Faceless Render Bake-Off

Render Bake-Off

Every clip below was generated from the same faceless brief and paid for in real money. Costs are measured, not quoted — Kie from each task's own creditsConsumed, fal from Bench Studio's ledger of the x-fal-billable-units header. Ratings are an honest 1–5 for use as faceless B-roll. 18 Aug 2026 · total spend to produce all of this ≈ $4.87.

Recommendation — run two tiers, not one

Cost and quality point at different models, so blend them by role rather than picking a single winner.

Ambient B-roll (behind text)

$0.09 /min

LTX 2.5 fast · fal via Bench · quality 3/5, soft/dreamy — perfect where it sits under an overlay

Hero shots (the money frames)

$2.44 /min

seedance-2-mini · Kie · quality 5/5, sharp & photoreal at 9:16

An 80/20 ambient/hero blend ≈ $0.56/min ≈ $84/month at Track C scale (150 min/mo) — better than the $135 the original plan assumed. The margin is healthy, not marginal.

⚠ Sora-2 is gone from Kie

All routes return 500 "paused". The old $0.90/min headline is dead — this bake-off re-based it on live models.

✓ LTX 2.5 fast = $0.09/min

27× cheaper than seedance-mini. But measured once — GPU compute-seconds may not generalise; needs ~3 more runs + a 1080p check before committing.

✓ Pricing is flat & shape-neutral

Kie: 5s=41cr, 10s=82cr (exactly 2×); 9:16 carries no premium over 16:9. The $/min column holds.

Gotchas for automation

A failed job bills 0 credits (retry-safe), but the OpenAPI spec is wrong on durations — duration=5 at 9:16 failed while 10 worked. Hard-code known-good values.

Scored on the brief Same prompt, judged for real faceless use. This is where the decision lives.

Cost baselines — not scored Generated from the throwaway prompt "test" during model-name discovery, so each returned its own default content. The cost figures are valid and load-bearing; the pictures say nothing about a real brief, so they carry no rating.

Failed run — logged, not hidden Kept visible because the failure itself is a finding.

All figures reconciled to the Kie balance movement (10,080 → 9,180 credits = 900 credits ≈ $4.46) and fal's verified billable-units header. The single least-verified number here is LTX's $0.09/min — treat it as promising, not proven, until the follow-up runs land.