Captions AI Pricing 2026: Plans, Credits and a 30-Second Ad's Cost

500 credits a month, 80 of them per 30-second video

Captions' pricing page lists Max, the card it marks "MOST POPULAR", at $24.99/mo with 500 credits a month, and Frontier at $69.99/mo for 1,400 credits, with 2x and 4x tiers at $139.99/mo and $279.99/mo for 2,800 and 5,600 credits; its footnote calls every one of them a US-dollar price for Captions' iOS plans, which is how the page read on 2026-10-21. At the rate Captions' credits page gives for Prompt to Video, its talking AI-actor feature, of 16 credits every 6 seconds on average use, a 30-second video spends 80 credits, about $4.00 on any of those four plans. The meter decides the bill.

We priced the same 30-second ad on the Novoads meter as well. A Novoads talking actor bills the started minute: 200 credits at 720p, which is $9.80 of a Plus plan, or 100 credits at 480p. At 30 seconds and monthly prices, Captions is cheaper on every plan. Novoads comes out ahead on a 60-second ad at 480p, on the lowest monthly bill that includes AI actors, and on Google Veo 3.1 clips counted per second.

We have not used Captions hands-on and made no account, so the Captions side comes from its pricing page, its help center and Apple's App Store listing as they read on 2026-10-21, each help page carrying its own older date where we use it, and the Novoads side from our plan configuration and one of our own runs. Which tool fits which ad is a separate question: our Captions review weighs what it does for ads and where it falls short, and our comparison of Captions AI alternatives sets it against other tools. This page is about price.

Every Captions plan, and the page that prints each price

Captions spreads its prices over three surfaces, and no single one lists them all. The pricing page carries four paid prices and an Enterprise card, all scoped to iOS; the help center adds three cheaper plans; Apple's App Store listing shows the iOS purchases themselves.

Max, three Frontier tiers and Enterprise

The pricing page shows three cards: Max, Frontier and Enterprise. Max carries the "MOST POPULAR" label and a feature list that includes creating "digital twins or custom AI actors" and generating "custom B-roll, music, sound effects, images, and more", with 500 credits a month. Frontier is "Everything in Max, plus" a larger credit grant and "our most sophisticated tier of generative AI models". Its card has the page's only switch, between 1x, 2x and 4x usage, and nothing on the page toggles monthly against yearly billing. Enterprise reads "Custom pricing" and promises "Bulk credit discounts". The credits help page (last modified September 21, 2026) prints the same prices and credit grants in a table of its own.

Captions' subscription-and-billing help page (also last modified September 21, 2026) adds seats to the same plans: Max's 500 credits come with two seats, one admin and one more; Frontier has three, Frontier 2x four and Frontier 4x five.

Free, Lite and Basic live in the help center

The pricing page leaves out three plans that Captions' subscriptions page (last modified September 21, 2026) describes:

• Free: 60 to 200 lifetime credits, one template, and watermark-free exports of basic edits such as captions, trims and transitions. The pricing page's own FAQ confirms "there is a free version of Captions", while its comparison table marks Free's AI usage credits as "None". The two pages disagree on whether those credits exist, so we report both.
• Lite: $4.99 USD a month, sold on Captions Android, and it "can only be restored and used on Android".
• Basic (formerly Pro): $9.99 USD a month with 200 credits that renew monthly. Apple's US App Store listing showed it three ways among Captions' in-app purchases on 2026-10-21: "Captions Basic - monthly $9.99", "Caption Basic - yearly $64.99" (about $5.42 a month) and "Captions Basic - weekly $5.99".

Basic does not reach AI actors in practice. The subscriptions page lists "Mirage-generated actors" among Max's features and not among Basic's, and Captions' watermark page (last modified September 21, 2026) says AI Creator "for non-grandfathered users", AI Edit and AI-generated media used on a Basic plan export with a watermark. Our reading: for an AI-actor ad with no watermark, Max is the cheapest Captions plan.

