AI video for local businesses — what 1,800 credits really buys

A barber, a plant shop, a plumber, a bakery, a physio clinic. No studio, no agency, no marketing budget beyond the number that would otherwise have been a boosted post. The question is never "what could AI video do" — it is "what does fifteen dollars a month actually get me, and which parts of this should I stop trying to generate." This is a straight answer to both, with the arithmetic in the open.

Split the job before you spend anything

Generated video makes original scenes. It will never render your shop, your van, your staff or the customer who has been coming in since 2011. Real identifiable people without consent are banned by policy, generated people are fictional strangers, and there is no face swap, no upscaler and no training a model on your own photos.

That sounds like a limitation. In practice it sorts the work for you.

Your phone does the proof. The storefront at opening. The hands doing the thing. The before and after. The owner saying one sentence to camera. The queue at lunchtime. This is the footage that actually sells a local business, it is free, and nobody can generate it because it is true.

eroq does the surrounding layer. The establishing shot of a street you did not stand on at golden hour. The atmosphere clip between two phone shots. The abstract loop behind an offer. The stills for the menu board, the leaflet, the Google post. The voice-over when your own voice is not the point.

A local video that works is usually eight seconds of phone footage between two generated bookends. Not the other way around.

What 1,800 credits buys

Hobby is $15 a month for 1,800 credits. Credits never expire and unused ones roll over forever, so the number is a floor, not a use-it-or-lose-it allowance. Spend the whole allowance on exactly one thing and here is the ceiling in each direction:

• 30 clips of 5 seconds on Seedance 1.0 Lite — 30 × 60 = 1,800
• 18 clips of 5 seconds on Motion One — 18 × 100 = 1,800
• 10 clips of 10 seconds on Motion One — 10 × 180 = 1,800
• 180 stills on Image One — 180 × 10 = 1,800
• 90,000 characters of narration on Voice Turbo — 90,000 ÷ 100 × 2 = 1,800

Nobody spends it that way, but it is the right mental model: a five-second clip is somewhere between 60 and 100 credits, a still is 10, and a hundred characters of speech is 2. Everything else is addition.

Hobby also unlocks Seedance 1.0 Lite and Hailuo 02, raises the clip cap to 15 seconds, and holds two seats — you and the one person who runs the social accounts. That two-seat ceiling is the same on every individual plan, so if the shop grows into a team of five the answer is the Team plan at $249, not a bigger individual one. Seats are managed on the workspace page.

One monthly batch, costed

Sit down once a month and render everything. The batch that covers a small business comfortably:

• 8 social clips at 5 seconds on Seedance 1.0 Lite — 8 × 60 = 480
• 2 hero clips at 5 seconds on Motion One — 2 × 100 = 200
• 12 stills on Image One for posts, the board and the leaflet — 12 × 10 = 120
• 2,000 characters of voice-over on Voice Turbo — 2,000 ÷ 100 × 2 = 40

Subtotal 840 credits. Nothing comes out right the first time, so budget a second pass of six re-renders on Lite — 6 × 60 = 360 — and the month lands at 1,200 credits. That leaves 600 of the 1,800 rolling into next month, which is how the December batch pays for itself.

Failed generations refund themselves automatically, so a render that errors is not a charge. Ten clips, twelve images and a narration track for $15 is roughly the price of one boosted post that runs for two days.

The prompt for a generated establishing shot

One flowing paragraph in the video studio, naming subject, motion, camera, light and mood. For a bakery opening at dawn:

A narrow shopping street at first light in autumn, slow push-in along wet cobbles as warm light spills from a single lit shopfront and steam rises from a vent across the road, empty pavement, clean sharp lens at f/4, warm film palette, practicals and low sun, calm tempo, documentary look on 35mm film, wide shot.

Notice what it does not say: no brand name, no signage, no faces. Generated lettering comes out as almost-words, so keep "text, watermark, signage" in the negative prompt and let your own storefront carry your name in the phone shot that follows.

If writing that paragraph is the part you dread, the Enhance and Surprise me buttons rewrite a rough line into a director-grade prompt for free. "Bakery street morning" goes in, something like the above comes out, and you edit it rather than compose it.

Where the money actually goes wrong

Three failure modes account for most wasted credits in small accounts.

Re-rendering instead of taking takes. Each scene accepts 1 to 4 takes at once. Asking for two takes of a shot that matters costs the same as rendering it twice and saves you the round trip of watching, disliking and starting again.

Chasing length. A 10-second clip on Motion One is 180 credits against 100 for 5 seconds. Almost no local business post needs a 10-second generated shot; it needs two 5-second ones that cut.

Generating what you could have filmed. The single most expensive habit is trying to fake the shop. It costs credits, it looks generic, and the phone in your pocket does it better and for nothing.

FAQ

Is the free tier enough to try this?

A new account gets 50 credits, which is five stills on Image One or 2,500 characters on Voice Turbo — enough to judge the image quality and the voices. It is not enough for a clip — the cheapest 5-second render is 60 credits on Seedance 1.0 Lite, and 100 on Motion One, which is the engine a free account has. Try images first, then decide.

Do I need the $49 plan?

Not for a single location. Creator buys more credits, longer clips and the premium engines — Seedance 2.5, Kling, Veo 3 Fast — which matter when you are selling video to clients. One shop posting twice a week fits inside Hobby with change.

Can I put my actual shop in a generated clip?

Not as a generated scene. You can hand the engine one of your own photos as a reference and have it animate that frame, which is the only honest way your real premises appear in a render. Everything else should be filmed.

Got a phone and fifteen dollars? Open the video studio, render the street at dawn, and film the rest yourself.