How We Test
Every category on this site gets one specific axis — a fact that's actually checkable and that vendor marketing pages skip over, not a generic star rating.
How we source pricing
Every plan, every price, and every credit number comes from the vendor's own pricing page, read directly — not from a comparison site's summary of it. Search-result summaries quote wrong numbers often enough that we treat them as untrusted. Every figure carries the date we checked it, and a field we could not verify is left blank, never estimated. When a vendor's own pages disagree with each other — and in this category they do — we say so instead of quietly picking one.
Tested vs. reported
Some claims on this site are our own testing — we did the thing ourselves and recorded what happened. Others are the best documented claim we could find when we haven't done our own test yet, sourced and dated like everything else. A (*) next to a verdict means it's the second kind — reported, not independently verified by us. In this category most reported claims come from the vendor's own policy and licensing pages, which is stronger evidence than a third-party review, but still not the same thing as us downloading the file and looking at it. Check the tool's own section for the source. We'd rather show the best available answer with an honest label than leave the space blank.
AI video generators
The axis: does the video file you download on the free tier carry a watermark — and how many seconds of video does a month of credits actually buy?
The standing test, run identically on every tool: create a free account, generate the same brief — a 5-second clip of "a paper boat drifting across a rain puddle, overhead shot, morning light" at each tool's default model and resolution — download the resulting file, and inspect the frame corners for a burned-in watermark. We record the verdict on a three-point scale:
- No watermark
- The downloaded file has no burned-in watermark. What you generate is what you can use.
- Watermarked
- The file downloads, but a vendor logo is burned into the frame. Fine for previews, unusable as a deliverable.
- No file
- You never get a file at all — export or download is gated behind a paid plan before anything leaves the tool.
Credits → seconds
Every vendor in this category prices in credits, and no two credit systems match. So for every tool we convert the free tier's and the cheapest watermark-free plan's monthly credits into seconds of video per month, using only the vendor's own published per-clip or per-second rates, at the vendor's default model and base resolution. The arithmetic is printed next to every figure so you can re-run it yourself. Where a vendor publishes no allowance at all — and two of the five don't — the field says "Not published" rather than a guess.
What we do not do
- We do not score output quality on a numeric scale. Taste is not a measurement.
- We do not publish a number we did not verify. Unverified fields show a dash.
- We do not accept payment for inclusion or for a better position in a list.
Corrections
Pricing and credit rates change quickly in this category — several vendors ran promos on the day we checked. Every post carries a "last verified" date and a change log listing what moved. If something here is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will re-check it. See also our disclosure.