The only honest unit: a finished minute

Every comparison of these three platforms starts with plan prices, and plan prices are nearly useless. A $15 plan and a $19.99 plan tell you nothing until you know what a second of flagship video costs inside each, how many seconds you will discard, and whether the plan's credits survive to next month. So this article works in one unit throughout: 60 finished seconds of video, at each platform's flagship quality, assuming three generations per usable shot. That retry rate is not pessimism. Anyone who has generated video for a real deadline knows that one take in three being usable is a decent day.

The models compared are the current flagships as of October 12, 2026: MiniMax H3 inside Hailuo AI, Runway's Gen-4.5 inside the Runway suite, and Google's Veo 3.1 in its Quality tier inside Flow, with Veo's API prices shown alongside because Google sells the same model two ways and the two prices do not resemble each other.

What each platform charges, in its own words

MiniMax / Hailuo — H3 generates 5 to 15 seconds per clip at 24 FPS, up to 1440p, with native stereo sound and up to 12 reference files — images, video and audio in one prompt context. Audio inputs and the first five reference images are free; additional images cost $0.04 each, while reference-video inputs are billed separately. Hailuo's own estimate puts 2K generation at $0.073 to $0.120 per second depending on plan, or roughly $0.37 to $0.60 for a 5-second clip. The awkward part is the plans themselves. Hailuo's subscription terms list Standard at $14.99 a month with 1,000 credits, Pro at $54.99 with 4,500 and Master at $119.99 with 10,000, while the live checkout modal has recently shown lower promotional prices for the same tiers. Both numbers are Hailuo's. Treat the terms as the contract and the checkout as the price, and screenshot whichever one you pay. For the older Hailuo 2.3 model the credit arithmetic is at least concrete: 25 credits for a 6-second 768p clip, 50 for 6 seconds at 1080p.

Runway — the cleanest price list of the three. Gen-4.5 costs 12 credits per second. Standard is $15 a month, or $12 billed annually, with 625 credits — 52 seconds of Gen-4.5. Pro is $35, or $28 annually, with 2,250 credits, about 187 seconds. Max is $95, or $76 annually, with 9,500 credits. The free plan is a one-time 125 credits, not a monthly allowance. Runway's API sells credits at $0.01 each, which pins Gen-4.5 at $0.12 per second in the open, and the same credit pool also buys other models hosted in the suite, including Kling 3.0 and Veo 3.1. Credits on Standard and Pro expire at the billing date; Max rolls one month over; purchased top-ups never expire.

Veo / Google Flow — Veo is not sold as a product. It is a feature of a Google AI subscription, paid for in Flow credits. Everyone receives 50 Flow credits a day. AI Plus at $4.99 a month adds 200 credits a month, Pro at $19.99 adds 1,000, and Ultra adds 10,000 at $99.99 or 25,000 at $199.99. Inside Flow, an 8-second Veo 3.1 Lite generation costs 10 credits, Fast costs 20 credits (for non-Ultra users), and Quality costs 100 — for Ultra members Lite and Fast halve, Quality does not. Monthly Flow credits do not roll over. Through the Gemini API the same models are priced per second with audio: Lite $0.05 at 720p and $0.08 at 1080p, Fast $0.10 and $0.12, and the full Veo 3.1 at $0.40, rising to $0.60 at 4K.

The 60-second test

This is a generation-only budget, excluding editing, upscaling, external audio production, taxes and other workflow costs. It assumes two-thirds of generated footage is usable; actual results will vary.

One pass, no retries, flagship settings, 60 seconds of raw generation:

  • *MiniMax H3:* $4.38 to $7.20, at Hailuo's published per-second range
  • *Runway Gen-4.5:* $7.20, at 12 credits a second and one cent per credit
  • *Veo 3.1 Quality:* $24.00 by API at $0.40 a second, or about 750 Flow credits

Now the same job the way it actually happens — three takes per keeper, 180 generated seconds:

  • *MiniMax H3:* about $13 to $22. The cheapest flagship footage of the three, and the 15-second clip length means fewer joins to hide.
  • *Runway Gen-4.5:* about $22, or almost exactly one Pro month. Pro's 2,250 credits buy 187 seconds of Gen-4.5, so the job fits with seven seconds to spare and nothing left for the next one. The $28 figure is the monthly equivalent of an annual subscription, not a per-project charge. The example consumes 1,080 of the plan's 2,250 monthly credits.

Veo 3.1 in Flow, on AI Pro. Quality costs 100 credits per eight-second generation. Eight generations produce 64 seconds for 800 credits, leaving almost no room for rejected material. Under the article's two-thirds acceptance assumption, budget 12 generations, or 96 generated seconds, costing 1,200 credits. That exceeds AI Pro's 1,000 monthly credits. At 20 credits per generation, Fast costs 240 credits for the same 12 generations — a 1,000-credit allowance covers four such 12-generation budgets, with 40 credits left.

A balance scale weighing gold coins against a finished film reel, with discarded takes in a basket beside it
The meter runs on generations, not keepers: discarded takes are part of the price. Editorial illustration: alfw.ai

The Veo number comes with an escape hatch, and it is the most useful production tip in this article. Veo 3.1 Fast by API costs $0.10 to $0.12 a second — Runway money — and Lite costs $0.05 to $0.08. Draft in Lite, approve in Fast, and spend Quality's $0.40 a second only on the shots that survive. Run the whole job at Quality and you have paid a fourfold premium to discover, at maximum fidelity, that the composition was wrong.

