What AI UGC Really Costs: 12 Formats, 153 Real Runs
Every render on ppl.studio writes what it cost to a ledger: the model, the seconds or images, the dollars. We pulled 60 days of it, 153 runs across 12 formats, so you can see what a carousel, a talking UGC video or a song ad actually costs to make, and what drives the number.
5 min read
The short answer: a carousel costs about 30 cents, a talking UGC video about $1.70, and anything with moving people runs $3 or more. Video seconds are the whole story. Images are cents; generated video is about ten cents a second.
Cost per Format, From Real Runs
Median and 90th-percentile model fees per run, from our cost ledger between August 19 and October 18, 2026. A run is one finished format: one carousel, one video. Formats with fewer than three runs are left out.
| Format | Runs | Median | 90% under | Most of the cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TikTok carousel (6 slides) | 80 | $0.27 | $0.62 | one image per slide |
| Creator UGC video | 26 | $1.67 | $2.48 | the talking clips |
| Character in a trend | 8 | $3.04 | $3.59 | motion transfer |
| Map explainer | 8 | $0.02 | $0.02 | rendered, not generated |
| Lip-sync UGC video | 7 | $0.31 | $1.21 | lip-sync seconds |
| Drama song ad | 5 | $3.44 | $11.95 | scene images and clips |
| Cartoon explainer | 4 | $0.28 | $0.31 | illustrations |
| Animated story ad | 3 | $3.11 | $3.15 | scene clips |
| Micro drama | 3 | $0.59 | $0.68 | scene clips |
| History reconstructed | 3 | $0.47 | $0.60 | rebuilt stills and clips |
| App demo video | 3 | $0.45 | $0.45 | a few clips |
| History figure | 3 | $0.02 | $0.02 | rendered, not generated |
Why Video Seconds Decide Everything
Look at where the creator UGC videos' money went: 538 seconds of Veo Lite clips ($26.90) and 148 seconds of Gemini Omni clips ($14.95), against 24 images ($1.09) and voice isolation ($0.68). The clips were 96% of the bill. The same holds for every format that generates moving people: the per-second rate of the video model, times the seconds you ask for.
That is why the lever that moves a video's cost is its length. ppl.studio sizes each talking clip to its spoken line instead of a fixed 8 seconds, and the format screen shows the estimate before anything renders.
Carousels are the opposite: no video at all. 80 carousels used 468 images for $24.70, about 5 cents an image. The spread (5 cents to $1.22) is retries and slides re-made after review, not the format.
The Per-Second Price of Each Model
List prices as we pay them, checked against what the ledger logged. Google and fal can change these; treat them as of October 2026.
| Model | What it does here | Per second | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash | talking and scene clips, audio included | $0.101 | 5,792 output tokens a second at 720p × $17.50/M |
| Veo 3.1 Lite (preview, being retired) | talking clips before Omni | $0.050 | 538 s logged for $26.90 |
| Kling v3 Motion Control (fal) | moving a character like a reference video | $0.126 | 131 s logged for $16.52 |
| Wan 2.2 Animate Replace (fal) | swapping the person in a clip | $0.080 | at 720p |
| MiniMax H3 Max Turbo (fal) | silent image-to-video clips | $0.040 | 768p list price since Oct 15, 2026 ($0.024 at launch) |
| FlashTalk (fal) | lip-sync on a still | $0.020 | 177.6 s logged for $3.55 |
| LatentSync (fal) | lip-sync on a clip | $0.005 | 85 s logged for $0.42 |
| ElevenLabs Music v2.5 (fal) | songs | $0.010 | $0.60 a minute |
| Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS | narration | $0.0003 | 32 audio tokens a second × $9/M |
Images, for comparison: Nano Banana 2.1 is about $0.036 at 1K and $0.052 at 2K, including the few hundred thinking tokens it bills at minimal thinking; Nano Banana 2 is $0.067 and $0.101. We compared the two in Nano Banana 2.1 vs Nano Banana 2.
What This Means When You Plan a Week of Content
- Seven carousels: about $2 in images.
- Seven talking UGC videos: about $12, almost all video seconds. Cutting each from 20 to 15 seconds saves about a quarter.
- A song ad or a character-in-a-trend clip: $3 to $4 each, more if scenes are re-rolled; the drama song ad's 90th percentile was $11.95.
- Rendered formats (map explainers, history figures): about two cents. They are the cheapest way to post daily.
For how these numbers compare with paying creators, see AI UGC vs hiring creators; to price your own mix, the UGC cost calculator takes it from here.
How We Measured, and the Limits
- Source: every model call writes a row to our cost ledger with the model, units (seconds or images) and dollars at list price. We summed rows per run and took the median per format.
- Whose runs: mostly our own accounts (our TikTok and the formats we test), so the mix leans to the formats we post most.
- What is not in it: failed renders Google does not charge, and our own compute for rendering and cutting. The ledger priced images at a lower, wrong rate before October 5, 2026, so older carousels read slightly cheap.
- Small samples: three to eight runs for most video formats. The medians are a fair guide, the 90th percentiles less so.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does an AI UGC video cost to make?
On our runs, a creator-style talking UGC video cost a median of $1.67 in model fees (26 runs, 90% under $2.48). Almost all of it is the talking clips: Gemini Omni bills about $0.10 per second of video, so 15 seconds of talking is about $1.50 before images and audio cleanup.
How much does an AI TikTok carousel cost?
A median of $0.27 over 80 carousels, between $0.05 and $1.22. Each slide is one generated image; at 2K on Nano Banana 2.1 that is about $0.05 a slide, so a 6-slide carousel lands near $0.30. Retries and a model with a higher rate push it up.
Why are some formats almost free?
Map explainers and history-figure videos are drawn by our own renderer from data and a few stills, not generated frame by frame, so they cost about two cents in model fees. The expensive formats are the ones that generate video seconds: talking clips, motion transfer and scene clips.
Who pays these costs on ppl.studio?
You do, directly: generation runs on your own Gemini key (and your fal key for lip-sync and motion), so Google and fal bill you their list price with no markup. The ppl.studio subscription is separate, $1.99 a week, and the first 10 photos are free.
Is AI UGC cheaper than hiring a UGC creator?
In model fees, by two orders of magnitude: a talking video at a couple of dollars against creator rates that usually start in the tens to low hundreds of dollars per video. The real comparison also includes your time to brief, review and retry; see our cost breakdown of AI UGC vs hiring creators.
Price a format before you make it
Every format shows its estimated cost before it renders, and you pay Google and fal directly on your own keys.
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Founder of ppl.studio. Building AI tools for product marketing teams who need visual content at scale without the production overhead.