Recently, a company asked me to test its service and see if it was worth reviewing on .

The service in question was an AI video generation platform. I won't mention the specific company's name because what I discovered applies to every AI video-gen platform that follows a similar model.

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I agreed to kick the tires of the service, visited the website, and created an account.

After the first video I created was laughable at best, I thought, "Well, maybe it was my prompt." I went to give it another go, only to find out I'd already blown through the free credits I received upon signing up. I reached out to the company to ask if they could apply more credits to my account so I could continue testing.

They happily obliged.

Time to generate videos

With plenty of credits in my account, I set about refining my prompt, trying everything I could to create something that didn't make me go, "Huh?"

Video after video, I started seeing a trend, and by the time I'd had the service generate about 20 clips, I concluded that roughly 90% of the videos the service created were useless.

Here's the kicker: It doesn't matter if a video is useless; if it's generated, it uses credits.

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Let's say you pay$100 for 100 credits (that's not an accurate representation of the pricing structure, but it's easy to follow). If each video uses 10 credits, you'd get 10 videos from that$100. If 90% of those videos are useless, you'd wind up with 1 video you could use. The problem is, you still paid for 10.

I reached out to my contact to bring up the issue. I said maybe you could change the pricing model so that users are only charged for the videos they download. It made perfect sense to me. Unfortunately, the response was disappointing (but not surprising). My contact essentially informed me that it's extremely expensive for them to offer this service, so they have to pass that cost on to the consumer.

I'm certain that your reaction was similar to mine.

The cost factor

Imagine, if you will, you pay your$100.00 and none of the videos you generate are usable. You essentially just lost that money, not to mention the time wasted.

It seems to me that the video generation business is like gambling in Las Vegas (something I've never done). You continue feeding the machine and pulling the lever, even though you know the odds are against you.

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I'm not saying every video service has the same pricing model. For example, InVideo AI, Pictory, and Synthesia charge for minutes of AI generation used, while others use the credit system. There are some services (such as AI Studios) that charge you a set rate and allow you to create unlimited videos.

I've tried several of these AI video generation platforms and came away with the same response... meh. I've used incredibly detailed prompts, half-baked prompts, and even single-sentence prompts, and every service produced similar results.

Here's something fun: I even used AI to generate a prompt that would then be used by an AI video generation service. The results? Sad.

Also: 3 lucrative side hustles you can start right now with OpenAI's Sora video generator

I do understand the point the first company was trying to make. It probably is very expensive to run such a service. More than likely, the company is paying a third party to use their LLMs on remote machines (because AI uses so much energy and requires massive amounts of CPUs/GPUs), and they have to cover their costsandtry to turn a profit.

But charging users for video clips that they can't use is risky business... for both parties.

The lesson

Here's the thing: You get what you pay for.

Sort of. In some cases. But not often.

As the economy continues to buckle under various pressures, you and/or your company will have to keep tabs on spending. It's easy to think we can cut costs by using AI-generated video content. I would ask that you consider the true cost of these services. Is it really worth paying for a service that only gives you roughly 10% of what you signed up for? 

If there's one thing that's certain about this, it's that most of the videos your prompts generate will be worthless. Because of that, you should always use a free trial (if offered) to see if the service is up to the task. And if a service doesn't allow you to at least kick the tires once or twice, I would close that tab and move on to the next.

Also: The best AI image generators

You wouldn't buy a car without test-driving it. You wouldn't buy a house without visiting it first. So why would you pay for a service that you're not sure will deliver the goods?

I'm not saying every single AI video generation service out there is the same. But most of them are using the same (if not similar) collection of LLMs, and even if you're trained on AI video-gen prompts, it's a crapshoot. You roll the dice and hope it doesn't come up snake eyes... but all too often it does.

Spend your money wisely. If you can hire a company that specifically does video content for your needs, it might be smarter to go that route because you're more likely to get what you paid for.

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