OpusClip Free Plan: The Real Catch Is the 3-Day Export Window, Not the Watermark (2026 Price Check)

OpusClip turns long videos into short vertical clips automatically. The pricing page looks simple — free, US$15, US$29 — but reading the fine print reveals that the limitation most likely to bite you on the free plan is not the watermark. It is a deadline.

All figures below were read directly from the opus.pro pricing page (monthly tab) on 2026-09-07.

1. What the free plan actually gives you

Free Forever (US$0/month):

• 60 credits per month
• Clips rendered up to 1080p
• Auto reframe
• AI captions with emoji and keyword highlighting
• Watermark included
• No editing
• After 3 days, the clips are no longer exportable

That last line is the one to internalise. The page states it plainly: “After 3 days, the clips will no longer be exportable.” The free tier does not merely produce lower-quality output — your output has an expiry date. Render on Friday afternoon, remember to download on Monday, and it is gone.

Paired with “no editing,” the positioning is unambiguous: this is a trial that lets you judge whether the AI’s clip selection is worth paying for, not a plan you can settle into.

2. The paid tiers, with the numbers

Starter unlocks: AI clipping with Virality Score, animated captions in 20+ languages, auto-posting to YouTube Shorts / TikTok / IG Reels or direct download, the editor, 1 brand template, filler-word and silence removal, and watermark removal.

Pro adds on top: AI B-Roll (image, video and stock), input from 10+ sources, export to Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, multiple aspect ratios (9:16, 1:1, 16:9), a social scheduler, a 2-seat team workspace, 2 brand templates, 6 social account connections, custom fonts, speech enhancement, limited API access and video dubbing.

3. Annual billing halves the price — but changes how credits arrive

The annual offer is genuinely aggressive: US$29 becomes US$14.5 per month, and the site banner advertises “save up to 50% with annual billing.” Read the billing line carefully though: annual is US$174 charged once, and it comes with 3,600 credits per year, available instantly.

That is a different model from monthly top-ups, and the practical difference is:

• Upside: all 3,600 land at once, so you can burn a large share in a single heavy month (right after a shoot, say) without hitting a monthly ceiling.
• Risk: there is no “next month’s batch.” Blow through it in the first quarter and the remaining nine months require top-ups.

How to choose: annual suits lumpy output — agency work, project-based or seasonal campaigns. Steady monthly output, or uncertainty about lasting a full year, points to Starter’s monthly-only billing, which is arguably designed for exactly that person.

4. Sizing your credit needs

The pricing page does not publish a conversion formula for what one credit buys, but it does give reference points: 3,600 credits is framed as a year on Pro, Starter is 150 per month, and Free is 60 per month.

Proportions are the honest way to read this. Free is roughly 40% of a Starter month, and a Starter month is about 1/24 of an annual Pro allocation. If your routine is “a batch of shorts every week,” 60 credits is almost certainly not enough — which is precisely why the free tier also carries the 3-day export window. It is not built for you to stay.

(The site also offers a “Create & Grow Faster” calculator that estimates credits and clip counts by category and platform. Those outputs vary with your inputs, so we do not quote them as fixed facts.)

Prices and plan contents verified 2026-09-07 from the OpusClip pricing page (monthly tab); they can change at any time and the official page is authoritative. Our full record lives on the OpusClip tool page. For another case where credits do not roll over, see how to use all 500 weekly credits on Napkin AI.