Arcads AI pricing starts at a reported $110/month for 8,000 credits, which works out to roughly $11 per finished one-minute video with one actor — and, because Arcads rounds every video up to a full minute, the same $11 for a 15-second one. Arcads does not publish any of this: arcads.ai/pricing returns a 404, and there is no pricing page anywhere on the site.
Pricing verified 9 August 2026. We re-check every price in this post quarterly and update the date above.
Arcads AI pricing at a glance (2026)
| Plan | Reported monthly | Credits/month | Cost per credit | 1-min video, 1 actor | Overage allowed? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $110 | 8,000 | $0.01375 | ~$11.00 | No — account pauses |
| Creator | $220 | 16,000 | $0.01375 | ~$11.00 | No — account pauses |
| Pro | $550 | 40,000 | $0.01375 | ~$11.00 | Yes, per extra credit |
| Scale / Business | Not published | 80,000 / 160,000 | Unknown | Unknown | Presumed yes |
Two things stand out immediately, and neither is stated on any page currently ranking for Arcads AI pricing.
The cost per credit is identical on every tier. Starter, Creator and Pro all buy credits at $0.01375. Upgrading does not make videos cheaper. It buys feature unlocks and permission to overspend — nothing else.
Every plan price above is third-party reported, not published by Arcads. We fetched arcads.ai/pricing and www.arcads.ai/pricing on 9 August 2026. Both returned HTTP 404. The Wayback Machine holds no snapshot of that URL, ever.
Why can’t you find Arcads AI pricing anywhere?
Because Arcads deliberately doesn’t publish it. There is no pricing link in the site navigation, no pricing section on the homepage, and the app’s pricing route is blocked by robots.txt. You see numbers only after you create an account.
The Arcads help centre confirms the plan names — Starter, Creator and PRO — and describes how credits behave on each. It states no dollar amounts. Custom volume plans are handled by emailing a named person at the company.
This is why the Arcads AI pricing you find in search results contradicts itself so badly. One page says $49.99/month for 50 credits. Another says $110 for 10 videos. A third says 1 credit equals 1 minute of video. They cannot all be right, and most of them are quoting a credit system Arcads has since replaced.
The credit re-denomination that broke half the internet’s Arcads pricing pages
Arcads used to bill talking-actor video at 1 credit per minute. It now bills 800 credits per minute. One of Arcads’ own help articles still carries the old rate; the current credits article carries the new one.
So 1 old credit = 800 new credits. Any article telling you “10 credits gets you 10 videos” is describing a system that no longer exists. If a page quoting Arcads AI pricing doesn’t mention 800 credits per minute, it hasn’t been updated since the change.
How Arcads AI pricing actually works
Arcads sells credits, not videos. What a video costs depends entirely on which model renders it.
What Arcads charges per generation
These rates are published in Arcads’ own help centre and were verified on 9 August 2026:
| What you generate | Credit cost |
|---|---|
| Talking actor video | 800 per minute, per actor |
| Veo 3.1 clip | 800 |
| Sora 2 clip | 240–1,200 |
| Kling 3.0 clip | 176–560 |
| Seedance 2.0 clip (480p–1080p) | 96–1,620 |
| Grok video clip | 24–304 |
| Auto-captions | 80 |
| Translate video | 240 |
| Hook repurposer | 800 |
| Upscale | 80 per 10 seconds |
| Actor replacement | 800 |
| Change voice / extract frame | 0 |
| Preset (Show Your App – Fashion Try-On) | 200–800 |
| Nano Banana Pro & Seedream 4.0 images | Free, 100/day each |
The line that changes the whole calculation
From the same help article: talking-actor video is billed per minute, per actor, and “length is always rounded up.”
Read that again in the context of UGC ads, which are almost never 60 seconds long.
A 15-second Arcads UGC ad costs 800 credits. So does a 30-second one. So does a 58-second one. At the reported Starter rate, that is $11 for a 15-second ad — and $11 is also what you’d pay for a full minute. You are charged for time you didn’t use on almost every ad you make.
