2026-10-22 · Comparisons · 9 min read

Every AI video site quotes its price in a different currency. One sells subscriptions, another sells credits, a third sells generations that quietly expire if you forget to use them. Comparing them feels like comparing a gym, a vending machine and a buffet. So we did the only sensible thing: turned all three into dollars per second of finished 720p video, then layered on the stuff the price tags don't mention.

A note on those competitor numbers, because honesty is cheaper than a refund: the Runway and Pika figures are approximate, rebuilt from their public pricing pages as of October 2026, and they move. The Slloy numbers are exact and pulled from our own published table. Treat the competitor column as good enough to comparison-shop, not as something to engrave on a contract.

Where Slloy's per-second number comes from

No suspense, because we print it before you click generate. Here is the Slloy shelf at 720p, five-second clips, at our $0.008-per-credit subscription rate (pack rates go lower):

That spread is the whole point. You don't pay flagship money while you are still figuring out what your cat should be doing in frame. You iterate on Wan 2.2 Lite at five cents a second, then spend on Seedance 2.5 only for the final hero shot. Two-tier workflow, one wallet.

The subscription tax nobody mentions

Runway and Pika, in their paid form, are monthly subscriptions. That sounds fine until you do the math on a quiet month. A $15 Runway plan buys a pile of credits that expire; if you generate eight clips and then get busy, the other 40 clips worth of value simply evaporated. It is the gym membership problem wearing a creative jacket. Slloy has no membership. Your credits sit there until you spend them, and a quiet month costs exactly zero dollars.

• If you generate daily: a subscription can be cheaper per second, because you actually burn the quota you paid for. Full-time video people often land here.
• If you generate occasionally: pay-per-credit wins every time. You pay for the clip you made, not the club you joined.
• If your volume swings: subscriptions punish the swing; per-credit rides it. October might be 50 clips and November might be two, and only one of these pricing models shrugs at that.

The things the price tag hides

Per-second cost is the headline, not the story. Three quiet factors move the real number:

• Queue priority. Cheaper tiers often mean slower renders at peak hours. A cheap clip that lands at 2am is not cheap if the client needed it at 5pm.
• Failure refunds. AI video fails sometimes, a frozen frame, a broken morph. Slloy auto-refunds failed runs. We cannot speak to every competitor's policy, so read theirs before you assume the dud was free.
• Commercial rights. All three include commercial use on paid plans, but the tiers differ. Free and trial tiers frequently exclude it. If the output is going into something you sell, confirm the plan you paid for actually covers it.

So which one should you pick?

Notice nobody wins every row. That is the actual answer: the best platform is the one whose pricing shape matches your work shape. A freelance editor doing ten clips a month is a different creature from a studio shipping a hundred. Pick for your shape, not for the logo.

A worked example: 20 social clips a month

Same deliverable, three bills. On Slloy: about 60 draft renders on Wan 2.2 Lite (1,800 credits) plus 20 finals on Seedance 2.0 Mini (2,000 credits) is roughly $30 for the month, and a quiet month drags that toward zero. On Runway: a $15 to $35 subscription whether you make 5 clips or 50. On Pika: roughly $10 to $28 if you go paid, or near-zero if you limp along on the free daily allowance and accept the limits. The Slloy bill scales with output; the others are a flat tax with a usage ceiling. Neither is wrong, they are just different bets.

If you want to verify any of this without opening your wallet, that is what the 100 free signup credits are for. Generate a draft, check the exact credit cost printed before you render, and you will have our real per-second number in front of you, not a blog's approximation of it.

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