Creating AI videos for free: what still works without a subscription

This article is an overview based on vendor information, documentation and publicly available reporting, not a scored test of our own. Prices and features change quickly; the vendor's own terms always take precedence. We only score what we have used ourselves for weeks: those tools are listed under AI tools compared.

Why video is so much scarcer than images

A five-second video clip costs the vendor many times the computing time of an image. The free tiers are correspondingly tight, and in 2026 they have shrunk noticeably: several services have replaced their daily credit with a one-off starter pack or dropped it altogether.

What remains follows the same rules almost everywhere: a visible watermark, resolution around 720p, queues at peak times and no commercial use. That is enough for a first impression, not for a clip on a company website. The details in this article reflect the vendors' pricing and help pages in September 2026; in this field they change particularly often.

Fresh credit every day: Kling and Dreamina

Kling still hands out free credit but changed the rules in 2026: users without a subscription receive a monthly allowance, while daily bonus points go to subscribers. Clips come in 720p with a watermark and without commercial rights; image-to-video is included. According to the vendor, the cheapest subscription costs around 9 dollars a month, slightly less for the first month.

ByteDance also hands out daily credit on its Dreamina platform, through which Seedance runs; Dreamina itself gave a guideline of 120 points a day for August 2026, depending on account and region. Export without a watermark is not guaranteed on the free tier.

For both: the vendors are based in China, and processing is hard to assess by European data protection standards. Portraits of colleagues, customers or children do not belong there. More on both tools is in our portraits of Kling and of Seedance.

Try once: Runway, Hailuo, Pika, Higgsfield, Luma

Runway gives a one-off 125 credits at sign-up that are never topped up. Depending on the model, that is enough for a handful of short watermarked clips. After that, the Standard plan costs 12 dollars a month on annual billing, 15 dollars on monthly billing.

MiniMax's Hailuo gives new users a welcome pack that expires after three days; downloads carry a watermark, and commercial rights come only with a subscription. Pika does list a free plan, but according to its pricing page it no longer includes monthly credits, and the commercial licence only starts with the Creator plan at 35 dollars. Higgsfield is also reported to work only with one-off trial offers instead of recurring credit.

Luma Dream Machine no longer lists a free plan on its pricing page; older accounts in some cases keep a daily watermarked allowance. The Lite plan at around 10 dollars is not cleared for commercial use either; that starts with Plus at around 30 dollars.

Sora and Gemini: the big names drop out

OpenAI shut down its Sora video app in April 2026, and the developer interface follows on 24 September. Sora was never officially launched in the EU in any case. Guides recommending Sora as a free route are out of date.

Google does not create videos in the free Gemini app. A promotion with ten free videos in summer 2026 has ended. Video comes with the Google AI Plus subscription, which costs 4.99 euros a month in Germany and includes 200 credits for Google's video tool Flow; the stronger AI Pro costs 21.99 euros. Editing your own uploaded videos is not available in the European Economic Area. Our portrait of Veo gives an overview of Google's video model.

Meta AI remains free: its "Animate" feature turns an image into a short clip of up to ten seconds, with limits Meta does not publish. Anyone using it should know that Meta uses public posts by European users to train its models unless they object.

The honest calculation

A free clip costs no fee, but it costs time: waiting, repeats because the credit does not stretch to a second attempt, and in the end a watermark in 720p. For private experiments that is fine. For anything that gets published, the free clip is usually unusable simply because of the missing commercial rights.

The cheapest clean routes are therefore a monthly subscription: Google AI Plus at 4.99 euros, the smallest Kling plan at around 9 dollars, or Runway at 12 to 15 dollars. A proven approach: spend two weeks on the free tiers finding out which model suits your style, then book one month for the specific project and cancel again. The tools we have tested and scored are in the AI video generators & voice AI category.

Watermarks, people, labelling

Removing the watermark breaches the terms of use of practically every vendor, and it does not change the fact that the clip may not be used commercially. Anyone animating photos of people needs their consent; the right to one's own image applies to moving versions too.

Since 2 August 2026 the AI Act has also required that realistic footage of real people that has been artificially generated or manipulated is disclosed as such. How to make a good clip from a still image is described in the guide Image to video with AI.

In short: in 2026, recurring free credit is available almost only from Kling and Dreamina, always with a watermark and without commercial rights. Runway and Hailuo offer a one-off starter credit, Sora has been shut down, and Gemini requires a subscription. The cheapest clean route is a one-month subscription for a specific project, from 4.99 euros with Google AI Plus.