Put two actors in one 60-second video and it costs 1,600 credits — about $22. Make it 90 seconds and it rounds up to two minutes: 1,600 credits again. Two actors at 90 seconds is 3,200 credits, roughly $44 for a single ad.
Arcads AI pricing per video: the real numbers
Combining the verified credit rates with the reported plan prices:
| Output | Credits | Cost at $0.01375/credit |
|---|---|---|
| 15-second UGC ad, 1 actor | 800 | $11.00 |
| 15-second UGC ad + captions | 880 | $12.10 |
| 60-second UGC ad, 1 actor | 800 | $11.00 |
| 60-second UGC ad, 2 actors | 1,600 | $22.00 |
| 90-second UGC ad, 1 actor | 1,600 | $22.00 |
| Kling 3.0 clip (cheapest setting) | 176 | $2.42 |
| Seedance 2.0 clip (max setting) | 1,620 | $22.28 |
Multiple third-party pricing pages report a standing 30% discount on monthly Arcads plans, which would put Starter nearer $77 and drop the per-video figure to about $7.70. We could not verify that discount from Arcads directly, and we could not verify whether it is permanent or promotional. Treat $11.00 as the list figure and $7.70 as the discounted floor.
One reported quirk worth knowing if you’re deciding between billing terms: the same sources describe the annual discount as 20%, which would make annual billing worse value than the discounted monthly rate. Verify this in-app before committing to a year.
7 hidden costs in Arcads AI pricing
None of these are secret. All of them are in Arcads’ own documentation. None of them appear in the pricing summaries currently ranking.
1. Round-up billing on short ads. Covered above, and it is the single biggest gap between headline Arcads AI pricing and what you actually spend. If your ads are 15–20 seconds — which most UGC ads are — you’re paying a 3–4× premium on every render.
2. Per-actor multiplication. Two people in frame doubles the cost. Testing a hook with a second creator in the same video doubles it again.
3. Captions are a separate charge. 80 credits each. And on the Starter plan, third-party reporting indicates captions and background removal aren’t included at all — you need Creator.
4. Credits don’t roll over. Arcads’ help centre states plainly that credits reset each cycle and do not carry forward on Starter and Creator. Unused budget evaporates monthly.
5. There’s no overage below Pro. Hit your limit on Starter or Creator and, in Arcads’ own words, the account is “temporarily blocked” until renewal. You cannot buy your way out mid-campaign. Only Pro allows extra credits, and Arcads doesn’t publish the per-credit overage rate.
6. Retries are billed like originals. Failed or unusable generations consume credits. Arcads will restore credits for technical failures within 30 days, but not for output you simply don’t like — its refund policy is explicit that dissatisfaction with creative output isn’t refundable.
7. Cancellation needs 72 hours’ notice. Arcads’ terms require cancellation at least 72 hours before the end of the current period. Subscriptions are “tacitly renewed” otherwise. Combined with the no-rollover rule, this is the mechanism behind most of the billing complaints on Trustpilot.
Add these up and a realistic working assumption is that your effective cost per usable Arcads ad runs meaningfully above the headline $11 — before you’ve paid for the captions you’ll need on every one.
Does Arcads have a free trial?
No. There is no free trial and no free plan for video. Arcads’ terms of service describe no trial mechanic, and the company’s own refund documentation assumes a first charge has already occurred.
There is, however, one genuinely free thing, and almost nobody writing about Arcads AI pricing mentions it: 100 free images per day from Nano Banana Pro, and 100 more from Seedream 4.0. Arcads’ help centre states these “do not consume paid credits within the daily free limit.” If you only need static image ads, that’s a real free tier.
The closest thing to a trial is the refund window. Arcads’ refund policy allows a change-of-mind refund within 24 hours of your first charge, provided you have used zero credits. Which means you can subscribe, look around, and get out — but the moment you generate one video, that door closes.
