Captions AI Pricing (2026): Every Plan, the Flat $0.05 Meter, and Why Upgrading Never Gets You a Discount

Every figure on this page was read off captions.ai/pricing on 2026-08-04. The cost-per-credit and rollover-ceiling columns are ours: Captions publishes prices and credit counts, and publishes the rollover rule, but never the arithmetic between them — and in this case the arithmetic is the entire story.

One structural fact to hold before the table, because it inverts the usual advice:

Captions' credit price does not improve with volume. Max, Scale 1x, Scale 2x and Scale 4x all charge $0.0500 per credit. There is no bulk rate on the published ladder. Upgrading buys capacity, never value.

The Plans

Verified on captions.ai/pricing 2026-08-04. Prices shown in USD. Captions notes iOS plans separately.

The shape here is worth naming: there are only two genuine feature steps in the whole ladder. Free → Max unlocks the actual product. Max → Scale 1x unlocks "more sophisticated generative AI models". After that, Scale 1x → 2x → 4x adds nothing but credits. Scale 2x and Scale 4x are not tiers in any meaningful sense; they are prepayment.

What a Credit Actually Costs

Four tiers. One price. The spread across an 11.2x range of spend is 0.00002 dollars per credit, which is rounding, not a discount.

This is rare enough to be worth dwelling on, because it quietly invalidates the standard buying heuristic. In most credit-metered tools the advice is "estimate your volume, then buy the tier where the rate improves". Here there is no such tier. The correct question is not which plan is best value but simply how many credits do I need this month, because the answer costs the same either way.

It also means one specific mistake is impossible to make and another is easy:

• You cannot overpay by buying too small a plan. Buying Max twice over costs the same per credit as Scale 1x. There is no penalty for starting low.
• You can absolutely overpay by buying too large a plan, because unused credits stop banking at 3x (below), and there is no rate benefit to compensate for the waste.

The safe move is therefore to buy under your estimate and step up, which is the opposite of the advice that makes sense on a normal volume ladder.

The Rollover Ceiling, Per Plan

Captions states that unused credits roll over monthly, capped at 3x the monthly allowance. Worked through:

A standing balance is a real benefit and better than the two-month expiry Creatify uses (verified on help.creatify.ai 2026-08-03). But note what the cap means in practice: three consecutive months of zero usage and you are burning money with nothing to show for it. For seasonal advertisers — a brand that produces heavily around two launches a year and barely touches the tool between — the cap is reached long before the busy period arrives, and downgrading between seasons is the only way to avoid paying for credits that will never exist.

Because the rate is flat, downgrading and upgrading around seasonality costs you nothing in unit terms. On most competitors that manoeuvre is penalised. Here it is free, and Captions states plans are fully switchable with prorated pricing for upgrades.

Annual Billing

Captions states that "a yearly plan bills for 12 months upfront, at a discounted rate."

It does not display the resulting per-tier annual prices. We are therefore not quoting a discount percentage, an effective monthly rate, or an annual total, because we could not read any of them on 2026-08-04.

What we can say is that annual billing is one of only two published routes to a rate below $0.0500 per credit — the other being Enterprise bulk discounts. If your usage is stable and you have already decided on the vendor, this is the lever that actually moves the number, and it is worth asking sales to put the annual figures in writing before committing 12 months upfront.

Enterprise — the Only Published Volume Discount

Everything in the Scale tiers plus bulk credit discounts, custom seat options, a dedicated account manager, training-data exclusion, priority support and early beta access.

Two of these deserve more attention than the price:

Custom seat options. No published Captions tier describes seats, team collaboration, client separation, or white-labelling at all. Not Max, not any Scale rung. If more than one person needs access under one account — or if you need to keep client work apart — you are in an Enterprise conversation from the first day, regardless of volume. For agencies this, not credit consumption, is the binding constraint.

Training-data exclusion. This is listed as an Enterprise feature, which implies it is not the default below Enterprise. For anyone uploading unreleased product footage, client material under NDA, or a founder's likeness as a digital twin, that is a procurement question rather than a pricing one, and it should be asked early.

Comparing With Creatify Without Getting It Wrong

The per-credit numbers invite a comparison that does not hold up:

Captions verified 2026-08-04; Creatify verified 2026-08-03.

A Captions credit looks 6–8x cheaper. Do not read it that way. The two vendors' credits are different units and neither publishes a conversion into the other. Creatify's credit maps to a documented amount of finished video — 5 credits per 15 seconds for an AI Video Ad, so a 30-second ad costs 10 credits or $3.90 on Starter. Captions does not publish comparable per-feature credit costs on any page we could reach on 2026-08-04; the help centre redirect chain (help.captions.ai → help.mirage.app → captions.ai/help) terminated in a 404.

So the only sound comparison is monthly total against your own output. Run a week on both free or entry tiers, count finished assets you would actually ship, and divide. Any comparison table that converts between these two credit systems is guessing.

What We Could Not Verify

Stated plainly, because a pricing page that hides its gaps is worse than useless:

• Per-feature credit costs. Not reachable on 2026-08-04 — see the redirect chain above.
• Annual prices. Advertised as discounted; the figures are not displayed.
• Free-tier watermark policy. Not stated on the pricing page or the overview page.
• Seat counts below Enterprise. Not published.
• API access. No API documentation or pricing is published.
• The $399/month, 8,000-credit business tier that circulates in third-party write-ups alongside Mirage Studio. It does not appear on the live pricing page we read today, so we do not present it as current.

Each of these is a fair question for sales, and the last one especially — the Captions/Mirage Studio merge means some published third-party pricing describes a product structure that no longer exists.

Related Reading

• Captions AI alternatives, ranked by job
• Captions AI review: what it does well and where it stops
• Creatify pricing, plan by plan