By the minute.Never by the clip.
Not per clip, not per export. You are charged for the footage the pipeline actually reads, rounded up to the minute, plus a start-up charge for the half of the work that happens once however long the file is — both itemised before you spend anything, and both refunded in full when a job fails. An hour at the shipped settings is 220 credits. With the review off it is 96. With your own timestamps, 60.
3 hours is the longest source Cutlist takes. A longer recording is split into parts and sent as separate jobs.
Asking for more costs more, because the review reads three candidate windows for every clip you ask for — up to a shortlist that caps at 45. The footage is still only read once, so it is nowhere near four times the price of five.
- 60 source minutes
- see + listen review (x1.8 a minute)
- start-up, once a job (+112)
Covered by Creator, which includes 700 credits a month — 3 jobs like this one. The free trial covers one of them.
Trial
About 62 minutes of source through the whole engine. No card, no watermark, nothing held back.
- 280 credits, once - about 62 minutes of source
- Enough for one real episode - up to 89 minutes at five clips
- Every feature, nothing held back
- No watermark, no card required
Creator
Most teamsAbout 3 hours of source a month. Four half-hour episodes, with credits left for re-cuts.
- 700 credits a month
- See + listen review on every clip
- Motion-tracked reframing
- Timeline editor and re-cuts
- Full API, signed webhooks and MCP
- Timestamped ingest at the anchored rate
A monthly subscription. Self-serve checkout is not live yet: start on the trial today, and email us to be moved onto this plan the day billing opens.
An annual subscription. Self-serve checkout is not live yet: start on the trial today, and email us to be moved onto this plan the day billing opens.
Studio
For a couple of hour-long sources a week, and for putting clipping inside your own product.
- 2,400 credits a month
- About 11 hours of source
- The volume to run the API in production
- Full API, signed webhooks and MCP
A monthly subscription. Self-serve checkout is not live yet: start on the trial today, and email us to be moved onto this plan the day billing opens.
An annual subscription. Self-serve checkout is not live yet: start on the trial today, and email us to be moved onto this plan the day billing opens.
The same on every plan, including the free one: Clips live 30 days, source uploads 14 days from upload, and the account holds 250 GB across every project. Download what you want to keep.
For the week you shoot three times as much as usual. Bought once, never expire, spent only after your plan allowance runs out.
Yes, it costs more.
Every clip goes through a frontier model with the actual frames in hand, at the highest reasoning effort, on top of the largest transcription model there is. Before that, a sweep looks at the footage in its own right so a moment nobody narrates can still be found. None of that is cheap and none of it is optional here — it is the entire reason the cuts come back usable.
Prices went up in August 2026 because we built a model of what that actually costs instead of guessing, and published it — including which inputs are measured and which are still estimates, because the largest single input, the model’s own thinking tokens, is still one of the estimates. The old rate had not moved since the review was widened. We would rather charge what a good clip costs than quietly ship a cheaper pipeline and call it the same product.
The yearly price is worked out first, against what a job costs at the pessimistic end of our own measurements, and the monthly price is set above it. That is the opposite of the usual order, and it is why the saving is 14% rather than the two months free everyone advertises: two months free here would price a year below what the compute costs, and the people it would undercharge are the ones who committed for the longest.
See what it actually doesBefore you ask.
- Why per minute of source, not per finished clip?
- Because reading the footage is the work, and writing the files is not. Downloading a clip you already have costs nothing, however many times you do it. Changing one splits by what moves: moving the trim or changing the shape cuts new pictures, which is a re-cut at the anchored rate, and changing what is burned over them - a word, the caption style, a music bed - is a touch-up at a flat 4 credits. Either way the moment is already known, so there is no detection, no review and no ranking pass - but the video is encoded again and the source has to be fetched again to do it, so it is a few credits rather than nothing. The expensive half already happened and you are not charged for it twice. Asking for more clips up front does move the price, and honestly so: the review looks at three candidate windows for every clip you ask for, up to a shortlist that caps at 45, so twenty clips is forty-five windows of frontier-model judgement rather than fifteen.
- What happens if a job fails?
- The hold is returned in full. Cancelled jobs are refunded too. We do not bill for our own failures, and the ledger on your usage endpoint shows every movement with the job that caused it.
- What if I paste a link and the file turns out to be huge?
- A link cannot be measured until it is fetched, so the hold placed at submit is a nominal one. The real length is established before any of the expensive work runs - not after it, which is how this used to go. If your balance covers the corrected figure the hold is topped up and the job carries straight on; a small overrun should not interrupt anybody. If it does not, the job stops there: the hold comes back in full, nothing is charged, and you are told what the file turned out to be, what it would have cost and — where narrowing it would help — the longest window of it your balance does cover. We will not quietly cut it down to what you can afford - that is a decision about your work, not about our meter.
- Why is pasting timestamps so much cheaper?
- Because almost none of the expensive half runs. With moments supplied, the engine builds its model clients with a budget of zero calls - there is no discovery sweep, no grounded review, no ranking pass - so the start-up charge collapses from 112 credits to 1, and the source meters at the anchored rate. Not to nothing: a re-cut still encodes video and still moves the result out of the origin, and the estimate shows you that line either way. An hour is 60 credits that way against 220 found from scratch. Captions still need a transcript, and that part is billed when you ask for it.
- What is the start-up charge?
- The half of a job that happens once, however long the source is. The shortlist goes to the grounded review whether the file is five minutes or fifty, the sweep samples the same forty signal peaks, the ranking pass runs once, and every clip gets a caption written for it. On an hour of source that is 111.85 of the 220 credits; on a five-minute source it is most of the bill. It is shown as its own line in the estimate before you spend anything, because a meter that hides half of itself is not a meter.
- Do credits expire?
- The plan allowance resets each period and does not roll over. On a yearly plan that period is a year, so the whole twelve months of credits land at once and stay spendable until the year is out - which is the real difference between the two intervals, and part of why the yearly saving is a modest one rather than the two-months-free you may be expecting. Top-up packs never expire on either, and the allowance is always spent first so the packs you paid for survive to the next period.
- Is there a watermark on the free trial?
- No. Nothing we render carries a watermark on any plan, including the trial. A watermarked trial does not tell you whether the tool is good, it just tells you what the watermark looks like.
- Can I subscribe right now?
- The trial is self-serve today - make an account and start cutting. The paid plans are monthly or yearly subscriptions, but card checkout is not built yet, so there is no button here that would take your money. Email us and we will work the plan out with you by hand, and tell you the moment self-serve billing is live. We would rather say that than put a Subscribe button on a page that cannot charge you.
- Can I clip a broadcast I did not shoot?
- That is a rights question and the tool cannot answer it for you. Clipping footage you do not hold the rights to is on you, and the hosted terms say so plainly.