The mirror-image trap sits in Hailuo. H3 is cheap enough per second that sloppy prompting feels free. It is not: at three takes per keeper the bill has already tripled, and a kitchen-sink prompt carrying twelve references fails in more dimensions at once than a focused one. Our earlier field guide to the H3 credit economy makes the same point from the workflow side: draft cheap, give each generation one job, and pay for length only after the idea is proven.

Commercial rights: three different answers

Hailuo / MiniMax — the clear grant lives in the paid plans. Under Hailuo's subscription terms, content you create and download during a paid plan period is yours, including for commercial use, and paid downloads carry no watermark. The free tier is the opposite in every respect: watermarked downloads, and general terms that bar commercial use of the service. Do not build client work on free credits and upgrade later expecting the earlier clips to be covered; the grant is written around the paid period. MiniMax's own H3 page is blunter about the paperwork, directing users to the Hailuo terms for the licensing specifics on their plan — which is a fair summary of how much of the detail sits in the terms rather than the marketing.

Runway — its current terms, updated September 15, 2026, state in substance that the company does not claim ownership of your inputs or outputs and does not restrict your commercial use of outputs, as long as you comply with the agreement. That is the broadest of the three positions, and for most client work it is enough. The clause to read twice is the next one: Runway reserves the right to use inputs and outputs to train and improve its models. For a public ad, that is a footnote. For unreleased product footage, a client's unlaunched campaign, or anything under NDA, it is a reason to route the job through an enterprise agreement or a different tool.

Google / Veo — Google's terms likewise do not claim ownership of generated content, and Google's own support answers have confirmed that Veo clips made in Flow may be used commercially on the paid plans. Two conditions travel with every clip. First, all Veo output carries an invisible SynthID watermark: it does not restrict use, but it means provenance is detectable, and stripping it is not on the menu. Second, Flow's content rules are the strictest of the three in practice — no videos of prominent people, and limits around identifiable minors — so a concept can be legal, licensed and still ungeneratable. There is also a tier nuance developers should know: on the Gemini API's free tier, content may be used to improve Google's products; on the paid tier, it is not. Veo video has no API free tier, but anyone prototyping on free text and image tiers before moving to paid video should know which side of that line their prompts sat on.

A film strip passing through a sealed contract scroll, one frame glowing with a faint watermark pattern
Rights, watermarks and training clauses are part of the product. Editorial illustration: alfw.ai

One limit applies to all three, and no plan upgrade removes it. A commercial-use grant from a platform settles your position with the platform. It does not give you rights in a face, a logo, a song or a location that appears in the frame, and it does not make purely generated footage copyrightable in jurisdictions that require human authorship. If a client needs to own the shot in the strong sense, that argument is built in the edit — direction, selection, compositing and finishing — whichever model made the raw clip.

Best use cases, plainly

Choose MiniMax H3 when the job is volume. Social output at daily cadence, stylised and anime work, product clips that need several variants, game and concept footage, anything where you are buying iteration rather than a single perfect shot. The 15-second native length, stereo sound and multi-reference prompting cut real production steps, the per-second price is the lowest here at flagship quality, and the open-weight local route we covered for H3 gives technical teams a second, self-hosted path that neither rival offers in the same way. Accept the costs: plan pricing that disagrees with itself across Hailuo's own pages, and rights paperwork you have to read in the subscription terms rather than on a pricing card.

Choose Runway when the job is a client's. Agency and brand work, editing-heavy production, and teams that need generation, video-to-video editing, voice and upscaling in one seat with one credit pool. The budgeting is the most predictable in this comparison — a producer can price a job in credits per second before anyone writes a prompt — and Max's ProRes, HDR and image-sequence exports are the only studio-delivery features on this list. You pay more per finished minute than H3, and the training clause deserves a conversation before confidential material goes in.

Choose Veo when the shot has to be believed. Photoreal hero footage, dialogue with native audio, and the one 8-second centrepiece of a campaign. If you already pay for Google AI Pro for Gemini, Veo is effectively bundled: your 1,000 monthly Flow credits are ten Quality shots, and the sensible workflow is Lite and Fast for everything else. What Veo is not is a volume tool at Quality tier, and the 8-second ceiling means every longer piece is a stitching exercise by design.

How to decide in one pass

Four checks, in order, before you pay for any of the three.

  • *Your cost per finished minute is the metric.* Count your real retry rate for a week before choosing; it moves the bill more than any plan discount.
  • *If one platform is only for drafting, say so in the budget.* The cheapest professional setup in this comparison is two tools: H3 or Veo Lite/Fast for exploration, and a flagship pass somewhere for finals.
  • *Read the clause about your inputs, not just your outputs.* Ownership of the clip is settled almost everywhere. What the platform may do with what you uploaded is where the three genuinely differ.
  • *Check the price on the day you pay.* Hailuo's promotional checkout, Runway's annual billing and Google's Ultra tiers all move the per-second figure materially, and none of the three locks its credit exchange rate in the terms.

Sources

  1. [1] Runway, official pricing page (checked October 12, 2026)Read source
  2. [2] Runway, Terms of Use, last updated September 15, 2026Read source
  3. [3] Hailuo AI, MiniMax H3 official model page — specs and per-second pricing estimateRead source
  4. [4] Google Support, Manage your Google Flow credits — plan allowances and per-generation costsRead source
  5. [5] Google, Gemini API pricing — Veo 3.1 Lite, Fast and Standard per-second ratesRead source
  6. [6] Kingy AI, Hailuo AI review — live subscription modal snapshot, August 2026 (promotional plan prices and credits)Read source
  7. [7] Note, "Which Video Generation AIs Can You Try for Free, and Which Can Be Used Commercially?" September 2026 edition — Hailuo subscription terms and Google terms cross-check (verified September 26, 2026)Read source