How Much Does an AI Video Cost in India?

Our rate card is public and it is short: ₹6,000 for every 30 seconds of finished film, with a project minimum of ₹40,000. "Finished" is the operative word — you are billed on the length of the film that ships, not on the hours of drafts, discarded shots and alternates produced along the way. And "AI video" here means a professionally scripted, directed and edited film that uses AI generation for its shots — not the output of a template tool. A 30-second product ad, a five-minute explainer and a twenty-minute training film all price off the same two numbers, and the quote is issued in writing before any production begins.

That number includes the work that actually decides whether a film succeeds: the script, the concept, the visual style developed for your brand, the assembly and finishing of the edit, and one full round of revisions. You supply the real photography and footage of your product and premises — more on why that matters below — and we build the film around it. There is no hourly meter and no open-ended "post-production extras" section; if something would move the price, it is named in the quote before you approve it.

For export-facing businesses that think in dollars: ₹40,000 is roughly $470, ₹60,000 is roughly $700, and ₹2.4 lakh is roughly $2,800. Those conversions are for orientation, not a separate price list — we quote and invoice in rupees, with a GST invoice, like any registered Indian supplier. If your buyers are overseas, the useful comparison is what a produced film of equivalent polish would cost you from a studio billing in those currencies; the rupee rate card is the same either way.

Every commercial film — AI-made or camera-made — contains two different kinds of work. The first is fixed craft: understanding your business, writing the script, developing the concept and the visual style, then assembling, pacing and finishing the edit. This work takes roughly the same effort whether the finished film runs 30 seconds or ten minutes. A tight 30-second ad is not one-twentieth of the thinking behind a ten-minute film; in some ways it is harder, because every single word and shot has to earn its place.

The second kind of work is shot production — actually generating, selecting and refining the individual shots that fill the running time. This is the part that scales with length, and it is the part AI has genuinely transformed. What has not changed is the judgment wrapped around it: knowing what to ask for, recognising which output is usable and which is subtly wrong, and cutting the keepers into something a viewer follows without effort. AI collapsed the cost of shots. It did not collapse the cost of taste.

This split is why the minimum exists. If we priced purely per second, a 30-second film would be quoted at a number that could not honestly cover the script, concept and style work it consumes — and the shortfall would have to be recovered somewhere less visible. Under roughly the ten-minute mark, the fixed craft dominates the bill, so a stated minimum prices it in the open. That is not an AI-industry quirk; it is how serious production has always worked, in film, in photography and in print.

Here is the ladder, worked out at the rate card. Notice its shape: at the short end the minimum governs, so a 30-second film lands at ₹40,000; from five minutes onward the per-second rate takes over and the price climbs in a straight, predictable line. There are no tier jumps, no "premium length" surcharges, and nothing to negotiate — the same two numbers produce every row.

Four things move a quote up, and each is named in writing before you commit. Revision rounds beyond the included one are ₹8,000 per round — the only add-on with a standing price, because it is the one clients ask about most. Additional languages are produced as re-voiced, re-captioned variants of the finished film, and each variant moves the quote. Licensed music — where a specific commercial track matters to the brand — moves the quote. And if your product or premises need footage that does not yet exist, live-action shoot days to capture it move the quote as well. None of these appears mid-project as a surprise; they are scoped or they are not in the film.

What never moves a quote is drift. There are no hourly overruns, no "rendering charges", and no per-draft billing. The number on the written quote is the number on the GST invoice, and if the scope genuinely changes mid-project — a second language added, a new section requested — you get a revised written quote to approve first, not a bigger invoice to discover later.

The first piece of advice we give every client with a long film in mind: split it. A 20-minute explainer produced as one film costs ₹2.4 lakh. The same material produced as four five-minute chapters costs four times ₹60,000 — the identical ₹2.4 lakh. The rate card is deliberately neutral on the split, which means chaptering costs you nothing extra and buys you three real advantages.

First, viewers rarely finish long videos. A five-minute chapter gets watched to its end, and a chaptered series lets a prospect jump straight to the part they actually care about instead of scrubbing through a twenty-minute timeline. Second, chapters create milestone payments: you pay as each chapter is delivered and approved, rather than funding the entire film before you have seen anything. Third — and this is the one that saves projects — chapters contain risk. If the tone or style of chapter one misses, the rework costs one chapter, not the whole film, and every later chapter is then produced against a style you have already seen and approved.

The pattern generalises well beyond explainers. A training curriculum, a factory walkthrough, a product line overview, an investor story — almost any film above five minutes has natural chapter lines in it, and cutting along them converts one large, all-or-nothing bet into a sequence of small, correctable ones. When a client brings us a long brief, proposing the chapter structure is usually the first thing we do.

The second piece of advice, and the one that saves the most money: do not ask AI to render your actual product. Today's video models produce a plausible wrong version of whatever you describe — a machine that looks almost like yours, a pack shot with almost your label, a showroom that is almost your showroom. "Almost" is fatal in a commercial film. Your customers know your product better than anyone; the first wrong detail tells them the film is fake, and everything the film says after that moment gets discounted.

The shape that works is hybrid, and we scope it explicitly upfront. Your real product and premises appear as supplied photography and footage — which is why every engagement asks you to provide them. AI carries what it is genuinely superb at: b-roll, environments, atmosphere, and the sheer volume of connective footage that makes a film feel expensively produced. Motion graphics carry the things that must be exact — specifications, numbers, names. The films on our service page, including our own brand film and our children's-channel work, were made exactly this way: real where it must be real, generated where generation shines.

A client who insists on AI-rendering the hero product ends up paying for generation after generation of shots that will never be right — budget spent proving a limitation instead of shipping a film. If you want the fuller map of where AI video is strong and where it is not, we wrote it up separately in what AI video can and cannot do for a business; this post stays on the money question.

One revision round is included in every quote, and the brief decides how that round gets spent. A vague brief burns the included round discovering what you actually meant, and pushes the real polish into paid rounds at ₹8,000 each. A sharp brief lets the first cut land close to the mark, so the included round is spent making a good film better instead of steering a lost one home. In other words: the cheapest tool in the whole engagement is a well-written brief, and it costs you an hour.

Four things, fixed in writing before production starts, do most of the work:

Read the ladder against your actual goal, not against a length you assumed. Most first films for an Indian business are short: a 30-second or one-minute piece for ads and WhatsApp — that is the ₹40,000 minimum at work. A proper explainer or founder story usually sits at five minutes — ₹60,000. Anything longer, budget off the per-second rate and then apply the chapter advice: a ₹2.4 lakh training series delivered and paid for in four approved chapters is a very different risk from one twenty-minute film approved blind at the end.

With the brief fixed, the process is short: written quote, production, one included revision round, delivery — and a GST invoice at the number you approved. That is the whole answer to the question in the title: ₹6,000 per finished 30 seconds, a ₹40,000 minimum that prices the fixed craft honestly, and two pieces of advice — chapter your long films, and never ask AI to draw your product — that keep the budget pointed at the film instead of at the mistakes.