OpenShortsOpus Pro: the plan, the price, and when it is the wrong buy
Opus Pro is the $29/month tier of Opus Clip: 300 minutes of source video a month, 1080p exports, auto-posting, speaker detection and a brand kit.
The tier it sits above costs $15/month for 150 minutes at 720p, so Pro is roughly double the price for double the minutes and a resolution step. Whether that is worth it depends entirely on how long your sources are, because the credit is charged per minute imported.
OpenShorts self-hosted does the same job for $0 with no cap, and the flat hosted plan is $12/month for 100 minutes with no watermark.
20 free minutes a month, no credit card. Or self-host it free under MIT.
What Opus Pro includes
| Plan | What it includes |
|---|---|
| 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 |
Checked 2026-07-27 on the vendor's public pricing page.
The differences between Starter and Pro that people actually notice are 1080p instead of 720p, auto-posting straight to the connected accounts, speaker detection and the brand kit. The minutes are the headline, and the resolution step is the one that shows up on a phone screen.
Who the Pro tier is priced for
Opus bills one credit per minute of video imported, not per clip exported. A weekly 60-minute show is roughly 260 source minutes a month, which fits inside Pro and does not fit inside Starter. A creator posting one 20-minute video a week uses about 90 minutes and is paying $14/month more than the job needs. The plan is priced for volume of input, so the honest question is how many minutes you actually import, not how many clips you publish.
What OpenShorts costs for the same job
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.
Two differences are worth stating plainly rather than leaving to a table. Self-hosted has no meter at all, so a 90-minute interview and a 9-minute one cost the same: nothing. Hosted is a flat minute balance with no per-call or per-clip charge, and API and MCP usage draws from the same balance as the dashboard.
What you give up: the caption-style library. Opus Clip's presets are more numerous and more polished than ours, and if animated captions are the product you are selling, that is a reason to stay. What you gain: the code is MIT and auditable, the source video can stay on your machine, and dubbing into 30+ languages is in the same pipeline rather than a second tool.
Common questions
- How much does Opus Pro cost?
- $29/month for 300 minutes of source video, 1080p exports, auto-posting, speaker detection and a brand kit, as published on the vendor's pricing page (checked 2026-07-27).
- Do I need Opus Pro or is Starter enough?
- Starter is $15/month for 150 source minutes at 720p. If the minutes you import in a month exceed 150, or you need 1080p exports and auto-posting, the Pro tier is the one priced for you. The meter counts minutes of source video, not clips produced.
- Is there a cheaper way to do what Opus Pro does?
- Yes, two: OpenShorts self-hosted is free under MIT with no cap (you supply your own machine and a free-tier Gemini key), and OpenShorts Cloud is $12/month for 100 minutes with no watermark, drawing API and MCP usage from the same balance.