Opus Clip pricing: the unit matters more than the number
The number is on their site and it changes. What does not change is what they charge for — processing minutes — and how that behaves once you feed it a real two-hour recording.
We make a competing product, and we have not copied their prices
InTheClips is a clipping tool in the same category, so treat this the way you would treat any comparison written by a rival: check anything that matters against the source. Their current tiers are on their own pricing page, and that is deliberately the only place this page sends you for a number.
The reason is not tact. A price transcribed here is wrong the day they change it, and a page that quietly misquotes what a competitor charges deserves every bit of the distrust it earns. What is stable enough to write down is the unit, the arithmetic, and what to look at before subscribing to anything of this kind — including ours.
What is being sold is processing time, not clips
Their plans are metered in minutes of video processing, on the free tier and the paid ones alike, as their own site describes them. That is the number to plan against. It is not a count of the clips you end up with, and it is not a count of the ones you publish — it is how much video the machine was asked to look at.
Which means a recording you decide not to use still costs you. Feed in a two-hour episode, read the results, decide none of them are worth posting, and the two hours are spent. This is not a quirk of one product: transcription and any model reading that transcript both cost in proportion to duration, so every tool in this category is paying for the whole recording whether or not you keep anything, and the honest ones price accordingly.
So the useful sum is hours per month, not clips per month. Count the long recordings you actually put through a tool in a month, multiply by their length, and add anything you might run twice. That number, against the allowance of a tier, is the answer to what a plan costs you — and it is a different answer from the one you get by counting the clips you want out.
The same sum, on oursWhat a month of a real show consumes, in source hours
What happens to a long episodeFour things to check, and they apply to us too
These are the four that generate the angry reviews across this whole category — not at one company, at most of them. Check them on whichever tool you are about to pay, this one included, and check them before the first charge rather than after the second.
Does a renewal arrive with warning
A subscription that renews silently is the single most common complaint written about tools in this category. Ask whether you get an email before the charge, not after it. Ours does not send one yet — asked of us, that is the answer, and ask it of anyone else too.
Is cancelling a button
If stopping requires emailing support, that is a decision somebody made, and in some EU countries the law gives you a cancel control instead — Germany under § 312k BGB, France under L215-1-1 — so how much of a choice it is depends on where you are. The test is whether you can find the cancel control yourself, in the account settings, before you subscribe — most billing portals let you look.
What the unit actually counts
Minutes of processing, minutes of export, credits, clips and videos are five different units, and two tools quoting the same number are often not quoting the same thing. Convert whatever it is into hours of your own footage before comparing anything.
Whether what you paid for expires
An allowance that resets monthly is normal and fine. Credits bought in advance that quietly expire are a different arrangement, and worth knowing about on the day you buy rather than the day they go.
The free tier is the part most worth understanding
Theirs refreshes every month. That is generous, it is genuinely useful for trying the product repeatedly, and it is the industry norm here. It also means the free tier is a permanent cost to whoever runs it, which is a fact with consequences: a recurring free allowance either shrinks over time, or it is subsidised by the paid tiers, and both of those are visible in this category if you watch it for a year.
Ours does not refresh, and we would rather say so than shrink it later. Thirty minutes of video, granted once, no card. That is one half-hour recording and up to ten clips out of it, included — enough to judge the thing, not enough to run a show on. It is the honest version of a trial for a product whose costs scale with every minute it reads.
Either way, use the free tier for the comparison you actually care about. Put the same recording through both and compare what comes back, rather than comparing two pricing pages. A tier is only cheap if what it produces is worth posting.
What comes back from ours
Published in full on the pricing page, in the same unit this page argues for: hours of source video a month.
Four hours a month on Starter, eleven on Creator, twenty-seven on Studio — one credit per minute analysed. Exporting a clip is included up to a generous batch each month (80 on Starter, 220 on Creator, 540 on Studio), and only past that does one cost 3 credits, out of the same balance.
Pasting a YouTube address is capped at three imports a day on the trial, twenty on Starter, fifty on Creator, a hundred on Studio. Uploading a file is not capped: a link costs you nothing and costs us a fetch, and an upload already limits itself on your own connection.
A third off, which is less than the half this category usually discounts a year by. Our monthly price starts higher than theirs; the yearly plan is about paying once rather than about the shop window.
Four hours a month means four hours a month, and it is worth checking wherever you subscribe: a plan whose allowance arrives once a year is a very different product from one whose allowance arrives every month, and the two are often sold in the same words.
The allowance is not bankable — it resets rather than rolling over, and there is no separate expiring balance layered on top of it. Clips you already made are kept for the window your plan states, and cancelling does not delete them — ending a subscription stops new work rather than confiscating old work.
Questions
What people are usually trying to work out when they search for the pricing of a tool like this.
How much does Opus Clip cost?
Their current tiers are on their own pricing page, and that is where to read them: a number copied onto a competitor’s site is out of date the day it changes, and this page would rather be useful in a year than precise for a week. What is worth knowing before you look is that the tiers are measured in processing minutes, so the figure to compare against is how many hours of your own recordings you put through a tool in a month.
Is there a free version?
They run a free tier that refreshes monthly, which is the norm in this category and is the sensible way to try the product on your own footage. Ours works differently on purpose — thirty minutes granted once, with no card — because a recurring free allowance is a recurring bill for whoever runs it, and we would rather be straight about that than quietly reduce it later.
Why is a yearly plan so much cheaper in this category?
Because a year paid up front is worth a great deal more to the seller than twelve chances to cancel, so most tools here discount a year by around half. That is a real saving if you were going to stay, and an expensive way to find out you were not. If you are still deciding between tools, pay monthly until you have run a month of real recordings through one.
What is a “minute” in these plans?
Usually a minute of video the tool processes — the length of what you upload, not the length of what you export. It is the unit that matters because the cost underneath it, transcription and a model reading the result, scales with duration. Ask specifically, because credits, export minutes and processing minutes are three different things sold under similar words.
Do unused minutes roll over?
Assume not, on any tool here, unless it says so plainly. A monthly allowance that resets is the normal arrangement and it is the one we use. What is worth reading closely is anything sold as a credit pack: those sometimes carry an expiry, and the time to learn that is before you buy rather than when it lapses.
What would you actually pay for, if you were starting out?
The smallest tier of one tool, monthly, for one month, with real episodes going through it. Every pricing page in this category is easier to read after you know how many hours of your own footage you get through — and that number is almost always different from what you would have guessed.
The rest of the reading
What the product does, what the alternatives are, and the comparison written for somebody already using it.
