Runway vs Pika vs Sora: AI Video Generation Pricing Playbook

Three names dominate AI video generation: Runway, Pika, and Sora. One no longer exists — and the most expensive tool in November 2026 is the one you build a workflow on and then lose. Based on our review of available pricing data from the vendors' own pricing pages, opened November 10, 2026, this playbook prices all three: what Runway and Pika charge today, what Sora charged while it lasted, and what each costs at 10, 50, and 200 clips a month.

The Sora Shutdown

OpenAI's deprecations page states it plainly: on March 24, 2026, OpenAI notified developers that the Videos API and the Sora 2 model aliases would be removed on September 24, 2026. The list names the Videos API, sora-2, sora-2-pro, and the snapshots sora-2-2025-10-06, sora-2-2025-12-08, and sora-2-pro-2025-10-06 — with no recommended replacement. The consumer app had already closed on April 26, 2026.

Sora's historical prices set the benchmark every surviving tool is judged against. Corroborated across four independent 2026 pricing reads, the API charged $0.10 per second for sora-2 at 720p, and $0.30, $0.50, or $0.70 per second for sora-2-pro at 720p, 1024p, and 1080p, with a batch tier at half those rates. Inside ChatGPT, Plus at $20 a month carried about 1,000 credits and Pro at $200 a month about 10,000. Sora 2 generated 4, 8, or 12-second clips; Pro 10, 15, or 25.

Runway Pricing: Credits, Tiers, and the Real Per-Second Cost

Runway sells credits, not clips. Every model burns credits per second, and the per-second rate is the only number that lets you compare Runway to anything else. The pricing page, opened November 10, 2026, lists four tiers, 20 percent cheaper on annual billing.

Burn rates, from the vendor's own equivalences: Gen-4.5, 12 credits per second; Aleph 2.0, 28 per second; Gen-4 Turbo, about 6 per second.

Credit value differs by tier:

At Gen-4.5's 12 credits per second:

A 5-second Gen-4.5 clip costs $1.15 on Standard, $0.75 on Pro, and $0.48 on Max. Aleph 2.0 costs $0.5376, $0.3484, and $0.2240 per second across the tiers. Gen-4 Turbo costs $0.1152, $0.0747, and $0.0480 per second.

On Standard and Pro, monthly credits do not roll over — they reset at the billing date. On Max, up to one month of unused credits rolls over. Top-up credits never expire, minimum purchase 1,000 credits. Annual totals: $144, $336, $912.

Pika Pricing: Flat Credits and a Stated Commercial License

Pika's pricing page, opened November 10, 2026 and last updated October 28, 2026, is simpler: four tiers, one credit currency, and a commercial license on every paid plan.

The page's own worked example fixes the burn rate: a 5-second 720p Seedance 2.5 clip costs about 122 credits, 24.4 credits per second. Annual billing saves 20 percent.

Starter credits cost $0.0133 each on annual billing; Creator $0.0108; Fancy $0.0089. Top-ups cost $1 per 60 credits ($0.0167 each) — more per credit than any annual subscription tier, so top-ups never beat a subscription.

Per finished second, that is $0.3253 on Starter, $0.2628 on Creator, and $0.2169 on Fancy — roughly two to three-and-a-half times Runway's Gen-4.5 rate on Max. Every paid plan lists "commercial license included" and "no watermark." Creator and Fancy include free Pika H3 Flex generations every day.

The Head-to-Head Decision Table

Monthly Cost at 10, 50, and 200 Clips

Assume one clip is 5 seconds of finished video. Ten clips is 50 finished seconds, 50 clips is 250 seconds, and 200 clips is 1,000 seconds. The table uses each vendor's cheapest plan that covers the volume from its monthly allotment alone.

For Pika at 200 clips:

For Sora at 200 clips, the historical API rate gives $100.00 at 720p and $700.00 for Sora 2 Pro at 1080p.

Break-Even: When the Expensive Tier Pays for Itself

First, Runway Pro to Max on Gen-4.5. Max costs $48 more per month than Pro and covers 604 more seconds (791 minus 187):

That marginal second costs about half of Pro's $0.1493 average second. More than 187 seconds of Gen-4.5 a month — about 37 five-second clips — and Max is cheaper per second than Pro. Below 187 seconds, stay on Pro.

