How much does it cost to make an AI video What a faceless video really costs.

• Hiring freelancers: $50 to $80 a video on a budget, $80 to $150 standard, $150 to $250 premium (Becomeviral, March 2026).
• AI tools, stills only: “a few cents to roughly a dollar” of generation for most niches (Kineclip, October 2026).
• AI video clips: the biggest line by far. One Veo 3.1 clip at 1080p used 1,680 credits ($1.68) in Wyrlo, a Veo 3.1 Lite clip 420 ($0.42).
• Your time: the part every price leaves out.

Every faceless video is the same handful of parts, however it is made:

• The script. Research and writing. The one part worth paying for even when everything else is cheap.
• The voice. A human narrator, an AI voice, or your own.
• The pictures. Stock footage (free from Pexels, Pixabay or Unsplash), AI images, AI video clips, animated graphics, or your own footage.
• The edit. Cutting the pictures to the voice, captions, music, sound and the render.
• The packaging. Title, thumbnail, description, upload.

Becomeviral's breakdown of freelance rates (March 2026), per video:

• Script: $20 to $50.
• Editing: $15 to $50.
• Voiceover: $10 to $25 for a human, $5 to $15 with AI.
• Thumbnail: $5 to $15.

Together, $50 to $80 a video on a budget, $80 to $150 standard and $150 to $250 premium. At twelve videos a month, a budget channel spends $600 to $960 before it earns anything. What you buy is someone else's time and judgement, and you still have to manage it.

AI tools replace most of that bill with generation costs. Kineclip puts a still-image video at “a few cents to roughly a dollar of underlying generation” for most niches, and notes that true text-to-video “costs noticeably more per second of footage”.

That last point is where estimates go wrong. Most published costs assume a video made of pictures and a voice. The moment a scene is a real AI clip, from Veo, Kling or Sora, that one clip can cost as much as every picture in the video put together. A sensible channel uses clips where movement matters, usually the opening, and pictures, graphics or free footage for the rest.

Six Shorts made in Wyrlo on 25 October 2026, each with a pasted script, an ElevenLabs voice and the same account. These are the credits each used, retakes included; in any Wyrlo pack 1,000 credits cost $1.

• The book no one can read (mysteries, 0:21): 843 credits, 85 cents
• The three tallest buildings on Earth (lists and rankings, 0:17): 845 credits, 85 cents
• A hundred dollars a month (personal finance, 0:15): 859 credits, 86 cents
• Fresh at six (restaurants and cafés, 0:09): 905 credits, 91 cents
• The city under the ash (history, 0:18): 1,028 credits, $1.03
• Every continent fits in one ocean (science and facts, 0:15): 7,589 credits, $7.59

The dearest one, “Every continent fits in one ocean”, is all Veo 3.1 clips at full quality, with two asked again. The others open on one Veo 3.1 Lite clip and use pictures and graphics for the rest. Each page shows its ledger line by line. The prices of the parts, as those ledgers recorded them:

• A Veo 3.1 clip at 1080p: 1,680 credits ($1.68)
• A Veo 3.1 Lite clip at 1080p: 420 credits ($0.42)
• A Nano Banana 2 image: 142 credits ($0.15)
• An animated graphic designed by AI: 60 credits ($0.06)
• Scene prompts for a Short: 40 credits ($0.04)
• Stock footage, editing, captions, music from the free library, the render and publishing: free.

A long video multiplies the scenes, so the mix matters more. With Wyrlo writing the script, at its default scene count and lowest-cost models, a 10-minute video made from stock footage uses 2,247 credits ($2.25), and with an AI image in every scene 3,999 ($4.00).

1. Put AI video where movement is the point, often only the first scene.
2. Use free stock footage for anything real: cities, nature, people working.
3. Draw numbers, dates and places as graphics instead of generating clips of them.
4. Pick the cheaper model for scenes nobody will study, and the best for the one everybody sees.
5. Write the script yourself, or paste one in, when you already know what to say.
6. Change a picture's prompt before asking for it again: retakes are where a bill grows.

Wyrlo AI shows the price of every step before it runs and sells credits in packs bought once, from $9, with no subscription. See pricing or the niche pages, each with its Short's ledger.

1. Becomeviral: YouTube automation costs breakdown, March 2026
2. Kineclip: What it costs to run a faceless AI channel in 2026, updated 24 October 2026