Opus Clip takes a long video, finds the moments worth clipping, and returns vertical shorts with captions, reframing and a virality score. The pricing rule that decides everything: one credit equals one minute of source video processed, not one clip produced. A 60-minute podcast costs 60 credits whether it hands back five clips or twenty — so your bill tracks how much footage you feed it, and the way to get value is uploading material dense enough to yield clips throughout.
Reviewed by EdGrows·Updated Aug 18, 2026Affiliate link — we may earn a commission
This analysis is based on documentation, public user reports, and vendor materials — not yet on our own hands-on testing. How we rate
This is the entire pricing model, and most people get it backwards.
A credit is a minute of source video processed — not a clip produced.
Feed Opus Clip a 60-minute podcast and it spends 60 credits. It might return five clips. It might return twenty. Same cost.
Which flips the optimisation. You're not trying to generate fewer clips; you're trying to upload footage that's dense enough to yield clips throughout. A rambling two-hour stream with four good moments burns 120 credits for four outputs. A tight 40-minute interview with a strong moment every few minutes burns 40 and gives you a month of posts.
Two mechanical details: clips under a minute cost one credit minimum, partial minutes round down, and publishing to X costs an extra credit per post — refunded if the post fails.
| Plan | Price | Credits | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 60 min/mo | Watermark, exports expire after 3 days |
| Starter | $15/mo | 150 min | Monthly only. No scheduler. |
| Pro | $29/mo or $174/yr | 300 min | Annual grants 3,600 credits upfront |
| Business | Custom | Negotiated | API access, unlimited seats |
Two things comparison articles routinely miss.
Starter has no annual option. It's month-to-month at $15, full stop.
Starter has no social scheduler. That starts at Pro. So the "cheap" plan still leaves you paying for a separate scheduling tool, which for most creators erases the $14 saving immediately.
Then there's the annual maths, which is unusually aggressive: Pro at $174 a year is an effective $14.50 a month against $29 monthly — roughly half. If you're confident you'll use Opus Clip for a year, annual Pro costs about the same as monthly Starter and includes everything Starter doesn't.
That's the whole plan decision, really. Monthly Starter and monthly Pro work out to a similar rate per minute; you're just buying a bigger bucket. The only way to meaningfully cut your per-minute cost is the annual Pro commitment.
Monthly-plan credits expire after 60 days. Annual credits last 12 months.
For creators whose production comes in bursts — three episodes in a week, then nothing for a month — this matters more than the headline price. Monthly subscribers who assume they're accumulating a balance find it quietly resetting, and it's one of the more common complaints in recent reviews.
Annual Pro handles this better than anything else on the list: 3,600 credits granted upfront with a year to spend them means a quiet quarter doesn't cost you anything.
The moment-finding works. That's the product, and it's the reason people tolerate the rest.
Upload an hour of talking and Opus Clip identifies the segments with a hook, cuts them vertically, tracks the speaker with auto-reframing, and burns in captions. The virality score ranks them 0–100 on hook strength, emotional language and story arc.
That score is best understood as a sorting tool rather than a prediction. It doesn't know what TikTok will do with your video. It does know which of your fifteen clips has the strongest opening, and publishing in that order beats publishing in chronological order — which is what most people do when clipping by hand.
The time saving is concrete: the alternative to Opus Clip isn't a cheaper tool, it's rewatching your own episode with a scrubber, which nobody enjoys and most people therefore skip.
Reviews across platforms surface the same issues consistently, and it would be dishonest to skip them.
Processing stalls. Multiple reports of videos hanging for hours or never completing. Not universal, but frequent enough to plan around if you're on a deadline.
Undocumented daily caps on paid tiers. One G2 reviewer noted speech enhancement limited to ten clips per day — a ceiling that isn't on the pricing page.
Cancellation and refund friction. A Trustpilot reviewer described the cancellation flow as deliberately multi-step; another reported a four-week wait on a refund for a $107 yearly plan.
Projects disappear after cancelling. Three days, even with credits remaining. Export anything you care about before you cancel.
None of these are dealbreakers on their own. Together they're the reason this isn't a higher-rated tool despite the core feature working well.
Against CapCut: CapCut is a manual editor — you decide what to cut. Opus Clip decides for you. They're the standard pairing rather than competitors: Opus Clip finds the moments, CapCut polishes the ones you're publishing. Neither replaces the other.
Against Vizard: Vizard occupies almost exactly the same niche — long video in, clips out — with different credit economics and a different editor. Worth pricing against Opus Clip specifically on how many source minutes you process monthly, since that's the axis both charge on.
Against Descript: Descript gives you transcript-based editing and full control, so clipping is manual but precise, and it handles the whole podcast workflow. If you're already editing episodes in Descript, adding clips there costs less than a second subscription.
Against Submagic: Submagic polishes clips you already have — captions, effects, pacing — rather than finding them. Some creators run Opus Clip to select and Submagic to finish, which works but stacks two subscriptions.
