AI Shorts Generator: Which Ones Make the Video, and Which Need Yours
Half the tools that call themselves an AI shorts generator do not generate anything. They cut shorts out of a video you already recorded. That single distinction decides whether a tool is any use to you, and almost no pricing page states it plainly. If you have a podcast, a stream or an interview sitting on a drive, a clipper is the right buy and the cheapest one wins. If your channel has no footage at all (a faceless niche channel where every video has to be made from nothing), a clipper has zero minutes to work on, and no plan fixes that.
This article sorts four tools onto the right side of that line: Revid AI, OpusClip, Submagic and Nichecast. We are upfront that Nichecast is ours, and it sits on one side only.
Everything below about Revid AI, OpusClip and Submagic is quoted from their own pricing pages, read as of September 2026, on 22 September. Everything about Nichecast is what the product does today, checked against the running site. Prices move. Re-read the vendor’s page on the day you buy.
The short verdict
- You have footage, and lots of it → OpusClip. It is built to swallow a long video and hand back the parts worth posting, and it has a free tier you can judge it on.
- You have footage and want it polished, captioned and posted → Submagic. Its credits are counted in videos per member per month, which is an editing allowance.
- You want to create and publish across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube from one place → Revid AI, which covers the whole loop and sells API, MCP and CLI access at its entry price.
- You have no footage and one channel to keep supplied → Nichecast. It writes, renders and uploads each video to your own YouTube Studio as an unlisted draft, and you press publish.
None of that is a quality ranking. It is a sorting by what you already own.
The split that matters: generators and clippers
| What you supply | What it returns | Runs dry when | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revid AI | An idea, a link or a prompt | A finished short, published if you let it | Never: it generates |
| OpusClip | A long video | Clips cut from it, captioned and reframed | You have nothing to upload |
| Submagic | A recorded video | An edited, captioned, published short | You have nothing to edit |
| Nichecast | A channel niche | A finished 9:16 video, unlisted on your channel | Never: it generates |
A clipper’s meter tells you this before its marketing does. OpusClip bills in minutes of video processing time; Submagic’s plan cards read “45 credits = 15 videos” against a “2 min video duration”. Both meters count material that has to exist first.
What each AI shorts generator actually sells
Revid AI: generation plus the publishing loop
Revid’s pricing page describes the product as one membership covering “Create, publish, learn, repeat”, with “rendering, publishing, performance stats, Auto-Mode, and agent access” in every plan. It generates from text or a link, remixes from a library it puts at “3M+ viral videos”, and publishes to TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.
| Plan | Price | Credits / month | What the page lists |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby | $39 / mo | none stated | Create from text or links, 3M+ videos to remix, editable short-form videos, “for occasional, hands-on creation” |
| Growth | $99 struck through, $39 / mo | 2,000 | Publishing, post stats, watch 5 channels, up to 4K, 100+ AI video tools, avatars, 70+ language voiceovers, 3 Auto-Mode workers, full API, MCP and CLI |
| Ultra | $199 / mo | 12,000, selectable up to 200,000 | Everything in Growth, 10 Auto-Mode workers, cloned voices, watch 50 channels |
Two things to read carefully. The $39 Growth price is a discount off a printed $99, labelled “Discount locked in forever” (a claim about the future that only Revid can keep). And the page converts credits into finished videos only as an estimate: its FAQ, re-read on 3 October 2026, puts a typical 30-second video at about 40 to 80 credits, roughly 25 to 50 a month on Growth. So “2,000 AI credits” is not 2,000 videos, and you cannot compare it to a per-video price without checking what your own kind of video debits.
OpusClip: a clipper, and an unusually good one
OpusClip’s own pricing page meters in credits, and the free tier’s card prints “60 credits per month” beside a plain statement of what free costs you: “Has watermark”, “No editing”, and “After 3 days, the clips will no longer be exportable”.
| Plan | Monthly | Billed yearly | Credits | The limits that matter |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | None | 60 / month | Watermark, no editing, clips unexportable after 3 days |
| Starter | $15 | Monthly only | 150 / month | 1 brand template, watermark removed, media expires after 29 days |
| Pro | $29 | $14.50/mo, $174 billed annually | 300 / month, unused roll over for 2 months | 2 seats, 6 social connections, AI B-Roll, scheduler, limited API |
| Business | Custom | Not listed | Customized | Priority queue, API and custom integrations, MSA, SSO |
Starter plan only available in monthly
That line sits beside the Starter card, and it is the detail most round-ups miss: the advertised “Save up to 50% with annual billing” is a Pro sentence, not a Starter one.
