AI Pricing Guru Labs · Direct API measurement
CogVideoX-3 API pricing: what each accepted video second actually cost
Z.ai lists CogVideoX-3 at $0.20 per video. After one billed request became unretrievable and four sampled seconds failed our usability rule, the measured cost rose to $0.0516 per accepted second—29.0% above the nominal five-second rate.
Buyer verdict
Budget about 29% above the clean per-second math
The simple calculation is $0.20 ÷ 5 seconds = $0.0400 per second. The end-to-end run debited $1.60 for eight requests and yielded 31 accepted seconds, raising the observed rate to $0.0516. That is the more useful planning number for this tested workflow, not a universal CogVideoX-3 quality estimate.
Request success
87.5%
7 of 8 retrievable
Accepted seconds
31/40
77.5% end to end
Median generation
96.2s
Successful calls only
Effective cost
$0.0516
Per accepted second
Shared zero-based scale
Nominal price versus measured accepted-footage cost
Both bars use the same $0.00–$0.06 axis. The effective bar includes the billed but unretrievable request and rejected sampled seconds.
At this measured rate, 1,000 accepted seconds would cost about $51.61, versus $40.00 from list-price arithmetic alone.
Text versus image input
Image-to-video followed the prompts more reliably
| Mode | Retrievable | Accepted seconds | Prompt adherence | Cost / accepted second |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Text-to-video | 3/4 | 15/15 | 33.3% | $0.0533 |
| Image-to-video | 4/4 | 16/20 | 68.8% | $0.0500 |
Methodology
How we decided whether a second was usable
Fixture and grading contract
- • Two matched product prompts: a NOVA bottle orbit and AURA headphones dolly.
- • Four requirements per clip: stable product, specified object motion, camera move, and exact full-clip text overlay.
- • One frame sampled at the midpoint of each requested second.
- • A second was rejected for a severe geometry, continuity, duplication, or text artifact that made the footage unusable.
Limits
- • Midpoint samples can miss brief inter-frame artifacts.
- • One request was billed but could not be retrieved after its submission response was lost.
- • Results apply to quality mode, 1280×720, 30 fps, five seconds, and no audio.
- • Provider billing came from authenticated bonus-balance readings before and after the run.
Choose the workflow, not just the sticker price
Compare a multi-model video API before committing to one direct provider
This benchmark was run and billed through Z.ai. Check Novita's current image and video API catalog if you want a commercial multi-model alternative, then rerun the same acceptance test on the exact model you select. Novita was not the provider measured here, and its catalog should not be assumed to reproduce CogVideoX-3. AI Pricing Guru may earn a commission at no extra cost to you; it did not influence the benchmark.
For Z.ai text-model rates and the separate coding subscription, see our Z.ai pricing guide. The Coding Plan should not be treated as CogVideoX-3 API credit.
Sources and freshness
Official price and API behavior checked . Data owner: AI Pricing Guru Data. Re-verification cadence: daily. Official sources are monitored for price, duration, request-schema, and result-schema changes.