Against Veed: VEED is a general browser editor with clipping among many features. Broader and less specialised; better if you need one tool for everything rather than the best moment-finder.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual | Processing minutes | Includes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | — | 60/mo | Watermark, 3-day export expiry |
| Starter | $15 | Not offered | 150/mo | Watermark-free, caption styles, basic virality score |
| Pro | $29 | $174/yr (~$14.50/mo) | 300/mo (3,600/yr upfront) | Scheduler, AI B-roll, all aspect ratios, team workspace, Premiere export |
| Business | Custom | Custom | Negotiated | API access, unlimited seats |
Checked August 2026 against Opus Clip's published pricing and current third-party analyses. One credit equals one minute of source video processed; monthly credits expire after 60 days, annual after 12 months. Starter is month-to-month only and excludes the social scheduler. Note that the pricing page does not display credit allocations directly — the figures above come from help documentation and third-party verification, so confirm on opus.pro/pricing before subscribing.
Annual Pro is the only real discount. At an effective $14.50 a month it costs about what monthly Starter does and includes the scheduler, B-roll and aspect ratios Starter lacks. If you're committing at all, commit annually.
Count your monthly source minutes before choosing. Twenty 30-minute podcasts is 600 minutes — double what Pro provides. Heavy repurposing operations outgrow the top self-serve tier faster than they expect.
Upload dense footage, not long footage. Since you pay for input, trimming the first ten minutes of setup chat before uploading is free money.
Opus Clip does the hard part of repurposing well. Finding the four minutes worth publishing inside a ninety-minute recording is tedious work that creators avoid, and automating it — with reframing, captions and a ranking that tells you what to post first — is genuine leverage for anyone sitting on a back catalogue. The virality score is a useful sorting mechanism even if it can't predict anything, and the annual Pro rate at an effective $14.50 a month is priced fairly for what it removes from your week.
The friction is everywhere except the core feature. Credits meter your uploads rather than your outputs, which is fine once understood and expensive when it isn't. Starter's missing scheduler makes the cheap plan falsely cheap. Monthly credits expire after 60 days, penalising exactly the burst-production pattern most independent creators have. And the recurring reports of stalled processing, undocumented daily caps and awkward cancellation are consistent enough across review platforms to take seriously.
What keeps it recommendable is that the alternative for most people isn't a competitor — it's not clipping at all. Measured against that, $174 a year to systematically mine footage you've already recorded is easy arithmetic.
For podcasters and streamers with volume, recommend at annual Pro. For anyone publishing one long video a month, clip it manually and keep the money.
Note: Opus Clip does not currently have an affiliate program with AIVario. We earn no commission, and this rating carries no commercial incentive.
Best for: Podcasters and streamers with long back catalogues, teams systematically repurposing to Shorts and Reels, creators who won't rewatch their own episodes to find moments Not ideal for: Creators publishing infrequently, sparse or rambling source footage, anyone needing guaranteed processing turnaround, users who want a cheap plan with scheduling included Bottom line: The moment-finding works and saves real hours; the credit rules, expiry windows and Starter's missing scheduler are where the value quietly leaks. Annual Pro or nothing.
One credit equals one minute of source video processed. Upload a 45-minute episode and it spends 45 credits, regardless of whether it returns five clips or fifteen. Videos under a minute cost one credit minimum, and partial minutes round down. Publishing a clip to X costs an additional credit per post, refunded automatically if the post fails. The rule to internalise: cost tracks input length, not output count.
Free at $0 with 60 processing minutes a month, Starter at $15 for 150 minutes, Pro at $29 for 300, and a custom Business tier. Pro offers annual billing at $174 a year — an effective $14.50 a month, roughly half the monthly rate, with all 3,600 credits granted upfront. Starter has no annual option and is month-to-month only, which is the first thing most comparison articles miss.
Yes, and the window differs by plan. Credits on monthly plans expire after 60 days; annual credits last 12 months. Since annual Pro grants the full 3,600 upfront, that's a genuinely usable buffer for creators whose production comes in bursts. Monthly subscribers who bank credits during a quiet period can lose them, which has generated a recurring complaint from users who assumed they were accumulating.
More than the credit count, and the gap is deliberate. Starter at $15 gives 150 minutes, removes the watermark and unlocks caption styles, but leaves out the social scheduler, AI B-roll, multiple aspect ratios, Premiere Pro export, team workspace and brand kit expansion. Pro at $29 is where the product becomes a workflow rather than a clip generator. The practical consequence: a $15 Starter subscriber still pays for a separate scheduling tool.
As a ranking tool, yes; as a forecast, no. It scores clips 0–100 on hook strength, emotional language and story arc, and its real value is ordering fifteen clips so you publish the best five first. Treating it as a prediction of actual performance misreads what it does — it compares your clips against each other, not against the platform.
Sixty processing minutes a month with watermarked exports that expire after three days. It's a demo rather than a workflow — enough to run one long video through and judge whether the moment-selection is any good on your kind of content, which is the right question to answer before paying. There's no free trial of the paid features, so the watermark and the expiry are what you're evaluating around.
Three things recur across review platforms. Processing that stalls or never finishes on some uploads. Credits expiring before use on monthly plans. And friction around cancellation and refunds, including a Trustpilot report of a four-week wait on a yearly-plan refund. Separately, some paid-tier features carry undocumented daily caps — one G2 reviewer noted speech enhancement limited to ten clips per day.
Depends entirely on your volume of source footage. If you publish one long video a month, manual clipping in a normal editor costs nothing extra and gives better control. If you have a back catalogue of fifty episodes or ship weekly, the time saved on moment-finding is the whole value proposition — and the ranking output tells you where to start rather than making you watch everything again.
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