How This Startup Helps Users Generate Videos Without Breaking The Bank

Despite OpenAI’s decision to shutter Sora, other AI video developers aren’t giving up. Instead, they’re finding interesting new ways to make money from their video-generating models.

Take LTX—a spinoff from Lightricks, the company behind the popular image editing app Facetune—which in January launched open-source AI software for video generation and editing that can run on a single laptop.

People often use “open-source” and “free” interchangeably, but it’s not unheard of for developers of open-source software to require payment or other considerations from users in certain situations. LTX is an example of that: Initially, developers can use its AI software to generate and edit videos for free, but once they start making more than $10 million in revenue, LTX requires the developer to share a certain portion of revenue with it, according to CEO Zeev Farbman.

There’s a deeper strategy behind this pricing model, Farbman says. The issue with the video AI market today is that models aren’t yet good enough to produce exactly what a user wants on the first attempt, he said. Instead, users often have to produce many versions of the same video, tweaking them over time, which can quickly rack up costs when they have to pay per video generation, he said. Customers of video AI developers like xAI, Google and Runway can spend anywhere from a few dollars to over $10 to generate just one minute of video.