I kept a tally for a week. Not for the article — because I wanted to know whether "a cent a second" survives contact with a real shot list.
It does, with two asterisks: durations are longer than you ask for, and the source clip is billable when you restyle.
The short version. H3 output costs $0.01 to $0.10 per second across six tiers. A new account gets 18 credits then 15 a week; free downloads carry a watermark and failed jobs are refunded.
What does a second of H3 cost?
At one credit = one cent, output costs a cent per second at 480P, two at 768P, three at 960P and 1080P, four at 1440P and ten at 2K.
Ten seconds of 768P is twenty cents. The same ten seconds at 2K is a dollar. Five times the money for roughly the same shot until you actually need the resolution, which is why my sketching happens at 480P and my delivery at 768P.
What does the free allowance actually buy?
A new account starts with eighteen credits, then fifteen a week. In seconds that is eighteen at 480P, nine at 768P, six at 1080P or 960P, four at 1440P — and zero at 2K, because the tier has a four-second minimum, which is forty credits.
I had assumed the free allowance would let me try everything once. It lets you try everything except the top tier, and that is probably the right shape: nobody should learn what 2K costs by accident.
The two charges I did not see coming
Durations. A five-second request renders about 5.167 seconds, because durations quantise to a 24 fps frame grid. Three percent. At 768P that is a fraction of a cent; at 2K it is three cents a take, and over a hundred takes it is a line item I noticed.
Restyling. Video-to-video bills the source clip as well as the output. Six seconds in and five out is eleven seconds of charge. My first restyle cost double what I had budgeted, and the budget was mine to get wrong.
There is a third, smaller one: on 2K, reference images past the fifth cost three credits each. A nine-image 2K take adds twelve credits. Below 2K there is no per-image charge at all, which is another argument for doing reference work cheap.
What the free tier does not give you
Clean files. Free downloads carry a watermark; paid plans download clean, and paid plans include commercial usage rights for what you generate. If the video is going anywhere commercial, the watermark question decides the plan before the rates do.
What happens when a render fails?
Every failed or cancelled job I logged was refunded in full. That matters more than it sounds when you are learning a model's limits: being wrong about a duration costs me four seconds, not four seconds of credits.
The number that surprised me
My week of ten takes came to about two dollars. That is not the impressive part. The impressive part is that I had fifteen versions of a shot I would previously have iterated three times, because each attempt felt free enough to try.
Cheap iteration changes the work more than any single feature does. The tiers are not the story; the fact that a fourth attempt costs four cents is.
The live rate card and the free allowance are at the pricing page.
I work on Callirra, so these are our published rates and my own weekly tally. If you are comparing providers, compare the same tier and the same duration — a per-second figure quoted at a different resolution is not a comparison.