An allowance that expires monthly is a different product from a balance you own, and the difference only shows up in the months you were busy with something else.
AutoClip's own terms are plain about it: what you do not spend in a billing cycle is gone. For a daily show that is irrelevant, because you were always going to spend it. For anybody whose recording comes in bursts - a launch, a conference, a season - it means paying twelve times for something you used seven times.
One credit is one source minute, which is a clean and honest way to charge, and it does not care how many clips you cut. If the model suited you and only the reset did not, the fix is not a different unit. It is a tool where the allowance either persists or is small enough that losing it does not sting.
Their pricing describes stream VODs billing differently from ordinary uploads - a multi-hour broadcast at a small flat range of credits rather than per minute. If most of your source is stream footage, that concession may be worth more than anything on this page, and it is worth confirming with them before you move.
Cheapest plan on each that actually does long-to-short clipping, checked September 2026.
| Tool | Cheapest plan that clips | What the allowance counts | Why it might suit you |
|---|---|---|---|
| SnapDub | €12/mo | Credits, spent on reading the recording AND on each clip and caption | Top-up credits never expire, so a quiet month is not money burned. The monthly plan allowance still refreshes rather than accumulating - the difference is that you can hold a balance instead of only renting one. |
| Klap | $29/mo | Finished clips a month - 100 on the entry plan | Bills what you take out, so long or stream-heavy sources cost nothing extra to read. Suits bursts badly for the same reason AutoClip does: the allowance is monthly. |
| OpusClip | $15/mo | Credits, one per uploaded minute, sold in packs that stack | Their annual plan grants the whole year's credits up front, which is the one arrangement on this page that genuinely suits a burst schedule. Read the expiry terms on the exports before committing to a year. |
| Submagic | $19/member/mo | Seats, with the clipping sold as an add-on on top | No volume allowance to lose, because the bill follows headcount instead. Predictable, and expensive the moment more than one person needs an account. |
| Choppity | $20/mo | Hours of source video analysed per month | Monthly hours, which reset the same way yours do. What differs is the shape above the entry tier: the allowance stops climbing, so the extra money buys seats and social accounts rather than a bigger buffer. |
| Munch | $38/mo | Minutes of repurposing a month, inside a wider content suite | The same monthly reset on a larger allowance and a larger bill. Worth a look only if you also want the scripts, posters and analytics that come with it. |
Ours is €12 for about 200 minutes of source with the clips and captions included. Run your own month through the calculator - including the months you barely record.
The trap with an expiring allowance is that you size the plan for the month you had in mind and then pay for it in the months you did not. Take last year, find the three quietest months, and price those. If a smaller plan plus an occasional top-up covers your busy months, that is almost always cheaper than a plan sized for your best week.
Every tool worth comparing will find moments, crop them upright and burn captions on. What separates a clip that looks cut from a clip that looks edited is what happens next, and that is three decisions a human editor makes on every single clip.
The opening. The strongest sentence in a recording is almost never the first one. Television has opened on the moment and then gone back to the beginning for forty years; a clip can do the same, playing the line once at the front and again in its own place, so nothing before it is lost. It is a change to the order of the clip rather than a caption laid over it, which is why it still reads with the sound off.
The emphasis. On the one line that matters, the frame comes in on the speaker, holds, and is gone again the moment the line ends, with a restrained whoosh under it. It costs nothing, it is everywhere in professionally cut video, and its absence is most of what makes a clip feel machine-made. It only works while it stays rare, so it is one line per clip or none at all.
The language. A brand brief with a line about profanity voids a submission over one word, and it does it after the views have arrived. Every clip is checked against its own spoken words, the sound drops for the length of anything that needs it, and the caption is masked to match - along with the title, the description and the hashtags, which are written from the same recording and are where it usually slips through.
All three are settings, on the video and on any template, and a tick per clip in the editor. If a tool you are comparing does these as well, its own features page will say so - this is not the kind of thing anybody hides.
Each one has a page of its own: where a clip should start and the cold open, the push-in, and handling the one word that voids a submission.
SnapDub connects to ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor and other MCP clients on every plan, the free one too. Sign in once, then ask in plain words: make clips from a link, read them best first, find live clipping campaigns.
Every paid plan also comes with a REST API and API keys, for n8n, Make, Zapier or your own app, described in one OpenAPI 3.1 document.
No. Their pricing states that unused credits do not carry into the next cycle, so a monthly allowance is use-it-or-lose-it.
SnapDub's top-up credits do not expire, so a balance you bought stays yours through a quiet month. The monthly plan allowance still refreshes rather than stacking up - no tool here lets a subscription accumulate indefinitely - but the balance you top up with is genuinely yours.
On AutoClip and OpusClip, yes. On Klap the unit is finished clips, not minutes at all. On SnapDub a credit is a unit of work, so reading the recording and cutting each captioned clip are both priced - which is why our calculator asks for two numbers.
Either an annual grant that hands you the whole year at once, or a small plan you can top up in the months it matters. What to avoid is a large monthly allowance sized for your busiest month, because you pay for that one twelve times.
Somebody else's prices, so they carry their name and the date we read them.
Pricing pages change without notice, and in this category they change fast: Klap stopped selling minutes and started selling clips between two of our own checks. If you are reading this long after the dates above, open theirs before deciding anything on ours.
Start free, and your first recording runs whatever it costs.