TL;DR
- The market has no agreed unit. We have seen AI video quoted at RM5, RM30 and RM150 per second, and in packages at RM2,000 for 10 videos, RM2,000 for 20, and RM8,000 for 20. The same three words can describe products that are nothing alike.
- Before comparing anything, do the division. RM8,000 for 20 videos is RM400 a video — that number sets what the work can possibly be.
- Our own ratio: done properly, AI executes at roughly 30% of real production cost and lands on par with it, sometimes slightly above. A RM30,000–40,000 job runs around RM10,000; a RM100,000 job around RM30,000. The saving is most obvious where there is VFX.
- That 30% has a hard limit: AI generative work cannot be precisely adjusted. Once precise changes pile up, the cost of re-rolling can exceed traditional production and still miss the mark — which is why most large brands have not moved to pure-AI advertising.
- What works today is AI combined with a normal workflow — generating elements, assets and modelling help inside conventional production, not replacing it wholesale.
- The spread is a market for lemons: when quality cannot be judged before purchase, price stops carrying information about it, and the work of telling the difference lands on the buyer.
- If what you need is volume at the lowest price, we are not your best choice, and we will say so early rather than late.
Ask three studios what an AI video costs and you can get three answers that do not share a unit, let alone a number. One quotes per second. One quotes a bundle. One quotes per project. All three say "AI video."
This piece answers the questions buyers actually arrive with, in the order they usually arrive in — what it costs, why the quotes disagree so violently, and how to tell which end of the range you are being sold.
How much does an AI video cost in Malaysia?
There is no industry standard. Not a loose one, not an informal one. Whatever price you have been quoted, something ten times cheaper and something ten times dearer both exist in this market right now, and both are being sold under the same name.
Two quoting shapes dominate.
Per second. Rates we have come across run from around RM5 a second, to RM30, to as high as RM150. A thirty-second piece could therefore be RM150 or RM4,500.
Per package. Bundles such as RM2,000 for 10 videos, RM2,000 for 20, or RM8,000 for 20.
For the kind of work we do — a piece that would otherwise have been a real production — we price per video, per project, in the region of RM10,000 for something a conventional shoot would have delivered at RM30,000–40,000.
What is a reasonable price for a 30-second AI video?
The honest answer is that duration is the wrong unit, and any quote priced primarily by the second should be read carefully.
Thirty seconds of a single locked-off product shot and thirty seconds carrying six scene changes, a character who must stay consistent across all of them, and a brand-exact colour are not the same job. They differ by an order of magnitude in effort and they will differ by an order of magnitude in cost, whatever the stopwatch says. What actually drives the number is how many distinct shots there are, how precise each has to be, and how much of it has to survive a client's specific corrections.
Why do AI video quotes vary so much?
This is the most useful question on the list, because the answer is structural rather than anecdotal.
The spread exists because AI video has become a market for lemons — George Akerlof's 1970 account of what happens when buyers cannot judge quality before they buy.
The mechanism runs like this:
- Buyers cannot tell a good AI video from a poor one at the quoting stage. Both are described in the same words, and neither exists yet.
- Unable to verify quality, a rational buyer declines to pay a premium for a claim they cannot check, and anchors on price instead.
- Sellers who invest in craft cannot recover that investment, so they stop investing or leave the category.
- What remains is whatever is cheapest to produce — and price stops carrying information about quality at all.
Here is the uncomfortable consequence, stated plainly: a RM200 video and a RM500 video may well be the same thing. Same underlying model, same platform, same automated pipeline, same absence of anyone checking the output. Where that is true, the extra RM300 buys nothing at all. It is pure premium.
That cuts both ways, and it is the reason we do not simply tell you to buy the dearer option. In a lemon market, paying more is not evidence of getting more. The only defence is to ask questions the price cannot answer for you — which is the checklist further down.
Why does one studio charge RM8,000 for one video and another for twenty?
Because they are running two different businesses, and the difference is in who touches the work.
Volume has an unavoidable structure. To deliver twenty videos at a few hundred ringgit each, a studio cannot make them itself at that price. It has to outsource them, or staff them with interchangeable part-time hands, and run the process as automatically as the economics demand. The result is that no particular person owns the work.
