Who Pays $5 for a Five-second AI Video?

fal co-founders Burkay Gür and Gorkem Yurtseven say a five-second video priced at five dollars still found essentially infinite demand. Cheaper five-second clips, including from Kling and Minimax, had started around 40 cents and settled near 30 cents. The five-dollar price was a jump of more than ten times, and the first reaction was to ask who would pay that for another five-second clip.

People paid it, and later models that cost even more also got used. Professional work showed up at the same time, in ads and in movie production. Marketers started using the higher-quality models because cheaper ones could not capture the demand. Usage rose, capabilities rose, and prices rose together.

Language models draw a lot of talk about hitting a wall. On the video side, diminishing returns are nowhere in sight. Quality is still going up, prices are still going up, and people still want the models. fal also hosted Sora and saw huge growth in the last three months before it was taken down. The rumor was that there was not enough compute, and the model was expensive to run.