Hailuo AI

Where Hailuo AI sits

Hailuo AI is MiniMax's consumer video and image generator: text-to-video and image-to-video generation at up to 2K, with an agent mode and image generation folded into the same web product at hailuoai.video. MiniMax is a Shanghai-based foundation-model company founded in early 2022, and Hailuo is its flagship creative surface; the models themselves (Hailuo 01, Hailuo 02 and the current H3 generation, launched on 31 July 2026) are also sold through an API and through third-party aggregators. In the current video-model field, Hailuo competes with Runway, Kling, Veo and Sora, and the pitch is consistent wherever you read it: motion quality and character physics close to the leaders at a per-clip cost well below them. Whether that holds in practice is what I went looking for.

What it actually does

Generation starts from a prompt, a reference image or both. The creation page I used accepts multiple reference images (up to twelve in the interface, under the Omni Reference feature), a model selector (MiniMax H3 as the current default), resolution up to 2K, clip length of 5 or 10 seconds and a choice of aspect ratios including 21:9. Output is downloadable, and paid plans remove the watermark that free output carries. Image generation and an agent-style creation flow sit beside video in the same interface, and MiniMax Design is a related product with its own credit grant.

The pricing is credit-based, and this is where the product needs careful reading, because list prices and promotional offers currently coexist on the subscribe page. At time of writing: Free gives basic features, watermarked downloads and a one-time welcome credit package that expires three days after it is granted. Standard lists at $14.99 per month, shown as a limited-time offer at $7.99, with 1,000 credits per month, which the plan FAQ describes as about 40 six-second 768p videos, 20 ten-second 768p clips or 12 six-second 1080P clips. Pro lists at $54.99 with a $24.99 offer price, 4,500 credits, ten-second 1080p output and two tasks in parallel. Master lists at $94.99 with a $63.99 offer and 10,000 credits. Ultra ($124.99) adds 12,000 credits plus unlimited generation on the older Hailuo 01 model, and Max ($199.99) adds 27,000 credits plus unlimited Hailuo 01 and 02 generation; a notice on the page records that monthly credits rose from 20,000 to 27,000 recently while the plan FAQ still says 20,000.

For developers, the MiniMax API prices the current H3 model at $0.08 per second at 768p and $0.13 per second at 2K, with H3-Max at $0.05 per second at 480p and $0.08 at 768p; input images are free for the first five (two on H3-Max) and $0.04 each after, and upscaling from 768p to 2K regenerates at $0.05 per second. Usage rights matter for commercial work: the terms of service bar free-tier output from advertising use, while paid-plan output may run in ads under stated conditions, and the API terms do not clearly say either way.

My testing notes

I generated a few dozen clips across text-to-video and image-to-video prompts, comparing subject motion, prompt adherence and character consistency. Four observations.

First, motion quality is the reason this product earns attention. Human and animal movement in my clips had the fluid, physically-plausible quality that separates the current generation from the sliding-puppet output of older models: a running dog's gait held up frame to frame, and a hand manipulating an object kept its proportions across the clip. Prompt adherence is good on concrete descriptions and weaker on camera language; when I asked for a slow dolly-in I got a push-in on most attempts but occasionally a static frame with a zoom, which is a real difference for anyone storyboarding shots.

Second, the credit math is harder than it should be. At the Standard tier, the plan FAQ's own count works out to roughly $0.37 per six-second 768p clip at list price ($0.20 at the promotional price), and those counts describe the older Hailuo 01 and 02 models. For the current H3 model the subscribe page quotes seconds per month instead (about 143 seconds monthly on Standard), which at list price comes to about $0.63 for a six-second clip. Two different units for two model generations on the same page is the kind of pricing that rewards careful buyers and punishes casual ones.

Third, the promotional pricing is genuinely temporary. The $7.99 Standard price is labeled a limited-time offer returning to $14.99, and the Pro, Master and Ultra offers show the same pattern. I also found a documented conflict about parallelism: the plan FAQ says Standard processes one task at a time while the subscription terms say paid users may generate up to two videos simultaneously. My queue behaved like one task at a time on Standard.

Fourth, on the free tier, the three-day expiry on the welcome credits is aggressive. I ran the free credits in an afternoon of testing and was done before the watermark question even mattered. The free tier is a demo; treat it as one.

On reliability in production terms, my generation queue completed every request I submitted across the testing window, with the usual variable wait at peak hours; the platform surfaces queue position rather than leaving you guessing. The history and asset view keeps every clip with its prompt attached, which made comparing variants across seeds practical in a way some rivals are not. Downloads arrived without re-encoding artifacts in my checks, and the watermark on free output is a visible lower-third that paid tiers remove.

What it does not do

There is no desktop or mobile editing suite here: Hailuo generates clips, and anything beyond trimming means exporting to an editor. The agent mode is a guided creation flow, not a multi-shot film production tool; it will not maintain characters across a sequence of scenes the way a storyboarded production needs. Consistency across clips in a series remains a per-clip craft of reference images and prompt tuning, and even with reference images my results were consistent in look but not in identity-level detail.

The commercial-rights story is a real constraint. Free output cannot be used in advertising at all per the terms, the paid-plan rights come with conditions I would read before a client campaign, and the API terms are silent on paid-ad use. For agencies, that silence is a question for a lawyer, not a footnote. Credit rollover was not documented where I looked, and the plan-page disagreements (20,000 versus 27,000 credits on Max; one versus two simultaneous tasks) suggest packaging that changes often.

Support is web-based with documentation and a terms page; there is no phone line, and the company's consumer product sits inside a large model lab whose business重心 is API and enterprise. As with all fast-moving model products, expect version churn: the model that wins your test today may be superseded next quarter.

Verdict

Hailuo AI is one of the stronger video generators I have tested on the metrics that matter for real work: motion plausibility, subject stability and per-clip cost against the Western leaders. The product around the models is where it falls down: credit accounting mixes units across model generations, promotional prices are stacked on top of list prices, and the terms around parallel use and ad rights have contradictions I had to read twice. Rated 4.0 on my rubric: generation quality is close to the top of the category, value per clip is strong at promotional pricing and respectable at list price, usability of the creation flow is good but the pricing page works against it, the API and aggregator ecosystem is broad, and the documentation conflicts keep the reliability score from going higher. If you produce short video clips for ads or social and you are willing to manage credits deliberately, Hailuo belongs in the evaluation set alongside the big names.

Sources

• https://hailuoai.video/subscribe
• https://adtestbench.com/tools/hailuo/pricing
• https://autogpt.net/hailuo-ai-pricing
• https://ageofllms.com/ai-news/ai-fun/hailuo-ai-paind-plans
• https://pricepeekai.com/tool/hailuo
• https://akool.com/blog-posts/minimax-hailuo-2-3-cost-guide
• https://toolscout.in/tools/minimax-video-hailuo-ai.html
• https://platform.minimax.io/docs/guides/pricing-paygo
• https://www.minimax.io/blog/minimax-h3
• https://ir.minimax.cn/en/corporate-information/company-profile
• https://hailuoai.video/doc/terms-of-service.html