Arcads AI pricing compared, per finished ad
Comparing subscription prices is misleading, because plans differ wildly in what a “video” means. Comparing cost per finished 15-second UGC ad is the honest measure.
| Tool | Entry plan | Cost per 15-second UGC ad | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arcads | $110/mo (reported) | ~$11.00 | Rounded up to a full minute |
| MakeUGC | $59/mo | ~$11.80 (Startup) – $7.45 (Pro) | Derived from MakeUGC’s own video counts |
| Shhots AI | $19/mo | $6.33 (Starter, 10s) – $4.71 (Scale) | 551 credits per 10-second UGC ad |
| Creatify | $39/mo | $1.95 | 5 credits per 15 seconds |
| HeyGen | $29/mo | ~$0.24 | Talking head only; product-in-hand costs ~$2.90+ |
Two caveats, because this table is easy to misread.
HeyGen’s $0.24 is real but narrow — it buys a person talking to camera. The moment you need an avatar holding your product, HeyGen routes through Veo 3.1 at 30 credits per 8-second scene, and the Creator plan caps you at around five of those per month. We break the whole calculation down in HeyGen vs Arcads.
Creatify’s $1.95 is the cheapest genuine per-ad number in the category, but its credits expire after two months and its refund policy states payments are final. Cheap per unit is not the same as cheap in practice.
For context on where the whole category sits, see what AI ad generators cost in general.
Where Shhots AI lands on the same measure
We publish our pricing, so you can check this yourself on the Shhots AI pricing page.
| Plan | Price | Credits | 10-second UGC ads | Cost per ad |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $19/mo ($199/yr) | 2,000 | 3 | $6.33 |
| Pro | $49/mo ($499/yr) | 6,000 | 10 | $4.90 |
| Scale | $99/mo ($999/yr) | 12,000 | 21 | $4.71 |
A 10-second UGC ad costs 551 credits; a 15-second one costs 826. Product images cost 11 credits plus one analysis credit per shoot, which is why the Starter plan covers up to 175 images a month.
Where we’re genuinely different from Arcads: there’s no round-up penalty — a 10-second ad is billed as a 10-second ad. Every plan includes a full commercial licence and watermark-free exports, and annual plans carry unused credits within the year.
Where Arcads is genuinely better: actor variety. Arcads advertises 1,000+ AI actors and a deep preset library for pure talking-head UGC. If your creative strategy is testing forty different faces reading the same script, Arcads is built for that and we are not. Our AI UGC ads generator is built around turning one product photo into ads, which is a different job.
If you want the full field rather than a two-way comparison, we’ve ranked 13 cheaper Arcads AI alternatives and the best AI UGC ad generators separately.
What Arcads’ refund and cancellation terms actually say
This is the most under-reported part of Arcads AI pricing, and it’s the part that generates the angriest reviews. All of the following is from Arcads’ own published refund policy, checked 9 August 2026.
You can get a full refund if you used zero credits during the billing period and request within 30 days. Also: change of mind within 24 hours of the first charge, zero credits used, first request only. Also: a wrong-plan upgrade within 7 days, with the lower plan’s credits deducted.
You cannot get a refund for completed generations, for dissatisfaction with creative output, for any period in which you used credits, or for requests older than 30 days. Failed generations get credits back, not cash. Approved refunds take 5–10 business days.
On cancellation, unused credits are neither refunded nor carried forward.
Arcads holds roughly 140–160 Trustpilot reviews with a score reported in the 3.0–3.3 range, and the distribution is unusually polarised — one third-party analysis of 100 reviews found 43% five-star and 39% one-star, with very little in between. That U-shape almost always means a genuinely satisfied cohort alongside a genuinely angry billing cohort. You can read the Arcads Trustpilot reviews directly. Arcads has no G2 listing at all, so there’s no verified-buyer dataset to balance it against.
We go through the quality and reputation side properly in our full Arcads AI review.
Who Arcads AI pricing makes sense for
It makes sense if you are running high-volume talking-actor UGC tests, your ads genuinely run 45–60 seconds, you need hundreds of distinct faces, and $110–$550/month is inside a test budget you expect to recover from ad performance. Arcads raised $16M in seed funding in December 2025 and reported 6,000+ clients, so this is a serious product with a real customer base.
