OpenShortsWhat Opus Clip actually costs
Opus Clip's entry price is $15/month, and the credit it charges for is one minute of source video you import, not one clip you export. A 60-minute podcast costs 60 credits whether it yields 5 clips or 20.
The free tier is 60 source minutes a month, watermarked, 720p. There is no separate time-boxed trial published alongside it.
OpenShorts prices the other way round: $0 self-hosted with no meter at all, or the hosted service with 20 free minutes a month and flat paid plans from $12/month.
Paste a link and compare the output against your last Opus Clip export. 20 free minutes a month, no credit card.
How Opus Clip's credit system works
The unit Opus Clip bills in is not the clip. It is the minute of video you import. 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.
That single design decision is what makes the plans hard to compare against each other, and why the tiers below cost what they cost. If your sources are short (a 60-second TikTok you want restyled) the meter barely moves. If they are long (a 90-minute interview, a weekly show) the meter is the whole bill, and the number of clips you keep never enters into it.
Opus Clip plans and prices
Pricing checked 2026-07-27 on the vendor's public pricing page. Vendors change plans without notice; verify before you buy.
| Plan | What it includes |
|---|---|
| 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 |
What does the free plan include?
60 minutes of source video a month, 720p exports and a watermark. Two details that the pricing table states and the marketing copy tends to bury: free-plan exports leave Opus Clip's storage after three days, and link import (pasting a YouTube URL instead of uploading a file) is a paid-plan feature as of August 2026. If your source is already on YouTube, the free plan may not reach it.
Is there a free trial?
As of 2026-07-27 the pricing page lists a free tier rather than a time-boxed trial. When people search for an "Opus Clip free trial" they are usually describing that free tier, or looking for a way to test the unwatermarked output before paying. The distinction matters: a trial expires and the free tier does not, but neither one removes the watermark.
The watermark is the thing you are trying to evaluate past. If the question is whether the pipeline is good enough for your footage, a self-hosted run on one episode answers it at no cost, with no watermark, because there is no metering or watermark code in the self-hosted edition at all.
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.
Per source minute, that is the comparison worth making: Opus Clip Starter at $15/month buys 150 source minutes, and OpenShorts Cloud at $12/month buys 100 minutes with no watermark on any paid plan. Self-hosted, the meter disappears entirely and the only cost is the machine you already own.
Common questions
- How much does Opus Clip cost per month?
- Opus Clip starts at $15/month and its published tiers run up to the Business plan, which is custom-priced. The entry tier and the 720p/1080p split are in the table above, checked 2026-07-27.
- What counts as a credit in Opus Clip?
- One minute of source video you import, not one clip you export. A 60-minute episode consumes 60 credits regardless of how many clips you keep from it, so the cost of a job is set by your input length rather than your output.
- Is there a free Opus Clip plan?
- Yes: 60 source minutes a month with watermarked 720p exports, and free-plan exports are removed from storage after three days. OpenShorts Cloud also has a free tier (20 minutes a month, watermarked, no credit card), and the self-hosted edition is free with no watermark and no cap at all.
Sources
- Opus Clip plans and credit rules checked 2026-07-27 on the vendor's public pricing and help pages.
- OpenShorts pricing from the full comparison and the project source at github.com/mutonby/openshorts.