The True Cost of AI Video: A Real Project's Complete Ledger
If you look at API sticker prices, AI video seems cheap. HappyHorse I2V at ¥0.90/second, GPT-Image-2 at ¥0.08/call — a 5-minute trailer should cost a few hundred yuan on paper.
The real cost was ¥2,234.67. Agent tokens alone consumed nearly 1 billion tokens.
This is the real cost structure of the Silent Era · The Guardian trailer project — not "what it should cost in theory," but "what was actually spent, where it went, and why it was more expensive than expected."
The Full Ledger: Where ¥2,234.67 Went
| Category | Amount | Share | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Code / Opus 4.7 | ¥815.77 | 36.5% | Agent session token costs (3 sessions) |
| Codex / GPT-5.5 | ¥694.63 | 31.1% | 19 sessions (filtered from 41 total sessions) |
| Qoder Subscription | ¥300.00 | 13.4% | Monthly fee (local IDE / Agent tool) |
| HappyHorse I2V 720P | ¥198.09 | 8.9% | 38 successful calls, 220.1 seconds |
| MiMo TTS Subscription | ¥99.00 | 4.4% | Monthly fee (89 TTS calls within subscription) |
| MiniMax Music Subscription | ¥99.00 | 4.4% | Monthly fee (3 music generations, underused) |
| GPT-Image2 Image Gen | ¥26.25 | 1.2% | 430 calls (331 done + 99 failed) |
| Claude Code / deepseek-v4-pro | ¥1.93 | 0.1% | 1 test session |
Agent tokens combined: ¥1,510.40 — 67.6% of total cost. Nearly 1 billion tokens consumed (Codex 573M + Claude Opus ~421M).
The Real Insight
The API generation itself is cheap. It's the Agent reasoning, planning, retrying, diagnosing failures, and coordinating multi-step workflows that dominates cost. Agent token consumption accounts for two-thirds of the entire project budget. Any "AI video cost" estimate that only counts API generation prices is off by a factor of 3-5x.
Full Chinese original with category-level breakdowns available at AI视频的成本真相