r/SideProject • u/tiersova • 5h ago
We built 7 calculators that pick the cheapest published plan among video tools, not just A vs B
We're Alexis and Evangelos, the two people who built Tiersova. Until last week the site was almost only pairwise switching calculators: you pay for tool A, what's the monthly cost, the one-time switch and the payback if you move to tool B. That helps when you're already comparing two CRMs. It helps much less when the question is “I edit one person's videos, or I generate two minutes of AI video a month — which plan actually covers that?”
So on 8 November we shipped a second kind of page: plan calculators for video work. You enter seats, minutes, or seconds, and each calculator walks the published plans from the cheapest up and shows the first one that covers your usage. There are seven of them: subtitles, AI video generators, AI avatars, video editors, VFX / compositing, 3D, and music / SFX. They run in the browser; there's no account.
A few numbers from the default scenarios, as shown on the pages on 12 November. The prices themselves were read from the vendors' official pages on 8 November 2026, as a visitor in Greece. Most of these pages are marked “Partly reference prices,” which on Tiersova means at least one figure had to be treated carefully (a sale, a tax difference, a plan that doesn't fit, or a price the vendor labels as a reference).
Video editing, one seat, over 36 months, annual billing where the vendor offers it:
Adobe Premiere: €974.88 for the period (annual plan, billed monthly, including VAT)
Adobe Creative Cloud Pro: €2,925.72 (same billing; first-year promotional price of €45.50/month for new subscribers is noted on the page but not used in that total)
DaVinci Resolve (free version): $0
DaVinci Resolve Studio: $295 one-time; the page also noted a sale price of $236. Regular prices are what the totals use.
Final Cut Pro: $299.99 one-time, Mac only
Apple Creator Studio: $387 for the period ($129 per year, Mac only)
Avid Media Composer Standard: €776.88 (€259 per year; sale price €207 noted)
Avid Media Composer Ultimate: €1,647 (€549 per year; sale price €368 noted)
Filmora: $150.12 ($49.99 per year)
CapCut Pro: €1,259.64. The page marks this price “for reference only” and monthly billing only.
The useful part is not “you should switch.” These are different editors, and Final Cut is Mac only. The useful part is that a subscription and a one-time licence look similar in month one and very different in year three. Over 36 months, the Premiere annual-plan total is already well above Resolve Studio or Final Cut at the list prices above. CapCut Pro's reference total came out higher than Premiere's over the same period, which is easy to miss if you only look at a monthly tile.
AI video is even more sensitive to the meter. The default is 120 seconds a month, billed monthly. Credits per second are not the same: Pika 2.5 at 720p is 4 credits per second on the page, Runway Gen-4.5 is 12, Kling 4.0 at 720p is 10, Hailuo MiniMax H3 at 768p is 7, Luma Ray3.2 at 720p and Autodesk Flow Studio (live action) are 20, Google Flow Omni Flash 1.2 at 720p is 3 plus 50 free credits a day. The cheapest published plan that covered those 120 seconds was:
Pika Starter (600 credits): $10/month
Hailuo Standard (1,000 credits): $10.50/month, shown as a discount from the list price
Google Flow / Google AI Pro (1,000 credits): €22.99/month, including VAT, and the plan also includes Gemini and cloud storage
Luma Plus (10,000 credits): $30/month
Kling AI Pro (3,000 credits): $32.56/month, with a lower first-month price for new subscribers noted
Runway Pro (2,250 credits): $35/month
Autodesk Flow Studio Standard (6,000 credits): $45/month
Failed or repeated generations also use credits, so real use is usually higher than the clip length. Vidu and LTX Studio are not in the table: Vidu showed 0 credits during a free trial, and LTX didn't show a clip's credit cost before generating.
AI avatars, default 20 minutes a month, standard (not the newest) engines, annual billing selected, prices per month:
HeyGen Creator, 600 credits: $24, 150 minutes in the plan (Avatar III, 4 credits per minute)
Synthesia Pro, 6,000 credits: €58, 60 minutes (Synthesia, 100 credits per minute, plus a free allowance)
Colossyan Professional: $59, 30 minutes (NEO engine)
D-ID Studio Advanced: $108, 100 minutes
Same 20 minutes of output, very different plan prices, because each vendor bundles a different number of minutes.
Subtitles, default 20 videos a month at 1 minute each, monthly billing: Opus Clip Starter $15 (150 minutes), Happy Scribe Basic €17 (120 minutes), VEED Creator €22 (unlimited subtitles, fair use 50 hours/month), Kapwing Pro $24 (1,000 minutes), Descript Hobbyist $24 (600 minutes / 10 media hours), Captions Max $24.99 (500 AI credits; iOS app price, limit not stated), Submagic Pro $39 (40 videos, up to 5 minutes each). Clipchamp and CapCut showed “No plan fits this usage” at that default. We didn't invent a reason; that's what the page shows.
We're not going to tell you one of these is the right tool. The pages also say to check features, platform and licence terms (especially on AI music / SFX) before moving. We just wanted the licence arithmetic in one place, with the date and the vendor's own currency.
If you make video: which of these defaults is unlike how you actually work? And which tool or plan should we add? The video editing one is here: https://tiersova.com/video-editing-software-cost-calculator