Costs
Reelcraft itself is free. The only costs are the AI services you connect, and each bills you directly. Reelcraft estimates the cost before each paid call and keeps a run within its budget, but it can't know your providers' current prices, so check them on their sites.
What costs money
| What | Billed by | How |
|---|---|---|
| Generate Text with an OpenRouter model | OpenRouter | By the amount of text sent and received |
| Generate Image with an OpenRouter model | OpenRouter | Per image, by the model |
| Generate Video (fal) | fal | Per clip. Usually the biggest cost |
| Generate Speech (ElevenLabs, Deepgram) | ElevenLabs or Deepgram | By the amount of text |
| Generate Sound Effect, Generate Music (ElevenLabs) | ElevenLabs | By the length of the sound |
| Analyze Media with Transcribe align (Deepgram) | Deepgram | By the length of the audio |
| Quality control | The judge model's provider | One call per scoring, and a transcription if the judge can't hear audio |
Every attempt costs, including ones that fail a check, fail quality control or are rejected. Redoing work costs again.
What uses your ChatGPT or Claude plan
Codex and ChatGPT models, including Automate Browser, use your ChatGPT plan instead of a per-use bill, and Claude models use your Claude plan. They count against your plan's own limits and are recorded as $0. See Connect Codex, Connect Claude and BrowserOS Neo.
What is free
- Concatenate Video, Render Timeline, Compose Timeline, Prepare Drawings, Preview Drawings, Render Motion Graphic, Cut Out Background and Export Subtitles: they run on your computer. They use its processor and time, not money.
- Analyze Media with Probe.
- Generate Speech with Qwen3-TTS (local): it runs on your computer. See Qwen3-TTS on your computer.
- Everything with VoiceStudio: speech, word timings, transcription in Analyze Media and for quality control. It runs on your computer.
- Human Input and Human Timeline Edit, and waiting for approval.
- Checks.
- The Fake (test) provider, so dry runs of everything except Deepgram transcription cost nothing.
- Storing your channels, blueprints and files.
Keeping spending in check
- Try blueprints with a dry run, and one stage at a time from the canvas.
- Set a sensible Run cap and a stage cap.
- Put human approval before expensive stages.
- Set a spending limit with each provider too. Most let you.
- Use the cost shown when you reject an output or retry a stage: it estimates what redoing the work will cost.