It makes less sense if your ads are 10–20 seconds, you need your product visibly in frame rather than described, you’re testing at low volume, or you need to know what something costs before you hand over a card.
For the head-to-head against the two tools people most often compare it with, see HeyGen vs Arcads and Arcads vs MakeUGC.
FAQ
How much does Arcads AI cost per month?
Arcads AI pricing is reported at $110/month for the Starter plan (8,000 credits), $220/month for Creator (16,000 credits), and $550/month for Pro (40,000 credits). Arcads does not publish these figures — arcads.ai/pricing returns a 404 — so every price in circulation is third-party sourced.
How much does one Arcads video cost?
About $11 for a one-minute video with one actor, at 800 credits per minute and $0.01375 per credit. Because Arcads rounds every video up to a full minute, a 15-second ad costs the same $11.
Does Arcads have a free trial?
No. Arcads offers no free trial and no free video plan. It does give 100 free images per day from Nano Banana Pro and 100 from Seedream 4.0, which don’t consume paid credits. The nearest equivalent to a trial is a 24-hour change-of-mind refund window, valid only if you’ve used zero credits.
Is Arcads AI pricing cheaper on an annual plan?
Reportedly not, in practice. Third-party sources describe a 20% annual discount alongside a standing 30% monthly discount, which would make monthly the better rate. We could not verify either discount with Arcads directly — check both in-app before committing.
Do Arcads credits roll over?
No. On Starter and Creator, credits reset each billing cycle and do not carry forward. On Pro, unused credits accumulate. Unused credits are not refunded when you cancel or downgrade.
What happens if I run out of Arcads credits mid-month?
On Starter and Creator, the account is temporarily blocked until your plan renews — there is no overage option. Only Pro accounts continue working, with additional usage charged per extra credit. Arcads does not publish that overage rate.
Why do different sites report completely different Arcads AI pricing?
Because Arcads changed its credit denomination. Talking-actor video moved from 1 credit per minute to 800 credits per minute, and one of Arcads’ own help articles still carries the old rate. Pages that haven’t been updated since the change are describing a system that no longer exists.
Do you own the videos Arcads generates?
Not outright. Arcads’ terms grant you a non-exclusive, personal and non-transferable licence on the video. Your scripts and uploaded assets stay yours, but you grant the operating company a worldwide licence to use them, including for AI model training. Read the terms yourself before uploading anything sensitive.
Is Arcads worth $110 a month?
It depends on ad length. If your ads run close to a full minute and you need heavy actor variety, the per-video cost is competitive. If your ads are 15 seconds, the round-up rule means you’re paying roughly four times the rate you’d get from tools that bill by the second.
Final take
Arcads AI pricing is defensible on its own terms and genuinely expensive on the terms most advertisers actually operate under. Eleven dollars for a one-minute video with a thousand-actor library behind it is a fair trade. Eleven dollars for a fifteen-second ad, with captions billed separately and credits that vanish at month end, is a different proposition.
The honest summary: Arcads is priced for volume talking-head production and hidden from anyone who wants to compare before buying. If those two things suit you, it’s a strong tool. If they don’t, the arithmetic above should tell you fairly quickly.
If you’d rather see a number before you see a signup form, Shhots AI pricing starts at $19/month with every rate published, and our AI UGC ads generator turns a single product photo into ads without a per-minute round-up.
Try Shhots AI on your own product photo
One product photo in — AI UGC video, cinematic ads, studio product shots and static image ads out. From $19/month, every credit rate published. A 10-second UGC ad costs 551 credits, so you know the price before you generate, not after.
- No round-up billing. A 10-second ad is billed as a 10-second ad.
- Captions are free and unlimited on every plan — not 80 credits a time.
- Full commercial licence and watermark-free exports on all three plans.
See Shhots AI pricing → · Try the AI UGC ads generator → · Book a demo →