§ For people tired of watching a minute meter
Priced per finished clip, not per minute of source.
Opus Clip bills one credit for every minute of video you import — a 45-minute podcast costs 45 credits before you have decided which moment you actually want. Here a credit buys one finished clip. Paste a link, read the transcript, mark the line, take the clip. Free to start —three clips on a free account, no card, no watermark.
§ The short version
Every Opus Clip figure on this page was read off their own pricing page and credits documentation on 1 September 2026. Check them — prices move.
Two meters, one job: three clips out of a 45-minute podcast
Opus Clip measures the video you put in. Their documentation puts it plainly: processing costs one credit per minute of the original video imported, and a 30-minute video uses 30 credits. So the 45-minute podcast costs 45 credits at the moment you submit it. Take one clip from it or take ten — the meter already ran.
We measure what you take out. One credit, one finished clip. A captioned podcast can be five minutes or two hours; if you cut three moments out of it, you spent three credits.
On Opus Clip’s Starter plan — $15 a month for 150 credits — those 45 credits are worth about $4.50. Three credits from our 50-clip pack, at $13.50, come to about $0.81. Same podcast, same three clips, same afternoon.
Now the part a comparison page usually leaves out. Because their meter stops once the video is imported and ours keeps counting per clip, there is a crossover. Past roughly sixteen clips out of that one 45-minute video, their per-minute credit is the cheaper one, and it keeps getting cheaper the more clips you pull from the same source. If your habit is to mine one long recording for twenty or thirty shorts, the minute meter is genuinely on your side and you should stay where you are.
The per-clip meter is the better deal in the ordinary case: a few good moments out of each long video, across many different videos. That is the shape of most people’s week, which is why we priced for it.
Both are called free; they are not the same offer
Opus Clip’s free plan gives 60 credits a month — 60 minutes of source video — and renders up to 1080p. The exports carry a watermark, editing is not included, and after three days the clips can no longer be exported.
Ours gives three finished clips on a free account, at 720p or 1080p,with no watermark on them and no card asked for. The clips stay available for 30 days. A render that fails does not spend a credit.
The honest summary: theirs is more generous in volume, ours in what you may do with the result. Sixty minutes a month will produce more raw material than three clips. But every one of those clips is stamped, and three days later it is gone.
Said plainly, because a comparison that only flatters itself is not one
Opus Clip is a suite and we are a knife. Their plans include a virality score that ranks clips for you, AI B-roll, voice-over and dubbing, a social scheduler that posts to your accounts, 4K export, several aspect ratios, brand templates and custom fonts, team workspaces with seats, and an API. If your work depends on any of that, none of the arithmetic above matters — buy the suite.
What we do instead is narrow on purpose. The transcript is the interface: you read the video as text, drag across the lines you want, and that becomes the clip. The machine proposes moments in the margin — up to five of them, each one takeable with a click — but it never decides. Out comes a vertical 9:16 clip with the words burned in, at 720p or 1080p for a credit, up to 4K on a plan.
Two limits worth knowing before you paste anything: an Instagram link returns the transcript but cannot be cut into a clip, and we have no scheduler — you download the file and post it yourself.
See the rates, or paste a link above and spend nothing finding out whether the cut is any good.
The questions people ask before they switch
A free start, not a timed trial. A free account comes with three finished clips — 720p or 1080p, no watermark, no card — good for 30 days. Nothing bills you on day eight. When the three are spent, credits come in packs that never expire.
Because the meter measures a different thing. Opus Clip charges one credit per minute of the video you import, so a 45-minute podcast costs 45 credits whether you take one clip out of it or ten. Here a credit buys one finished clip, so the same podcast, captioned, costs three credits if you cut three clips — one with no captions we can read also takes 1 credit per 20 minutes past your plan's listening limit to transcribe. If you cut a great many clips from one long video, the per-minute meter wins — see the arithmetic below, which says where the line is.
Credits bought in a pack do not expire. Credits included with a monthly plan last for that billing period. Opus Clip credits expire in 60 days on a monthly plan and 12 months on a yearly one, and remaining credits keep their original expiry after a cancellation.
Nothing is charged. A credit is spent when a clip is delivered, not when one is requested — a failed render spends neither a welcome credit nor a bought one.
Quite a lot: it scores clips for likely virality and picks them for you, generates B-roll and voice-over, dubs into other languages, schedules and posts to your social accounts, exports 4K and other aspect ratios, and offers brand templates, team seats and an API. This cuts the moment you mark, burns in captions, and hands you the file. If you want the suite, theirs is the better tool.
YouTube, TikTok and Facebook links can be cut into clips. An Instagram link returns the transcript but not a clip. You can also upload a file directly.