Credits & billing

How Wavemaker charges — credits, reservations and settlement, refunds on failure, cancellation, and plan gates.

Last updated July 2, 2026

Wavemaker meters usage in credits. Plans include a monthly credit allowance; packs top you up. Current plan pricing is on the pricing page.

The reserve → settle model

Media generation costs vary with what actually gets produced, so billing is two-phase and always in your favor:

  1. Reserve. When a generation starts, credits are reserved — an upper-bound hold sized for the work requested.
  2. Settle. When it finishes, the reservation settles to the actual recorded cost of what was produced. The difference is released back.

Consequences you can rely on:

  • A failed generation refunds in full. If a run errors before delivering, the entire reserve returns automatically.
  • Cancelling settles to actual. Stop a run halfway and you pay only for what was already produced — the rest releases.
  • No surprise overruns. The reserve is the ceiling; settlement only ever goes down from it.

What costs what

Costs scale with the operation, and the expensive parts are the media:

  • Video generation — the dominant cost; scales with total video seconds produced.
  • Images, voiceover, music — smaller per-unit costs within a generation.
  • Refinements — priced by what they regenerate: a text/audio-only edit is cheap; re-producing a scene’s clip costs like producing a clip.
  • Exports — quoted per render tier (SD/HD/4K) before you confirm; upscaling is included in the tier price.
  • Catalog Video (early access) — per-variant tier rates (S: 3 credits, A: 6 + 2 per re-voiced line, M: 25) with batch quotes before any run. See Catalog Video overview.
  • Standalone upscaling — per minute, by tier and target resolution, quoted at dispatch.

Every generation’s actual cost is visible in Usage, itemized per operation.

Quotes before spend

Anything batch-sized shows a quote first: catalog runs, refresh diffs (“214 re-render — 47 credits”), exports. Automatic processes (catalog sync refresh) run under budget caps you configure — spend beyond the cap queues with a notification instead of running silently.

Plans & gating

  • Free — try the product; includes starter credits.
  • Paid plans — monthly credit allowances, no watermark, full export tiers, API access. Catalog Video’s Starter tier is included in Pro; Scale and Enterprise tiers add platform fees with volume discounts (numbers on the pricing page).
  • Credit packs never expire.

Team billing

Credits belong to your organization — every member draws from the shared balance, and admins see per-member usage in the dashboard.