That is not a moral failing — it is arithmetic. But it does mean the thing you are buying is different, and it is worth knowing which one you are getting.
Our own line runs the other way, and pays for it. Our capacity is deliberately small, because the AI production line belongs to a specific person rather than being passed around whoever is free that week. That is why we cannot quote twenty videos for RM8,000 — and it is also, precisely, what you are paying for when we quote one.
Monthly capacity is the tell
Capacity here means what one line — one person, or a small team — can finish in a month without being squeezed.
| Type of work | Realistic monthly output from one line |
|---|---|
| Polished pieces (production-grade) | 5 – 10 |
| UGC-style content | 30 – 50 |
So do the arithmetic on any studio quoting far above that. If a client is buying 50 videos a month and the studio serves ten clients, that studio is claiming 500 finished videos a month. Ask yourself what process could produce that, and how much of it involves anyone looking at the output.
⭐ Unusually large capacity is not a sign of strength in this category. It is a description of the process, and the process is the thing you are actually buying.
Is a 20-video package worth it?
Divide it before you decide.
| Package | Cost per video |
|---|---|
| RM2,000 for 10 videos | RM200 |
| RM2,000 for 20 videos | RM100 |
| RM8,000 for 20 videos | RM400 |
Those numbers are a specification, not an accusation. Four hundred ringgit buys a certain amount of attention — a certain number of iterations, a certain amount of art direction, a certain willingness to throw away a version that is not working. It cannot buy more than that, whatever anyone intends.
A package is a good buy when the campaign genuinely runs on volume: a broad ad matrix, many variants pushed out at once to find what lands, where no single piece has to carry the brand on its own. That is a legitimate way to spend, and if it describes your campaign, buy it.
Should I buy a video package or pay per video?
We price per video, per project, and we do not sell bundles. The reason is commercial rather than a judgement about anyone's taste.
A bundled rate asks for agreement, in advance, to a quality level nobody has seen yet. In our experience that agreement does not survive delivery — and we do not treat that as a failing on the buyer's part.
The sequence is consistent enough that we treat it as a property of the pricing model, not of the client:
- A per-video rate of a few hundred ringgit is quoted and accepted, with a genuine, stated understanding that craft will be limited at that price.
- The work is produced to exactly that rate.
- On delivery, the result still falls short of what was pictured.
Agreeing to a number is easy. Watching the finished piece with your brand on it is a different experience entirely. By the time that difference shows up, the budget is already spent — and both sides are stuck with a result the arithmetic made unavoidable.
So the decision rule is simple. Buy the package if the campaign is genuinely about volume and no single piece has to carry you. Pay per video if any one of them does.
Is AI video cheaper than traditional video production?
Yes, substantially — but only when the work suits it, and the condition is specific enough to state.
When it suits, done properly, AI executes at roughly 30% of what the equivalent real production would have cost, and lands on par with it, sometimes slightly above.
AI video vs traditional production: cost comparison
| If a conventional production would run | The AI route would run |
|---|---|
| RM30,000 – RM40,000 | around RM10,000 |
| RM100,000 | around RM30,000 |
The saving is most pronounced where the piece involves VFX. Effects work that would otherwise mean build time, plates and compositing is exactly where generative tools take out the most cost.
The clearest case we have run did not involve a substitution at all. The client had a production booked in the RM20,000–30,000 range and went ahead with it exactly as planned — then had us build an AI version alongside it, for around RM8,000–10,000. Two finished pieces from one brief, the second at roughly a third of the first. The interesting move was not replacing the production; it was getting a second asset out of the same thinking without taking anything away from the first.
This is a ratio against a real alternative, not a price list. It only means something once there is a brief on the table that could genuinely have gone either way.
⚠️ One unit note, because the two numbers get compared wrongly: the band on our corporate video service page — RM15,000 to RM120,000 — is per project, covering everything that project contains. The figures above are per video. They are not the same measure, and subtracting one from the other tells you nothing.
Why can't AI video be edited precisely?
This is the constraint that decides whether the saving above is real, and it is the least discussed part of AI video pricing.
In traditional production you adjust. In generative work you regenerate and hope.
On a shoot, if the product needs to sit two centimetres to the left, or the expression needs to be fractionally warmer, or the brand blue needs to be exactly that blue, you change it and it is changed. Generative output does not work that way. You cannot reach into it and move one thing. You pull again, and see what comes back.
