[Verified] OpusClip's Free Tier Gives 60 Credits a Month, But Your Clips Expire in 3 Days

OpusClip turns long videos — podcasts, livestreams, interviews — into short vertical clips for YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Instagram Reels. It finds the highlight moments automatically, adds animated captions, and scores each clip for how likely it is to go viral. The company also sells that automation through a credits system, where “credits” are the usage currency you spend each time you process a clip; different actions cost different amounts.

We went straight to OpusClip’s pricing page to check what the free tier actually includes, and whether the paid plans are worth it. Short answer on the free tier: it’s generous on paper — 60 credits a month, no credit card required — but two restrictions turn it into more of a trial than a usable free plan.

What the free 60 credits actually buys you

Sign up with no credit card and you get 60 credits every month. With that, OpusClip will auto-reframe horizontal video into vertical format, generate AI captions with emoji and keyword highlighting, and export at up to 1080p resolution. That’s a real feature set — the same AI clipping engine paid users get, just slower to process.

The catch is what’s missing. Free output carries a watermark. You can’t open clips in the editor to trim or adjust them. And clips become impossible to export just 3 days after they’re generated. So even if you liked what the AI produced, you have a 3-day window to grab it before it’s locked out. That combination — watermark plus a hard export deadline — means the free tier works as a “try before you buy” demo, not as a tool you’d actually run your channel on.

Starter vs Pro: what your money actually changes

Starter costs US$15 a month and is billed monthly only — OpusClip’s pricing page states this explicitly, there’s no annual discount option for this tier. For that, you get 150 credits a month, watermark removal, full AI clipping with the virality score, animated captions in 20-plus languages, auto-publishing to Shorts/TikTok/Reels, access to the editor, one brand template, and automatic filler-word and silence removal. In practice, Starter is what turns the free trial into a working tool: no watermark, no 3-day clock, and you can actually edit what the AI gives you.

Pro is US$29 a month billed monthly, or US$14.5 a month if you pay annually — which works out to US$174 for the year, according to OpusClip’s own pricing page. The annual plan also hands you all 3,600 credits for the year upfront in one lump sum, rather than doling them out monthly. Pro adds a team workspace for 2 seats, 2 brand templates, 6 connected social accounts, AI-generated B-roll footage, export in multiple aspect ratios (9:16, 1:1, 16:9), social media scheduling, export to Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, voice enhancement, AI voice dubbing, and limited API access — API meaning a way for other software to connect to OpusClip programmatically, rather than a person clicking through the website.

Above Pro sits Business, which is custom-quoted — OpusClip doesn’t publish a price. It adds priority processing, custom credit and seat counts, dedicated storage, full API access, a formal service agreement, and dedicated Slack support.

The credit math OpusClip doesn’t spell out

One thing worth flagging before you pick a plan: OpusClip’s pricing cards list credit amounts — 60 free, 150 on Starter, 3,600 a year on Pro — but nowhere on the plan cards does it say how many minutes of video one credit actually covers. We’re not going to guess or back into an estimate here, because that number isn’t published where we checked. If you’re trying to figure out whether 150 monthly credits covers your actual output, you’d need to test it with your own footage rather than trust a back-of-envelope conversion — ours or anyone else’s.

🔍 AMPM exclusive check

We read OpusClip’s pricing page directly (opus.pro/pricing) rather than relying on summaries, and the gap that matters most isn’t a hidden number — it’s something the page doesn’t frame as a limitation. Free-tier users see “60 credits a month” and reasonably expect a working free plan. The page doesn’t headline the combination of watermark-on-every-export plus a 3-day export expiry in the same breath as the credit count; you have to read the feature comparison table to find both restrictions. Together they mean the free tier isn’t really a recurring free plan — it resets monthly, but every batch of clips you make has a 3-day shelf life before they’re locked. We also confirmed that Starter has no annual billing option at all, only monthly — that’s stated plainly on the page, but easy to miss if you’re comparing it side by side with Pro’s monthly/annual toggle and assume both tiers work the same way. Everything else — the credit counts, the two price points, the feature lists — matched the official page as of our check on 2026-09-30.

☀️ AMO, the budget-minded cat

Sixty free credits a month with no credit card is a decent hook, and I get why people sign up. But I ran the actual math on what “free” gets you here: you can generate clips, but you can’t take them anywhere without a watermark stamped on, you can’t touch them in an editor, and if you don’t download within 3 days, that work is gone. That’s not a free tier I’d build a content habit around — it’s a way to test whether OpusClip’s AI clipping is any good before paying. If it is good for you, Starter at US$15 a month with 150 credits is the real entry point: no watermark, editor access, auto-posting to three platforms. That’s a fair price for a single creator doing a few videos a month. Where I’d pause is Pro’s annual deal — US$174 a year sounds cheaper than paying US$29 monthly, and it is, but you get all 3,600 credits dumped on day one. Cancel or stop using it in month four and you’ve paid for eight months of credits you’ll never touch. If your output is steady, fine. If it’s not, the monthly Pro plan protects you better even at the higher sticker price.

🌙 PIMI, the performance-minded cat

Forget the price tag for a second — does this thing actually do the job well? The free tier does run the same AI clipping and captioning engine as the paid plans, which is more than some “free” tools offer; it’s not a stripped-down demo model. Up to 1080p output, automatic reframing to vertical, and captions with emoji and keyword emphasis all work on the free plan. Where it falls short for real use is speed and output control: free processing is slower than paid, and you can’t get into the editor to fix anything the AI gets wrong. Once you’re paying, Pro is where the tool gets genuinely capable — AI B-roll insertion, multiple aspect ratios so one clip serves three platforms without re-cutting, export straight into Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve for a team that wants to finish editing by hand, and voice enhancement plus AI dubbing if your source audio is rough. The limited API on Pro also means you can start automating clip generation into a pipeline, though “limited” suggests it’s not the full toolkit — Business gets the unrestricted version. For a two-person team producing regularly, the 2 seats and 6 connected social accounts on Pro solve a real workflow problem: one person clips, one person schedules, without passing files back and forth.

Verdict: who should use it, who should skip it

Use the free tier to test whether OpusClip’s AI actually finds good highlight moments in your specific content — podcast pacing and livestream pacing are different, and the algorithm won’t perform identically on both. Just download anything you want to keep within 3 days, and expect a watermark until you pay. If the results are good and you’re publishing regularly, Starter at US$15 a month is the realistic minimum for actual use — no watermark, real editing, auto-publish. Skip straight to Pro if you need a second teammate, multi-platform aspect ratios, or B-roll automation, but take the monthly US$29 option unless your output is genuinely steady enough to use all 3,600 annual credits — the annual plan’s upfront lump sum is a bad deal if you stop mid-year. Business is worth a call only if you need real API access or priority processing at scale; there’s no public price to compare against.

Written: 2026-10-01 Price last verified: 2026-09-30 Tool last health-checked: 2026-10-01

🔗 Related on AMPM

• OpusClip pricing & free tier

📎 Sources

All prices and quotas in this article come from AMPM’s verified dataset for OpusClip (last verified 2026-09-30); primary sources:

• https://www.opus.pro/pricing
• https://www.opus.pro

🐾 Meet the cats: AMO and PIMI

AMPM is a Taiwan-based AI-tool pricing watchdog. Our motto: ask before you subscribe. Two cats argue every tool from two sides:

• ☀️ AMO — the budget-minded cat. Always asks: is the free tier enough, and is paying actually worth it?
• 🌙 PIMI — the performance-minded cat. Cares about whether it works well, fast, and gets your job done.

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