OpenShortsOpus AI: the tool behind opus.pro, explained
Opus AI is not a separate product: it is the same company and pipeline most people know as Opus Clip, which runs at opus.pro. If a tool called Opus AI is clipping your long videos, it is that one.
It costs $15/month at entry, billed in credits per minute of source video rather than per clip, with a 60-minute-a-month free tier that watermarks and caps exports at 720p.
OpenShorts does the same core job — moment detection, 9:16 reframing, word-level subtitles — and differs on two axes that matter: it is MIT-licensed and self-hostable, and it prices in flat minutes rather than per-minute credits.
20 free minutes a month, no credit card. Or self-host it free under MIT.
Is Opus AI the same thing as Opus Clip?
Yes. The product is marketed as Opus Clip and served from opus.pro,
and "Opus AI" is how a large share of its traffic searches for it. There is no
second, separate Opus AI clipper; if you see the name in a listicle, it is this
tool under a shorter spelling.
"Opus" is also the name of an Anthropic language model. That is a different thing entirely and has nothing to do with video clipping. This page is about the video tool at opus.pro.
What Opus AI does
It takes a long video, finds the segments worth keeping, cuts them, reframes them vertically and burns in captions with a large library of animated styles. The differentiators its users cite are the caption presets and the virality score, which is trained on the company's own data rather than on a general-purpose model. It is cloud only: there is no self-hosted edition and no source to read.
What Opus AI costs
Checked 2026-07-27 on the vendor's public pricing page.
- Free: 60 minutes of source video per month, watermarked exports, 720p
- Starter: $15/month for 150 minutes per month, no watermark, 720p export
- Pro: $29/month for 300 minutes per month, 1080p export, auto-posting, speaker detection, brand kit
- Business: Custom pricing, not published
Opus Clip bills one credit per minute of the video you import, not per clip you export. A 60-minute podcast costs 60 credits whether it yields 5 clips or 20, so the effective price depends on your source length rather than your output.
Where OpenShorts differs
- OpenShorts is MIT-licensed and can be self-hosted with Docker, so the source video never leaves your machine. Opus AI is cloud only.
- OpenShorts adds AI voice dubbing into 30+ languages and an AI UGC generator with lip-synced actors; the Opus AI feature set is clipping and captioning.
- Opus AI has the larger caption-style library and a longer track record. If your clips live or die on animated caption design, that advantage is real and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.
- OpenShorts self-hosted has no meter of any kind; Opus AI bills credits per minute of source imported, and those credits expire 60 days after purchase.
What does OpenShorts cost?
OpenShorts comes in two editions and they are priced very differently, so it is worth being precise. OpenShorts (self-hosted) is free and open source under the MIT licence: Free and open source under MIT. You run it with Docker on your own machine and bring your own API keys. No watermark, no usage cap, no subscription. What it costs you is hardware and time: on a typical CPU an 8-minute video takes 5 to 8 minutes to process. OpenShorts Cloud is the hosted service: The same software with the compute and API keys covered. An NVIDIA GPU clips that same 8-minute video in about 50 seconds. Free plan is 20 minutes a month with a watermark and no credit card. Paid plans start at $12/month for 100 minutes with no watermark, up to $59/month.
Common questions
- Is Opus AI the same as Opus Clip?
- Yes. Opus Clip is the product name and opus.pro is the domain; "Opus AI" is a shortened spelling of the same tool, not a separate service.
- Is Opus AI free?
- There is a free tier: 60 source minutes a month, watermarked, 720p, and free-plan exports are deleted after three days. Paid plans start at $15/month. OpenShorts self-hosted is free with no watermark and no cap, and OpenShorts Cloud gives 20 watermarked minutes a month free.
- Does Opus AI have an open source alternative?
- Yes. OpenShorts is MIT-licensed, self-hostable with Docker, and covers the same core job: AI moment detection, face-tracked 9:16 reframing and word-level burned-in subtitles. It also adds dubbing into 30+ languages and AI UGC video, which Opus AI does not have.