Conch Video

Conch Video is the English-facing name for Hailuo AI Video (海螺视频), the consumer video-generation platform from MiniMax, the Chinese AI lab behind the Hailuo model family. If you follow AI video benchmarks you know the models; the platform at hailuoai.com/video is where they are packaged for creators — text-to-video, image-to-video, subject-reference character work, and camera-direction controls, with web and iOS/Android apps sharing one credit balance. This is not a template-driven editing tool despite what some directory listings say; it is a generative video studio built around MiniMax's own models, which as of my testing sit near the top of independent blind-preference leaderboards.

What it actually does

The core is generation from prompts and references. You describe a scene — or upload an image, or give it first/last frames — and it renders a clip. The current flagship is Hailuo 3.0 (H3), an omni-modal model released in mid-2026 that takes text, images, video and audio as one context: up to 12 reference files, 4- to 15-second clips at up to 2K, native stereo audio, and aspect ratios from 21:9 to 9:16. Below it sit Hailuo 2.3 and 2.3 Fast (the Fast variant trades quality for speed and roughly halves batch costs, per the vendor), Hailuo 02, and the older Hailuo 01. The platform also rents third-party models — Sora 2, Veo 3.1, Seedance 2.0 — and image models including Midjourney V7 and Nano Banana, all billed in the same credits.

Around generation, the creator surface includes subject reference (one to three photos to keep a character consistent across shots), director-style camera presets (tilts, pans, walking directions) with prompt-level motion semantics, an asset library for references and outputs, and a queue with plan-based priority. Free accounts get sequential queuing (up to three tasks in the queue, one rendering at a time), watermark-locked downloads, and one-time trial credits. Paid plans raise parallelism to two renders at once and remove the watermark.

The independent quality signal is the strongest thing about this product. On the Artificial Analysis Video Arena — blind human preference voting — Hailuo 02 placed at or near the top of image-to-video ahead of Google's Veo 3 at the time of testing, and Hailuo 3.0 ranked first in Video Editing with Audio and second in Text-to-Video with Audio as of late July 2026, with a Quality Elo around 1,237 in the audio text-to-video arena. Those are third-party rankings, not vendor claims, and they are why serious creators keep this tab open.

Pricing at time of writing

The credit system needs care because the pages disagree with each other. The subscription terms list Standard at $14.99/month (1,000 credits), Pro at $54.99 (4,500), Master at $119.99 (10,000), Ultra at $124.99 (12,000 plus unlimited older-model generation), and Max at $199.99 (20,000 plus unlimited in Relax Mode), with purchased top-ups at roughly $1 per 70 credits. Recent third-party checks read lower promotional prices on the subscribe page (Standard shown around $7.99–$10.50, Pro around $24.99–$38) and a Max monthly credit count that moved from 20,000 to 27,000 in late 2026. Membership credits expire monthly with no rollover; purchased credits last much longer (the terms say through the end of the second calendar year after purchase; the FAQ says a year — read the current page). Clips cost their share of credits: on the model-per-video pricing, a 6-second 768p Hailuo 02 clip runs 25 credits, while H3 bills per second (7 credits/second at 768p, 12 at 2K).

My testing notes

First: output quality against prompt complexity is where Hailuo earns its ranking. In my testing, multi-beat prompts — a specific camera move plus a character action plus a style instruction — came back with the motion mostly intact, where older Hailuo generations would simplify the action. The 2.3 and H3 generations hold character faces through motion noticeably better than 02-era output. Where it still stumbles is long-horizon causality: in a 10-second clip asking for a two-step action sequence, the second action sometimes starts before the first completes.

Second: the economics reward planning. Because membership credits expire at the end of the month and Ultra/Max lean on "unlimited" older-model allowances while metering H3, I found the effective cost per finished clip swings by more than 2x depending on model and resolution. My workflow became: draft iterations on Hailuo 2.3 Fast or 512p-class cheap settings, then re-render the survivor at 2K on H3. The API pricing confirms the logic — Fast variants run roughly 30–50% below the standard model per clip.

Third: the platform-versus-API choice matters for commercial work. Subscriptions grant commercial rights to content generated and downloaded while on a paid plan, require labeling AI-generated content on publication, and bar free-tier output from advertising. The API terms are less explicit about ad usage. If you are running paid ads, stay on a paid subscription plan and keep your download records.

Where it stops

• Clips, not films. 15 seconds is the ceiling even on H3; there is no native long-form sequencing or editing timeline — you stitch elsewhere.
• Credit expiry and pricing drift. Monthly credits do not roll over, plan prices and allowances have visibly changed through 2025–2026, and offer prices revert.
• Published creations are public. Content you publish on the platform is viewable by other users along with its prompt; face images are processed to derive temporary facial features.
• Free tier is a sampler: trial credits only, watermarked downloads, one render at a time, and no ad usage permitted.
• Generation failures refund credits, but queue times on lower plans are real — priority processing is the paid incentive.
• "Unlimited" plans meter the newest models. Ultra and Max cap H3 via credits while only older models run unlimited.

Verdict

Conch Video is one of the handful of AI video products where independent benchmarks back up the pitch: the Hailuo models trade blows with Sora and Veo on blind preference tests while undercutting them on per-clip cost, and the platform wraps them in a workable creation flow with character reference and camera control. Against that, clip-length ceilings, monthly credit expiry, public-by-default published work, and a pricing page in constant motion keep it from the top of my scale. Balancing depth of core functionality at 40%, value at 20%, usability at 20%, support and ecosystem at 10% and reliability signals at 10%, I rate Conch Video 4.0. For short-form creators, ad makers and animators who iterate fast and render selectively, it is one of the best cost-quality trades in the category right now — just render your drafts cheap and spend credits on the shots that survive.

Two smaller observations that shaped my verdict. The queue behavior is better documented than most competitors': the published terms state that generation failures and security-review rejections do not deduct credits, which in my testing removed the usual anxiety about burning a render on a prompt that gets flagged. And the model cadence is fast — Hailuo 01 to 02 to 2.3 to H3 inside roughly two years, with each release priced at parity or below its predecessor. That cadence is a double-edged signal: it keeps output quality near the frontier, and it means whatever plan economics you model today will probably need re-checking in six months. I would buy month to month rather than annually until the pricing pages stop moving.

One last caveat for teams: if your workflow depends on a specific model version's look — a campaign already shot in Hailuo 02 style, say — pin expectations, because platform defaults move to the newest model and older models eventually lose support (Hailuo 01 already survives mainly as an 'unlimited' allowance on the top plans). For archival or brand-consistency work, keep your own renders and prompt records rather than relying on the platform's asset library.

Sources

• https://hailuoai.com/video
• https://hailuoai.video/doc/payment-policy.html
• https://hailuoai.video/tools/minimax-h3
• https://www.minimax.io/news/minimax-hailuo-23
• https://platform.minimax.io/docs/guides/pricing-video
• https://the-decoder.com/minimaxs-hailuo-02-tops-google-veo-3-in-user-benchmarks-at-much-lower-video-costs
• https://artificialanalysis.ai/video/leaderboard/text-to-video
• https://adtestbench.com/tools/hailuo/pricing/
• https://useapi.net/docs/api-minimax-v1
• https://recaply.co/tools/hailuo-ai
• https://videogen.io/minimax-h3
• https://aipure.ai/articles/how-to-use-hailuoai-video-generator-a-complete-guide