Opus Clip Pricing in 2026: Plans, Credits, and What Opus Clip Costs Per Clip

Opus Clip has four tiers: Free at 0 dollars, Starter at 15 dollars a month, Pro at 29 dollars a month, and Business on a custom quote. What you actually buy is processing minutes, not clips: the official plan documentation lists 60 minutes a month on Free, 150 on Starter, and 300 a month (or 3,600 a year) on Pro, and one minute of allowance is spent per minute of source video you upload. So the real number to compare is not the plan price, it is what an hour of your recording costs you once it is uploaded.

Anyone pricing a clipping tool runs into the same confusion. The pricing page shows dollars, the plan works in minutes, and reviews quote credits. This breakdown separates the three, works out the cost per finished clip at each tier, and shows which plan matches which workload. Prices below come from the Opus Clip pricing page and its plans and credits help article, checked in September 2026. Anything not published by Opus Clip is marked as reported.

Opus Clip pricing plans in 2026

Two structural details matter more than the headline numbers. Pro is the only plan sold on a yearly cycle, so the annual discount everyone talks about does not exist at the Starter level. And the Pro annual grant is front-loaded as 3,600 minutes for the year rather than 300 a month, which suits lumpy production (a conference season, a course launch) far better than a monthly meter does.

What is a credit in Opus Clip?

A credit is a minute of source video, not a finished clip. Upload a 58 minute podcast and roughly 58 minutes of your monthly allowance is gone, whether the tool returns three usable clips or twenty. That is the single most important thing to understand before you pick a tier, because it means the cost of the tool is set by how much raw footage you feed it, while the value is set by how much of that footage is worth cutting.

Reported behavior worth checking on your own account: monthly-plan minutes expire after about 60 days, while annual-plan minutes stay valid for 12 months from the grant. Neither figure is on the public pricing page, so treat them as third-party reporting rather than a promise.

How much does Opus Clip cost per clip?

Divide the plan price by minutes, then by the clips an hour of your content actually yields. At list prices that gives you:

• Starter, 15 dollars for 150 minutes: 10 cents per minute of source. Two and a half hours of uploaded recording a month.
• Pro, 29 dollars for 300 minutes: about 9.7 cents per minute of source. Five hours of uploaded recording a month.
• Pro annual, reported at about 174 dollars for 3,600 minutes: about 4.8 cents per minute, the cheapest rate published anywhere on the product.

Now add the yield. If an hour-long interview reliably gives you ten clips you would post, Pro costs about 58 cents per finished clip. If the same hour gives you three, the same plan costs about 1.93 dollars per clip. Nothing about the tool changed; only the density of usable moments in your source did. This is why two people on the same plan report wildly different value, and it is the number to estimate before you subscribe rather than after.

What raises an Opus Clip bill unexpectedly

Four things, in the order they surprise people:

1. Re-uploads. Minutes are spent on upload, so recutting a recording after you fix the audio or trim the intro spends the allowance again.
2. Long source, short output. A three-hour stream eats 180 minutes, more than a full Starter month, even if you only want two clips from the last twenty minutes. Trimming before upload is the only real lever.
3. Storage windows. Free media expires after three days and Starter after 29, so anything you have not downloaded is gone. Build the habit of pulling files down the same day.
4. Monthly minute expiry. Reported at about 60 days on monthly plans, which quietly punishes a slow production month rather than rolling forward indefinitely.

Is Opus Clip free?

There is a free tier at 0 dollars with 60 processing minutes a month, which is about one hour of uploaded video. Exports are reported to carry a watermark, media disappears after three days, and editing is restricted. It is genuinely useful for judging whether the clip selection matches your taste, and not usable for publishing client or brand work.

Is Opus Clip Pro worth it over Starter?

Pro doubles the minutes for 14 dollars more and is the only tier with annual billing, a team workspace, and the full aspect ratio set, so the decision usually comes down to volume rather than features. If you upload more than two and a half hours of source a month, or if more than one person touches the account, Pro is the cheaper unit and the only tier where the annual rate applies. Below that, Starter is fine.

Does Opus Clip have annual pricing?

Only on Pro. The help documentation states plainly that Pro is the one plan offered on a monthly or yearly cycle, and the yearly version grants 3,600 minutes up front. Third-party reviews put the annual price at about 174 dollars, roughly 14.50 a month, though the public pricing page did not display an annual figure when we checked it in September 2026.

Opus Clip pricing compared with the alternatives

Clipping tools are priced on source minutes. Caption tools are priced on video count. Text-to-video tools are priced on finished videos. Comparing them on monthly dollars alone hides that difference, so the table below shows what each one meters.

Prices are US list prices from each vendor pricing page in September 2026 and move often. The per-tool math across the whole category, including how credit meters and minute caps change the real bill, is in our AI video generator cost breakdown.

When Opus Clip is the wrong line item

Clipping is a subtraction business: it needs footage to exist before it can do anything. That sounds obvious until you look at a content calendar and notice how much of it has no recording behind it at all. Product announcements, offers, blog posts, service explainers, and most client social work start as text, and there is nothing for a clipper to cut.

That is the gap our own tool fills, and it is worth being blunt about the boundary: Vidup does not import or clip video, so it is not a cheaper Opus Clip. It goes the other direction, turning a script, a blog post, or a product URL into a finished captioned video with an AI voiceover, matched licensed footage, and music, exported in 9:16, 1:1, and 16:9 on a flat plan with no minute meter. People who record weekly usually end up running both: a clipper for the recording, a generator for everything the recording did not cover. The side-by-side detail is on our Opus Clip alternative page.

There is a third case neither tool covers. When a campaign needs a real person on camera holding the product and saying the lines, that is a shoot, or a marketplace where brands brief and hire vetted creators to film it. Stock footage and clipped webinar audio cannot fake that, and pretending otherwise is how a good campaign gets a flat video.

Which plan fits which workload

A weekly podcast, one hour per episode. Four hours of source a month needs 240 minutes, which is Pro. Starter runs out in week three.

A monthly webinar plus one interview. About two hours of source, comfortably inside Starter at 15 dollars, with room for a re-upload.

An agency clipping for five clients. Five accounts at one recording each per month is roughly five hours, right at Pro's ceiling with no margin for revisions, which is where the Business quote starts to make sense. Agencies also tend to discover that most client deliverables are not clips at all, a split we cover on the AI video generator for agencies page.

A YouTuber posting long-form weekly. Four to six hours of source a month puts you over Pro monthly, so the annual grant of 3,600 minutes is the cheaper structure if the output is steady.

How to decide in ten minutes

Add up the hours of raw footage you produced last month, multiply by 60, and match that number to a tier. Then count how many of last month's planned posts had no recording behind them, because that share of your calendar is the part a clipping subscription cannot serve at any price. If it is most of your calendar, price a generator first and a clipper second. If it is a small share, Pro on the annual cycle is the cheapest published rate on the product, and you can size everything else around it. Our comparison of AI video generators for social media sorts the rest of the category by the same test.