My AI Shorts: 9 Cents vs $1.33 vs $3.23 (Real Receipts)

I've built a lot of AI Shorts in the last two weeks, and I logged what each one cost. Here are three of them side by side: the cheapest kind I make, a mid-priced one with an AI video hook, and the priciest one I ever built. Every number comes from my own build notes and my ElevenLabs account usage, plus the two public pricing pages linked below.

Tier 1: about 9 cents

"My AI Picks, Q1 vs Q4" came off my production line on Oct 31, 2026. The paid part was the voice: 494 ElevenLabs credits for the text-to-speech plus 35 for the Scribe transcript check that compares each spoken line with the script. That's 529 credits. My account gets 131,000 credits a month on the $22 Creator plan (the public pricing page lists 121,000 for Creator), which works out to about $0.000168 a credit, so the Short cost about 8.9 cents.

The rest of the line looks the same. Across 10 production-line Shorts I measured between Oct 31 and Nov 2, the voice plus check ranged from 4.5 to about 14.4 cents, with an average of 8.8 cents. The picture on these is cards and type drawn in code with HyperFrames, with no AI video clips. Claude writes and builds them on my flat monthly plan, so it doesn't add a per-Short cost.

Tier 2: $1.33

The original Oct 24 build of my REA app-cloning Short used kie.ai, a pay-as-you-go reseller for image and video models. It took 6 AI images at 10 credits each and a Seedance video clip for the hook at 205 credits: 265 credits. kie lists a credit at about $0.005, so that's about $1.33. The voice was extra (659 ElevenLabs characters) and isn't in that number.

Tier 3: $3.23, and it never shipped

The priciest Short I've built was a miniature-diorama explainer about OpenAI's humanoid robot, also from Oct 24. It used 646.8 kie credits, about $3.23: 9 reference-to-video clips (393.6 credits), 3 regenerations to replace clips with a hidden cut or a figure walking the wrong way (131.2), 10 stills (40) and an A/B test pair (82). It's still a draft. It was never published or scheduled.

The verdict

The 9-cent tier is the one I keep making. Every Short on my production line now runs on it, and the line ships Shorts every day.

The catch

The three tiers don't count the same things. Tiers 2 and 3 are kie spend only, with the voice on top. Tier 1 is ElevenLabs credits only, priced at my plan's rate, and it leaves out the monthly plans themselves (ElevenLabs and Claude). If you're on a different plan, your per-credit price will be different too.

Here's how you get paid

My opinion, no income guaranteed: sell a local business (a shop, a clinic, a gym) a weekly Short package built on the cheap tier. One client, one format, one Short a week. On top of your monthly plans, your running cost per Short on this tier can be cents of voice, so price the package on your time: the hours you spend scripting, fact-checking and reviewing each one.