Two video generators price a shot by the rendered second

The process wall

A maker without access to a Western video generator once had to outsource anything beyond a still image, or light and shoot the plate directly. During 2024, two China-based systems, Kuaishou's Kling and MiniMax's Hailuo, opened video generation to that same maker, priced and licensed like a cloud render service rather than sold as a finished creative product. What changed the workflow was access: a browser tab and a balance of points or credits, not a production slate.

What the documents show

Kling's API pricing page, retrieved 16 September 2026, bills by the rendered second: its listed flagship tier prices a per-second rate in points, at parity with yuan, that rises with resolution from 720p to 1080p to 4K, and separately for a silent render against one carrying generated sound. Hailuo, now folded into its parent's MiniMax branding, sells access through a credit balance rather than a published per-second card on its own pricing page. Both storefronts describe current models, Kling 3.0 and MiniMax H3, superseding whatever shipped when each product first opened to overseas makers in 2024: the page a maker reads today is not the page that described the tool's original release.

Authorship and limitation

Kling's own user service agreement, in effect from 5 December 2025 at retrieval, names the mechanism worth understanding before buying a model's output: one clause assigns intellectual property in generated output to the user or rights holder within the scope permitted by law, but a separate clause grants the company a royalty-free licence to reuse anything a user inputs or generates, without payment, across a named list of the operator's own apps and platforms. That is the distinction between ownership and a retained licence: a producer nominally owns a clip yet has already licensed it back to the platform that rendered it. The same terms restrict watermark removal to paying members. The operator, Kuaishou Technology, is independently identifiable through its own investor relations site as the Hong Kong-listed parent of Kling.

What survives

A producer buying model minutes from either company is buying compute against a published or credited rate, not a guarantee of a specific look, a warranty of accuracy, or exclusive control of the clip: the platform's own terms describe a broad reserved licence and, for Kling, a members-only watermark policy. Editorially, that reserved licence is worth negotiating around before a paid commercial use, not assumed away.

• Read the intellectual-property clause of whichever platform's terms are live on the day of a paid render, since these documents change on stated effective dates.
• Compare the per-second or per-credit price at 720p, 1080p and with-audio tiers before costing a shot list.
• Check whether watermark removal or output-licence terms are gated behind a membership tier rather than included in the base price.

Read against each other, the two products describe the same shift: video generation sold as metered compute with a reserved platform licence, whose exact terms are only as current as the day they were last retrieved.