Once precise changes accumulate, the economics invert. The cost of re-rolling — pulling repeatedly for an exact result — can exceed what the traditional production would have cost, and still not reach the precision required. You can spend more and arrive with less.
This is the missing half of a point we made earlier in AI vs traditional production: that "AI is cheaper" is a claim you test rather than assume. Precision is what the test is measuring. Low precision requirement, the 30% above holds. High precision requirement, the saving evaporates and can reverse.
What are the limitations of AI generated video?
Practically, they reduce to one: anything that has to be exact.
- A specific real face that must stay itself across shots
- True product detail — the actual texture, the actual label, the actual proportions
- Brand-exact colour
- Claims with legal or regulatory weight
- Any correction phrased as "keep everything, change only this"
The more of these a brief contains, the less of the AI saving survives contact with it.
Is AI generated video good enough for a brand campaign?
For a great many campaigns, yes — and increasingly so. Where the piece carries mood, concept, scale or effects work rather than exact product truth, generative production reaches a standard that stands up next to conventional work at a fraction of the cost.
Where it is still not the right tool is the flagship with strict precision requirements. This is why most large brands have not moved to fully AI-generated advertising — not because the output looks wrong, but because their approval process is built on precise correction, and precise correction is the one thing the technology does not offer.
The workable answer in 2026 is not pure AI and not a refusal of AI. It is combination: generative work produces elements, assets and some modelling, folded into an otherwise conventional pipeline, with the precise layer kept under conventional control.
Our own line holds a narrower distinction than "we use AI":
Every step in our process is operated by a person. What changes is where some of the material inside that step comes from.
Storyboarding can be AI. Modelling can be AI-assisted. The fine finishing is always done by hand, and so are the edit, the grade and the mix — because those are exactly the steps where precision lives.
How to tell if an AI video studio is good
This is the defence against everything above. In a market where price carries no information, the only thing that separates a RM200 video from a RM500 one is the answers you get before you pay.
Ask these. A studio doing real work will answer all of them easily; a pipeline will struggle with most.
- Which models do you use, and why those? A specific answer with reasons beats a brand name. "Whatever works best" means nobody is choosing.
- Which platforms do you generate on? Ask what they run on and what that platform is good and bad at.
- Walk me through your workflow, step by step. You are listening for where a human sits in it. If every stage is described as automatic, you have found an automated pipeline.
- Can you make a short test first — say 15 seconds — before I commit? This is the single most useful question on the list. It converts an unverifiable claim into a sample you can look at. (It is how we work: we produce a roughly 15-second trial piece, and only sign once the client has seen it.)
- Who specifically will do my project, and will it be the same person throughout? A named person is a very different answer from a rotating pool.
- What is your monthly capacity, per line? Use the numbers above — 5–10 polished pieces, or 30–50 UGC-style, is a healthy answer from one line. Far higher describes a different process.
- What happens when I ask for a change — is it an edit or a regeneration? This tells you what revisions will actually cost in time and in quality.
- How do revisions work, and what are the limits? (Ours run on a revision window: inside it, changes are not counted. After it, we will still make changes — often at no charge — but the work queues behind scheduled projects, so the wait grows.)
- Show me a piece where the client asked for a specific correction, and tell me what it took. Showreels are selected. This asks about the unglamorous part, which is where the difference lives.
- What do I receive at the end — masters, source files, usage rights? The deliverable list separates a service from a transaction.
If a studio cannot answer 1, 3, 4 and 5, the price is the only information you have — and in this market that is not information at all.
How to read any AI video quote
Four questions, in this order:
- What is the unit, and what does it divide into? Convert everything to cost per finished video before comparing anything.
- How precise does this piece have to be? The more exactness the brief demands, the less of the AI saving you keep.
- How do changes work, and what do they cost? In generative work, changes are regenerations rather than edits.
- Is this replacing a production, or is it a different product? A rate that replaces a RM30,000 production and a rate that produces social volume are not competing offers, even when both are called AI video.
When we are not your best choice
If you need volume at the lowest possible price per video, we are not your best option. We are not the cheapest and we are not trying to be. If your campaign genuinely runs on volume, buy the package — that is the right decision, and we would rather say so early than discover it late.
