3 Max clips at 768p are $500 of usage. The monthly bill is $500 on Pro (4 slots), $480 on Startup (8 slots) and $400 on Scale (20 slots). Scale is 20 percent cheaper than Pro and finishes the batch in 25 waves instead of 125.

The cost math

Pro: $40 fee covers $40 of usage, the other $460 is billed at the published rate, so $40 + $460 = $500. Startup: $120 fee covers $140 of usage, the other $360 is billed on top, so $120 + $360 = $480. Scale: $400 fee covers $800, which is more than $500, so the bill is $400.

Per clip that is $1.00, $0.96 and $0.80. This assumes overage is billed at the published rate, as the pricing docs describes, and treats the clip price as $0.10 per second from the Video Router docs.

The slot math

Concurrency is a dispatch limit. A wave is a set of jobs running together, so the number of waves is ceil(500 / slots). Multiply by the minutes one job takes to estimate the wall clock. I do not publish a typical job time, because none is in the docs; plug in your own measurement.

The queue limit changes how you submit

Accepted job capacity is slots plus queue: 24 on Pro, 48 on Startup, 120 on Scale. You cannot hand 500 jobs to the API at once on any self-serve plan. Submit in waves, track each job id, and keep an idempotency key per clip so a retry never pays twice.

When 500 is the wrong number

If you only need 140 clips a month, Startup's $120 is cheaper than 140 on Pro ($140.00). If you need more than 800, Scale's included usage runs out and extra clips are $1.00 each. Run your real clip count through the same arithmetic before picking.

A mixed workload

Say the 500 clips are 300 at 480p ($0.625 each) and 200 at 1080p ($2.00 each). Usage is 300 x $0.625 + 200 x $2.00 = $187.50 + $400.00 = $587.50. Pro costs $40 + $547.50 = $587.50. Startup costs $120 + $447.50 = $567.50. Scale costs $400, still inside its $800 of included usage.

On Scale you would have $212.50 of included usage left, enough for 106 more 1080p clips (106 x $2.00 = $212.00). Whether unused included usage carries forward is not something I could confirm, so treat it as use-it-or-lose-it when you budget.