What image, video and audio tools cost, and what changed. Every post is dated; prices move, so check the date.
13 posts
Sora's app is gone and its API ends September 24, 2026. See the final API prices, compare replacement costs, and plan a migration before access disappears.
Higgsfield lists a starting price of $19 a month. That number is real, but it is also close to useless, because Higgsfield does not sell you videos. It sells you credits, and credits are where the actual cost hides.
Mini is 2x faster and about 50% cheaper than 2.0 Fast: roughly $0.07 a second at 720p, near $35 a month for 500 seconds. It caps at 720p and faces drift on close-ups, so here is when to use it, when to stay on 2.0 standard, and the seed-reuse trick that cuts iteration cost 6x.
Blind test of 240 images across 10 designers: Ideogram 4.0 wins typography at 47.9%, but ties Gemini on overall quality. The open weights model is the real story.
Magnific API killed its pay-per-usage plan. June 30 deadline. Everyone moves to credit-based Business or Enterprise. Here is who wins, who loses, the MCP alternative, and what to do now.
Runway retired its Unlimited plan on June 1, 2026. The two platforms still selling "unlimited Seedance 2.0" (Loova, Topview) gate the offer behind an annual commitment and a 720p cap, while the per-second math favors credit platforms (BytePlus) and a Magnific-led hybrid beats both.
ElevenLabs is a world-class audio company trying to sell a plain, half-baked image canvas by forcing you to rent a $299 monthly subscription. Here's the credit math they don't want you to run.
Eight platforms added GPT Image 2. Four offer the full resolution range. Four cap at 1K. Same model, different infrastructure.
Both let developers call 40+ models from one API. Replicate is the mature choice with 1000+ models and legacy reliability, fal.ai is the newer, faster platform with better cold-start latency. The tradeoff: stability vs speed.
Both offer 40+ models in one interface. Krea emphasizes real-time generation and model breadth. Leonardo emphasizes compute credits and commercial-first pricing. Where you land depends on whether you're iterating live or rendering batch jobs.
Both generate full songs from prompts. One targets musicians with precision controls; the other targets creators who want finished tracks fast. Where you land depends on whether you're building from a description or iterating toward a sound.
Credits look like a neutral unit on the pricing page. They aren't. Three recurring traps turn the headline number into something between two and six times larger by the time you actually use the tool.
Every number on this site has a date, a human, and a source URL attached to it. Here is the process, the refresh cadence, and the places where even careful verification still struggles.