AI video price war: Vidu Q4 Preview cuts to ¥0.09/second
Chinese AI video model makers released new flagship versions and slashed prices in late September and early October. On Sept 28, Kuaishou's Kling 4.0 entered beta with native clips of up to 30 seconds and 4K output, alongside a lightweight Kling 4.0 Flash pitched on fast generation and cost-efficiency, though API pricing has not been disclosed; on Oct 8, Shengshu Technology launched Vidu Q4 Preview with support for 15 reference images and 3 reference audio clips, 4K output and a starting price of ¥0.09 per second, with the company estimating up to about five times more output for the same budget. By contrast, ByteDance's new Seedance flagships cost at least 50% more than the previous generation, at ¥46 per million tokens for Seedance 2.0 720P no-reference generation versus ¥70 for Seedance 2.5 at the same setting. The article argues that as one-pass generation success rates rose — up to roughly 90% for Seedance 2.0 per a BOC International research note it cites, versus an earlier industry average of about 20% — the competition is shifting from raw capability toward price-performance and fit with production workflows.
With entry-level pricing for flagship video models falling from yuan to cents per second, cost rather than quality alone now decides whether short-drama, advertising and film teams can put AI video into production at scale.