What we will not do is take that brief and price it as though it were the same job.
None of this is a price list, and the 30% ratio is not a formula to apply to a brief nobody has seen. It is how we price against a real alternative, and what we have found the limits of that pricing to be. The useful thing to carry away is the shape of the question: what does this piece have to achieve, how exactly does it have to achieve it, and what does that make the work worth — because that is the calculation the rate is standing in for.
Thinking about a project like this?
Tell us what it needs to do — we'll take it from there.
Frequently asked questions
- How much does an AI video cost in Malaysia?
- There is no industry standard. Rates we have seen run from about RM5 to RM150 per second, and packages work out anywhere from RM100 to RM400 a video. For work that would otherwise have been a real production, we price per video, per project — around RM10,000 for something a conventional shoot would have delivered at RM30,000–40,000.
- Why do AI video quotes vary so much?
- Because AI video has become a market for lemons: buyers cannot judge quality before purchase, so they anchor on price, studios that invest in craft cannot recover it, and price stops signalling quality. A RM200 video and a RM500 video may well be the same thing — same model, same platform, same automated pipeline, no one checking the output. Paying more is not evidence of getting more, which is why you have to ask questions the price cannot answer.
- Is AI video cheaper than traditional video production?
- When the work suits it, yes — done properly it runs at roughly 30% of what the equivalent production would have cost and lands on par with it, or slightly above. It stops being cheaper the moment the piece needs precise adjustment, because generative output is regenerated rather than edited, and repeated re-rolling can cost more than filming while still missing the mark.
- Why does one studio charge RM8,000 for one video and another for twenty?
- They are different businesses. Delivering twenty videos at a few hundred ringgit each means outsourcing or using interchangeable part-time hands, because nobody can produce that volume themselves at that price — so the production line is not owned by anyone in particular. Capacity is the observable tell. For polished work, 5–10 finished videos a month from one line is a healthy output; UGC-style work runs 30–50. A studio claiming 100–200 a month is describing a different process, whatever it is called.
- Is a 20-video package worth it?
- Divide it first: RM8,000 for 20 videos is RM400 a video, and RM2,000 for 20 is RM100. That figure fixes how much attention any one piece can get. A package is a good buy when the campaign genuinely runs on volume — a broad ad matrix where no single piece carries the brand alone. It is the wrong buy when any one of them has to.
- How can I tell if an AI video studio is good?
- Ask which models and platforms they use and why, have them walk you through the workflow step by step to find where a human sits in it, ask for a short test piece of around 15 seconds before you commit, ask who specifically will do the work and whether it is the same person throughout, and ask their monthly capacity per line — 5–10 polished pieces or 30–50 UGC-style is healthy, far higher describes a different process. A studio doing real work answers these easily; an automated pipeline struggles with most of them.
- Why can't AI video be edited precisely?
- Because generative output cannot be reached into and adjusted the way filmed footage can. You do not move one element; you regenerate the shot and see what comes back. That makes anything requiring exactness — a specific real face, true product detail, brand-exact colour, regulated claims — expensive and uncertain, and it is why most large brands have not moved to fully AI-generated advertising.
- Do you offer video packages?
- No. We price by video, per project. A bundled rate asks for agreement, in advance, to a quality level nobody has seen yet, and in our experience that agreement does not survive delivery — which we treat as a property of the pricing model rather than a failing on the buyer's part.
Keep reading
- Usage Rights, Talent and Music Licensing: The Part Everyone ForgetsThe line brands overlook until it's a problem. Here's how usage rights, talent fees and music licensing actually work in video production — where the cost really sits, what a studio does and doesn't charge for, and the questions to ask before you sign.
- "We Already Have Footage — Just Recut It": Whether That Works Is Decided by the Footage, Not the BudgetWhen the brief becomes "don't shoot this year, recut the old material," you're being asked to bet on the physical state of a batch of files. Before you say yes, spend fifteen minutes on what you actually have — because a finished film isn't raw footage, 1080p doesn't become 4K, and some footage has quietly gone out of date.
- How Long Does a Video Take? A Realistic TimelineMost brands budget the shoot day and forget the weeks around it. Here's a realistic video production timeline — pre-production, shoot, post — and why the time is really spent, and won, before the camera ever rolls.