Plan	Price as listed	Credits a month	Where it is printed
Free	$0	60 to 200, one time	Help center
Lite	$4.99 a month	Not stated	Help center, Android only
Basic	$9.99 a month	200	Help center, App Store
Max	$24.99/mo	500	Pricing page
Frontier	$69.99/mo	1,400	Pricing page
Frontier 2x	$139.99/mo	2,800	Pricing page
Frontier 4x	$279.99/mo	5,600	Pricing page
Enterprise	Custom pricing	Custom	Pricing page

Three limits that travel with every figure

1. iOS only. The footnote under the plans reads "*All prices displayed in USD. Features and prices reflect iOS plans only." It says nothing about web or Android prices, so neither do we.
2. No yearly price. The pricing FAQ says "A yearly plan bills for 12 months upfront, at a discounted rate", and the subscriptions page promises yearly plans "an automatic discount", but we found no yearly figure for Max or Frontier on the pricing page, in the help-center pages we read or in Apple's list of in-app purchases. Every Captions number in this post is a monthly one.
3. Checkout currency. The subscriptions page warns that at checkout "you may see prices listed in your local currency and may be above or below the USD price." The pricing page itself carries no location logic: on 2026-10-21 it showed the same US-dollar figures to a fetch from an IP address that geolocates to Chile and to fetches from outside Chile. So $24.99/mo is the page's list price for the iOS plan, not a promise of what a given card is charged.

What a Captions credit buys

Every generative feature in Captions draws on one monthly balance. The credits page (last modified September 21, 2026) lists images, videos, sounds, music, voiceovers, text prompt to videos and AI Edits as the things that deduct from it, and it prices them three ways: a project rate for Prompt to Video and AI Edit, ranges for the add-ons inside a project, and a price per clip or image for named models.

Prompt to Video: 16 credits every 6 seconds, on average

Captions' help center titles the feature "Prompt to Video: Create Talking Videos from Text Prompts". Its page (last modified August 17, 2026) describes three layers in one render: a Mirage-generated actor speaking to camera as the A-roll, generated images and video as the B-roll, and an edit pass that adds transitions, sound effects, music, zooms and cuts. The result, in Captions' words, is "a fully produced and fully AI-generated talking video".

The credits page prices that at "16 credits every 6 seconds", in a column headed "Costs Based On Average Use". Two words in that header carry weight. "Average" means one render can debit more or less than the rate. "Use" means generation runs the meter, not export: the same page says credits are spent whether or not a project is exported or saved. Every retake counts.

Clip models and add-ons draw on the same balance

Inside a project, generated media comes off the same balance. The credits page lists add-ons by range (generated images at 1 to 3 credits, generated video at 1 to 20, generated music at 1 to 2, chat-based editing at 2 credits a message plus 1 an action) and named models at a price per clip:

• Google Veo 3.1 Audio, 4 seconds: 64 credits
• Google Veo 3.1 Audio Fast, 6 seconds: 36 credits
• Seedance 2.0: 61 credits, no clip length printed
• Kling 2.1: 140 credits, no clip length printed
• Nano Banana Pro, one image: 6 credits

At Max's price of about 5 cents a credit, the 4-second Veo 3.1 clip with audio is about $3.20. Chat edits add up the same way: five messages that each trigger two actions cost 5 x (2 + 2) = 20 credits, about $1.00 on Max, before any generation they ask for. The pages we read do not say whether the B-roll that Prompt to Video generates sits inside the 16-credit average or is billed as one of these add-ons.

Rollover up to three months, and no credits for sale

• Rollover: on Basic and above, unused credits carry into the next billing period, with the balance "capped at 3× your monthly allowance (current month + up to 2× in rollover)."
• No top-ups on standard plans: "It is not possible to buy individual credits." Top-up credits exist only for existing Teams or Business customers and for Frontier 4x users; everyone else upgrades.
• Downgrades and cancellations cost credits: a downgrade cuts the balance to the new plan's cap at once, and canceling forfeits whatever is left at the end of the billing period.

Our reading: rollover makes Max a decent bank for a quiet month, and the missing top-up turns a busy month into an upgrade.

One 30-second AI-actor ad on each Captions plan

None of the Captions pages we read prints this number, so we worked it out from two that print its inputs: the plan prices and the per-second rate.

Five six-second blocks, 80 credits

Thirty seconds is five 6-second blocks. At 16 credits a block that is 80 credits, which is 16% of Max's monthly 500. Divide each plan's price by its credits and every tier lands on the same figure:

Plan	Price per credit	One 30-second video	Videos a month
Max	4.998 cents	about $4.00	6
Frontier	4.999 cents	about $4.00	17
Frontier 2x	5.000 cents	about $4.00	35
Frontier 4x	5.000 cents	about $4.00	70

Basic prices a credit at the same 5 cents ($9.99 for 200), but it does not list Mirage-generated actors, so it stays out of the table. A 60-second video doubles to ten blocks and 160 credits, about $8.00 on any plan in it.

Why moving up buys volume, not a lower rate

From Max to Frontier 4x the price of a credit never moves off 5 cents. A bigger plan buys more 30-second videos a month, more seats, "Faster speed generations" and Frontier's tier of models. It does not buy a cheaper credit at monthly prices; the pricing page offers "Bulk credit discounts" only under Enterprise, at a custom price.