Second, Pika Creator to Fancy. Fancy costs $60 more per month and covers 49 more clips (70 minus 21):

That marginal clip costs less than Creator's $1.31 average clip. Above 21 clips a month, Fancy beats Creator; below 21, Creator wins; below 4, top-ups on the Free plan win. Run your own volumes through the Break-Even Analysis Calculator before committing to a tier.

At 200 clips, Runway Max at $76 covers 791 seconds against the 1,000 needed — a 209-second shortfall top-ups must cover at an unpublished checkout price. Pika Fancy plus top-ups lands at $340.17. Runway is cheaper unless the top-up price exceeds $264.17; verify it in the dashboard first.

Operator Boundaries: Who Each Tool Fits

Runway fits the operator who generates video every week and can plan around a monthly credit budget: per-second cost falls by more than half from Standard to Max, Turbo drafts at $0.048 a second on Max. It does not fit the occasional user — Standard's 625 credits expire every month — or anyone who needs a commercial license stated in the tier list.

Pika fits the operator who wants one price, one credit, and a written commercial license. Creator at $28 a month on annual billing is the simplest mid-volume buy here. Pika does not fit the high-volume operator: at 200 clips a month it costs $340.17 against Runway's $76 plus top-ups.

Sora fits nobody in November 2026. Its historical $0.10 per second at 720p was the best per-second price here — but that is history, not availability. Anyone whose pipeline or client promise still names Sora needs a migration, not a renewal.

The Money Layer: Copyright, Expenses, and Getting Paid

On ownership, the U.S. Copyright Office's report on copyright and artificial intelligence — Part 2, published January 29, 2025 — addresses the copyrightability of generative-AI outputs. The Office's position is that human authorship is required: purely machine-generated material without sufficient human creative input does not qualify for copyright protection, while a human author's selection, coordination, arrangement, or modification of AI output can support it. In practice, the clip itself is rarely the asset — your prompt craft, your edit, and your client contract are. Section 102 of Title 17, U.S. Code, sets out the subject matter of copyright.

On expenses, treat the subscription as a SaaS cost. A US LLC, S-Corp, or C-Corp deducts it as an ordinary business expense, with the invoice saved as a PDF. If you resell clips to US clients, collect a W-9 from US vendors you pay, issue one when a client asks, and never put an EIN, SSN, or ITIN into a vendor dashboard or a chat thread; non-US operators use a W-8BEN instead of a W-9. Where a vendor offers Wire or ACH for annual plans, compare the FX cost — subscriptions bill in USD, so an operator earning in XAF pays a conversion spread on every charge. Track the unit economics: CAC is what a finished second costs you, LTV is what a client pays for it, and the ratio only works with the real per-second numbers from this playbook.

Execution Checklist: Buying AI Video the Right Way

1. Count your real volume first. Pull the last 90 days of finished seconds from your edit timeline. If you cannot count it, assume 10 clips a month.
2. Check Sora out of your stack. Search every template, proposal, and SOP for Sora and re-price the job.
3. Pick the tier by the break-even. More than 187 seconds of Gen-4.5 a month means Runway Max; more than 21 Pika clips means Fancy; fewer than 4 means top-ups.
4. Verify the Runway top-up price. The pricing page states the 1,000-credit minimum but not the dollar price. Do not quote a 200-clip budget until you have seen it.
5. Confirm commercial use in writing. Pika states it on the pricing page; for Runway, read the plan terms first.
6. Set the renewal guard. Put the renewal date in your calendar with a 30-day warning.
7. File the paperwork. Save the invoice as a PDF and put the ownership clause in the contract.
8. Re-price quarterly. Re-run the per-second math every quarter against the live pricing pages and move tiers when the break-even moves.

Related reading: still-image pricing works on the same credit math — see Midjourney vs DALL-E vs Stable Diffusion pricing. For the language-model side, see OpenAI vs Anthropic vs Google LLM API pricing and Perplexity vs ChatGPT vs Claude AI search pricing. For what the finished video earns once published, see YouTube Ads vs TikTok Ads video ROAS.