AI Pricing Guru Labs · Direct API measurement
CogVideoX-3 API pricing: what each accepted video second actually cost
Our 2026-09-17 five-second test cost $0.0516 per accepted second; today's list price and API access are checked separately.
| Current list price | $0.20 / video Price verified 2026-10-25 |
|---|---|
| Measured accepted-second cost | $0.0516 Historical 2026-09-17 run; not a new test |
| Documented duration / access | 5 or 10 seconds · direct API Access verified 2026-10-25; separate from Coding Plan quota |
Buyer verdict
Our dated run cost about 29% above clean per-second math
For the historical 2026-09-17 run, the simple calculation was $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.
Current API limits and billing boundary
- Inputs: text-to-video, image-to-video, start-and-end-frame. Start/end frames support speed mode only.
- Duration: 5 or 10 seconds (default 5); 30 or 60 fps; prompt limit 512 characters. Image uploads: png, jpeg, jpg, no more than 5M in provider wording.
- Generation is asynchronous. Save the returned task ID, then poll for PROCESSING, SUCCESS, FAIL and the resulting video URL.
- The Coding Plan is limited to supported tools and GLM-5.3 / GLM-5.3-Flash; do not treat its quota as video API credit.
- The public price is per video; these sources do not enumerate separate duration, quality, resolution or audio tariffs. The per-second normalization here applies only to the tested five-second setup.
- These reviewed sources do not specify a universal failed-request charge/refund rule. The billed unretrievable request is a historical observation, not a provider-wide policy.
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
Current price verified ; API access verified 2026-10-25. Data owner: AI Pricing Guru Data. Re-verification cadence: daily. Benchmark measured 2026-09-17; these historical results have not been rerun. Official sources are monitored for price, duration, request-schema, and result-schema changes.