Developers have a second meter. Captions' API pricing page (last modified August 13, 2026) sells Mirage Avatar X at "$0.15 per second (6-second increments)", so 30 seconds through the API is $4.50, priced apart from the app plans. Our breakdown of that API price compares it with a reseller's rate for the same model. Other tools cut their meters differently again, and our HeyGen pricing and Arcads pricing breakdowns walk through theirs.

What "average use" leaves open

• One real render can debit more or fewer than 80 credits; the rate is an average, not a quote.
• Whether generated B-roll comes out of the average or out of the add-on prices is not stated on the pages we read.
• Retakes spend credits too, because generation, not export, runs the meter.
• The credits page gives no output resolution for Prompt to Video, so we set it beside both Novoads sizes below.

The same ad in Novoads, billed by the started minute

The Novoads meter counts minutes where Captions counts six-second blocks, and that one difference drives most of the comparison.

200 credits at 720p, 100 at 480p, up to a full minute

A Novoads talking actor turns a script into a video of an AI actor delivering it, and it bills by the started minute, per actor: 200 credits at 720p, the default size, or 100 at 480p. A 30-second ad is one started minute. So is a 60-second one. The 61st second starts a second minute.

What those 200 credits buy is the actor's take: no generated B-roll and no automatic edit pass in that price. That difference in what each render delivers counts in Captions' favor.

What 30 seconds costs on each Novoads plan

• Starter, $15 a month for 200 credits, monthly only: $15.00 at 720p, the whole month, or $7.50 at 480p, two a month.
• Plus, $49 a month for 1,000 credits: $9.80 at 720p or $4.90 at 480p, five or ten a month; billed annually at $39 a month, $7.80 or $3.90.
• Ultra 3,000, $129 a month: $8.60 or $4.30, 15 or 30 a month; at $99 a month billed annually, $6.60 or $3.30.
• Ultra 6,000, $250 a month: $8.33 or $4.17, 30 or 60 a month; at $194 a month billed annually, $6.47 or $3.23.
• Ultra 9,000, $375 a month: $8.33 or $4.17, 45 or 90 a month; at $270 a month billed annually, $6.00 or $3.00.

Each of those counts holds for 60-second ads too, since a minute is one meter tick.

What one of our runs cost

On 2026-10-09 we sent a short line through the Novoads REST API: the library actor Antonella, with the voice Paloma, saying a 7.96-second Spanish line about a serum ("Hola, soy Lucía. Probé este sérum durante dos semanas y mi piel se ve más luminosa..."), at 480p. It came back in 23 seconds and said the line word for word. The debit was 100 credits, exactly what a 60-second take at 480p costs, because the started minute is the unit. A second API call, 41 minutes later, burned in subtitles in the Classic style for 3 credits, 28 seconds from request to file, in six cues; the one slip was "serum" losing its accent.

Talking actor (480p) with Subtitles (Classic) · an 8-second Spanish line about a serum, then subtitles burned in by a second API call · 103 credits (100 for the clip, 3 for the subtitles) · rendered 2026-10-09

In Novoads, burned-in subtitles are a separate step at 3 credits in the Classic style or 5 in the Animated one. Captions' subscriptions page puts captions among the exports of its Free plan. On subtitles alone, Captions is the cheaper tool. Why that step is worth paying for at all is a separate story, and our piece on speech-to-text for ad captions tells it.

Where Captions costs less, and where Novoads does

Which tool is cheaper depends on the length of the ad, its size, and whether the Novoads plan is billed monthly or yearly.

Captions costs less for a 30-second talking video

• At monthly prices, its about $4.00 per 30 seconds beats Novoads' 720p talking actor on every plan ($8.33 to $15.00) and the 480p one too ($4.17 to $7.50), narrowly on the two largest Ultra plans.
• Prompt to Video renders more than an actor take: it adds generated B-roll and an edit pass, though the pages we read do not say whether that B-roll sits inside the $4.00.
• Unused credits roll over, up to three months' worth. Novoads plan credits reset every month and do not roll over.
• Its Free plan exports captions; Novoads charges 3 credits for subtitles.

Verdict for a 30-second talking ad at monthly prices: Captions.

Novoads' annual 480p prices ($3.00 to $3.90) fall under Captions' $4.00, but Captions sells yearly plans too, at a discount its pages do not print, so that comparison is not like for like and we do not claim it.

