Ten ways to cut your AI video bill

1. Draft low, render high. Iterate on a $0.04–0.065/s tier, promote approved shots. Cuts iteration cost up to 90% — the single biggest lever.
2. Lock prompts before paying premium. A prompt that lands 90% usable versus 60% is a ~50% cost cut by itself.
3. Anchor to images. Image-to-video fails less than text-to-video for anything specific — lower retakes, same price. The comparison.
4. Match tier to shot, not project. 85% budget / 12% mid / 3% premium is the working mix at every scale.
5. Never generate text in frame. Captions and labels are free in your editor and always spelled right.
6. Use batch pricing. Sora's Batch tier halves rates for 24-hour turnaround — content libraries and non-urgent pipelines should live there.
7. Harvest free allowances. Google's $300 alone covers most channels' first month.
8. Do the credit math before subscribing, and size plans to last month's real usage. Break-even guide.
9. Re-cut before you regenerate. A winning clip re-edited into three variants costs nothing; three fresh generations don't.
10. Generate 20% extra on cheap tiers. Selection from surplus beats regeneration to order — counterintuitive but consistently cheaper for B-roll.

Applied together, established channels routinely report 40–70% lower generation spend at equal output quality. The common thread: spend deliberately at the top of the funnel (drafting, prompts) so the expensive tiers only ever see finished decisions.