Submagic: an editor that finishes footage
Submagic prices per member per month and converts its credits into videos for you on the card.
| Plan | Monthly | Credits | Videos / member / mo | Max duration | Export |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $19 | 45 | 15 | 2 min | 1080p, 30 FPS |
| Pro | $39 | 120 | 40 | 5 min | 1080p, 30 FPS |
| Business | $69 | 300 | 100 | 30 min | 4K, 60 FPS |
The yearly toggle is advertised as “Yearly (save up to 41%)”, and each card carries its own “Get 41% of annual discount” line. There is no standing free plan. The call to action is “Start editing shorts with AI, today. No credit card required.” Every card lists “API & Integrations (100min/mo)”, which is worth knowing if you intend to drive it from your own code.
The 2-minute cap on Starter is the line to watch. A 12-minute recording does not fit a $19 plan, and you reach 30 minutes only at $69.
Nichecast: the generator that stops before publishing
Nichecast takes a channel niche and produces finished vertical videos on a schedule: script, voiceover, captions, render, and an upload to your own YouTube Studio as an unlisted draft. It never publishes. Its pricing page says why in as many words: YouTube’s inauthentic-content policy asks that a video made with automated tools still show your creative judgement, and the review step is where you supply it.
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 5 finished videos to start, once, no card |
| Pro | $29 / mo | 30 videos a month |
One credit is one finished video, and the same number covers drawing a character’s reference sheet. A video that fails anywhere in the pipeline refunds its credit automatically, so a render that dies costs nothing rather than eating an allowance. Cancelling stops the next charge and leaves the month you paid for running to its end.
Comparing the money honestly
You cannot line these up on the headline number, because the four are not selling the same unit.
| Revid AI | OpusClip | Submagic | Nichecast | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Priced by | Credits per month | Minutes of processing | Seat, credits, duration | Finished video |
| Free tier | No, trial only | Yes, 60 credits/mo | No, trial only | 5 videos, once |
| Entry paid | $39 / mo | $15 / mo | $19 / member / mo | $29 / mo |
| Needs your footage | No | Yes | Yes | No |
| Who presses publish | The tool, in Auto-Mode | You, or its scheduler | You, or its publisher | You, always |
$29 buys minutes of processing at OpusClip and finished videos at Nichecast, and calling one cheaper than the other would be dishonest. The only comparison that survives is against what you already own: if the footage exists, paying anyone to generate material is waste, and OpusClip’s free tier will tell you in an afternoon whether clipping solves your problem.
Who should stay where they are
- Stay with OpusClip if you record anything at all regularly. Clipping an hour of existing material is the cheapest video you will ever make, and OpusClip’s Pro tier at $174 a year is aggressive for what it bundles.
- Stay with Submagic if your problem is the finish rather than the footage (captions, hooks, bad-take removal, translated subtitles) and you are fine with a per-seat plan.
- Stay with Revid AI if you work across three platforms and want the publishing and stats loop in one subscription, or if you want to call a video API from your own code at $39.
- Look at Nichecast only if your channel is genuinely faceless, nothing is ever recorded, and the weekly job you want gone is “make a video from nothing and get it onto the channel”.
How to switch without wasting a month
- Count your minutes of existing footage. Zero puts you in generator territory and ends the comparison early.
- Try the free tiers that exist. OpusClip’s free 60 credits and Nichecast’s 5 free videos both answer the real question (do I like what comes out) without a card.
- Convert every plan into your own unit before comparing. For a credit-metered tool, make one video and read what it debited.
- Check the publishing step is what you want. A tool that posts for you saves minutes a day and removes the review; a tool that stops at an unlisted draft costs you the click and keeps the judgement.
- Keep only one subscription per job. Running a clipper and a generator at once is common and sometimes right, but only when both jobs are genuinely live.
If you want the longer read on where each faceless tool stops, we compared four of them on exactly that axis in AI Faceless Video Generator: Where Each One Stops, and walked the four automatable steps of a Shorts channel in YouTube Shorts Automation. For the clippers specifically, Submagic vs Opus Clip goes deeper on the two.
Plans and limits above were read off revid.ai/pricing, opus.pro/pricing and submagic.co/pricing on 22 September 2026 and change without notice.