Novoads costs less for a minute at 480p and the first bill

• A 60-second ad at 480p. Novoads still bills one started minute, 100 credits: $7.50 on Starter, $4.90 on Plus, $4.17 to $4.30 on Ultra, every one under Captions' about $8.00 for 160 credits.
• The cheapest plan with AI actors. Starter is $15 a month and includes the actor catalog; Captions lists Mirage-generated actors from Max, at $24.99/mo. Starter's 200 credits make one 30-second ad at 720p or two at 480p, where Max makes about six at the average rate, so the lower bill buys fewer ads.
• Buying more without upgrading. Every Novoads plan can add top-up packs, from 100 credits for $12 to 4,000 for $340, valid for 90 days; Captions sells no individual credits on its standard plans. Top-up credits cost more than plan credits (12 cents each in the smallest pack, 8.5 cents in the largest), so they suit a spike, not a habit.

At 720p a 60-second ad stays slightly cheaper on Captions at monthly prices: about $8.00 against $8.33 on Ultra 6,000 or 9,000, $8.60 on Ultra 3,000, $9.80 on Plus and $15.00 on Starter.

Ten ads a month on each meter

Volume changes the answer, because both meters are sold in plan-sized blocks. Ten 30-second AI-actor ads a month need:

• Captions: 800 credits at the average-use rate. Max's 500 do not cover that, so the plan is Frontier, and the 600 credits it leaves unused roll over into the next month, up to the 3× cap.
• Novoads at 480p: 1,000 credits, exactly the grant of Plus at $49 a month, with nothing left over.
• Novoads at 720p: 2,000 credits, which takes Ultra 3,000 at $129 a month and leaves 1,000 credits that reset when the month ends.

At ten a month the Novoads bill at 480p is the smaller of the two and the 720p bill the larger. Rollover softens Captions' jump to Frontier, because the unused credits carry forward; unused Novoads plan credits do not.

Google Veo 3.1 clips on both meters

Captions lists Google Veo 3.1 Audio at 64 credits for a 4-second clip: about $3.20 on Max, or 16 credits a second. Novoads charges a flat 72 credits for a Google Veo 3.1 clip of 4, 6 or 8 seconds, at 720p or 1080p, with sound: $5.40 on Starter, $3.53 on Plus, $3.10 on Ultra 3,000 and $3.00 on Ultra 6,000 or 9,000.

• One 4-second clip: cheaper on Captions than on Starter or Plus, pricier than on any Ultra plan.
• Per second at full length: an 8-second Novoads clip works out to 9 credits a second, about 44 cents a second on Plus, against Captions' 80 cents a second.
• What we cannot compare: Captions' table prints no 8-second Veo 3.1 row and no resolution.

Verdict for Veo 3.1 footage by the second: Novoads.

How Novoads solves the per-minute ad budget

Novoads turns a script and an AI actor, or a product image and a clip model, into a downloadable ad on one credit balance, from $15 a month on Starter for 200 credits.

One meter for actors and clips

The talking actor bills by the started minute, so a script can run to 60 seconds without changing the price, and 480p halves it. The same credits run the clip models: Seedance 2.0 Mini at 1 credit a second at 720p (a 15-second clip is 15 credits, about 74 cents on Plus), Kling v3 Pro at 2 credits a second, Omni Flash at 24 credits for 8 seconds at 720p, and Google Veo 3.1 at the flat 72. Captions' credits table lists none of the first three, so they get no side-by-side here; our Seedance 2.0 pricing guide prices that model family across the places that sell it.

What every plan includes

The plan sets the number of credits, and the "Included in every plan" rows of the pricing table list what stays the same on every rung:

• the actor catalog, and your own actor made from a photo
• HD downloads
• top-up credit packs
• the API and MCP connector, and the Claude Code skill pack

Screenshot: novoads.ai/pricing, "Included in every plan" (columns Starter, Plus, Ultra, Custom): 200, 1,000 and 3,000 to 9,000 credits a month, and the actor catalog, your own actor from a photo, HD download, top-up packs, the API and MCP connector and the Claude Code skill pack on every plan, taken 2026-10-22

Every plan and the credit price of each model sit on the Novoads pricing page, so the arithmetic above can be rerun for any script length before you pay for either tool.

Price the meter, not the plan

A plan's price tells you what a month costs; the meter tells you what an ad costs. On Captions' meter, 30 seconds of a talking AI actor is about $4.00 on any plan at its average-use rate, and that beats Novoads at 30 seconds. On Novoads' meter, a full minute costs what 30 seconds does and 480p halves it, which beats Captions on every 60-second ad at 480p. The useful question is not which tool is cheap but which meter matches the length of the ads you actually run. If those ads need a filmed person instead, what a human UGC creator charges per video is the number to set beside both.