InVideo AI let us sign up for free, paste a script, and plan a whole video with its AI agent. Then it asked for about 350 credits. Our free account had 10 to begin with, and the planning chat had already used about half of them.
Why We Reviewed InVideo AI on Its Free Plan
Most InVideo AI reviews show you finished videos. This one can’t, and that is the point: on October 21, 2026, a free InVideo AI account could plan a 20-second video but not produce it. We think that is the most useful thing a new user can learn before signing up.
InVideo (the company writes its name in lowercase, “invideo”) sells an AI video tool at invideo.io. You describe a video, paste a script or upload files, and an AI agent turns that into a video with voice, visuals and music. The pricing page sells plans by the credit, starting at 400 credits a month (InVideo pricing).
So what do you get before you pay anything? That is the question we set out to answer, with the same short script we use for every video tool we review.
Here’s the catch we found early: on InVideo AI, the free plan is a place to look around, not a place to make videos. Here is why.
Key Takeaways
InVideo AI’s agent quoted about 350 credits for one 20-second voiceover video, while our free plan held 10 credits per period, in our test on October 21, 2026. Sign-up, planning and browsing are free; producing that video was not. Free downloads carry a watermark, per InVideo’s own help center (InVideo Help Center).
Quick Verdict: What InVideo AI’s Free Plan Can and Cannot Do
The InVideo AI free plan let us do four things and stopped us at the fifth: producing a 20-second video needed about 35 times the 10 credits we started with. If you only want to see how the agent thinks, the free plan is enough. If you want a video file, plan on paying.
| Task | Free plan result in our test |
|---|---|
| Sign up with Google | Worked; 8-step questionnaire, no card entered |
| Paste a script and plan with the AI agent | Worked; the agent asked 6 production questions |
| Produce the video | Stopped; quoted about 350 credits, balance about 5.4 |
| Export and check the watermark | Not reached; no video was produced |
| Read the free limits | Worked; 10 credits, 10 GB storage, no iStock footage |
Is that a bad tool? Not necessarily. It is a credit-metered tool, and the free meter is very small. Keep reading for where the credits went and what the paid plans cost.
How We Tested InVideo AI
We tested InVideo AI on October 21, 2026, on the free plan, with one work account and no card on file. We used the five tasks from our standard video test, written down before we started:
- Sign up.
- Go through the plan step.
- Make a short video from the same material: a 20-second script.
- Export it and check the watermark and quality.
- Record the free plan limits from the app.
We signed in with Google, copied what each screen said word for word, and kept masked screenshots of every step. When this review quotes a screen, that text comes from our test log.
What did we not do? We did not pay for a plan, we did not buy credits, and we did not try avatars or the generative video models. Those all need credits we did not have. Where this review talks about them, it uses InVideo’s own pricing page and help center and says so.
A note on money: Indie Stack Lab may add affiliate links to some tools later. When a link is an affiliate link, it is labeled, and our disclosure page explains how that works. It did not change what we tested or what we wrote down.
Signing Up: An 8-Step Questionnaire and a Pre-Checked Lookup Box
Signing up for InVideo AI took an 8-step questionnaire after the Google consent screen, and the first screen had a privacy box already checked for us. The Google step itself asked only for name, profile picture and email address.
The pre-checked box read “Allow invideo to look you up on the internet.” We unchecked it. If you don’t want a company searching for you online, look for this box before you press anything else.
Then came the questionnaire. Is every question required? Not quite: the role question can be skipped. It asked for:
- a workspace name
- your preferred language
- your birth year
- your role (you can skip this one)
- your team size
- the type of video you want to make
- how you heard about InVideo
- your editing style
One question deserves a warning. Under the birth year, the screen said: “Your birth year can’t be changed later.” That is unusual for a video tool. Pick the real year, because you won’t get a second chance.
After the questions, onboarding ended on a plan picker with a countdown discount. We never entered a card.
The Plan Picker: A 55% Off Countdown Before You Reach the App
InVideo AI’s onboarding ends on a full-screen plan picker with a countdown timer and a 55% discount on annual plans. The banner read “55% OFF JUST FOR YOU — ON ANNUAL PLANS — … promo code applied” in our test.
The Plus plan on that screen showed “2,000 credits/mo” and “$60 $27 per seat/mo, billed annually.” We closed it with “Skip plan picker” and landed on the home screen. After that, the same discount offer stayed as a banner on every page we opened.
Does the countdown mean the price vanishes when it hits zero? We didn’t wait to find out. What we can tell you is what the public pricing page showed two days later, on October 23, 2026: a “50% OFF” label and Plus at $30 per seat per month, billed annually, with $60 struck through (InVideo pricing). So the in-app offer was a little lower than the public one, and both were annual prices.
Honestly, our advice is simple. Skip the picker on day one. You can’t judge a plan before you’ve seen what the credits buy, and the free plan will show you that quickly.
Giving the AI Agent Our Script: Six Production Questions
InVideo AI’s agent did not start producing right away: it asked us 6 production questions about our 20-second script first. That part worked well, and it is the best look at InVideo AI the free plan gives you.
From the home screen we chose “Use my script,” pasted our script with the instruction “Create a video for YouTube using exactly this script,” pressed Proceed and named the project. The agent was labeled “Agent Two Lite.” Then it asked six questions about how we wanted the video made. Our choices, as recorded in our test log:
- Format and length: 16:9, kept tight to the script, about 20 to 25 seconds.
- Voice: voiceover only, no on-screen presenter.
- Visuals: stylized, generic dashboard visuals, not real product screens.
- Music: light background music.
- Ending: a plain text end card.
What surprised us was how much of a brief this produced. The questions were the ones a human video editor would ask, and each answer narrowed the plan. If you have never written a video brief, this exchange alone teaches you what one contains.
Did anything go wrong? One small hiccup. Partway through, the chat showed “Connection issue — Restoring…” once. We pressed the retry button and the conversation picked up where it had stopped.
Where It Stopped: A 350-Credit Quote on a 10-Credit Plan
InVideo AI stopped before producing anything: the agent said our planned cut would cost about 350 credits, and our balance was about 5.4. In its words: “The locked cut lands around 350 credits to produce. Your balance is about 5.4, so we can’t run it as planned.”
A second message followed: “This needs more credits than your account currently has. Upgrade your plan to keep going.” No video was generated. There was nothing to preview, edit or export.
How big is that gap? At 10 free credits per period, 350 credits is 35 periods of the free allowance for one 20-second video. InVideo’s help center says the free quota resets weekly (InVideo Help Center), and a weekly quota resets rather than stacking up, so waiting is not a real workaround.
Two things are worth knowing about this quote:
- It came before any generation. The agent priced the plan first and told us it couldn’t run it, so we did not lose credits on a half-made video.
- It covered the whole plan we had agreed: voiceover, visuals, music and the end card. A shorter or simpler brief might cost less. We did not test that, because the remaining balance was too small to try.
Seen from the other side, the quote is useful information. A 20-second video with voice and visuals, at the Lite tier, was priced at about 350 credits. That gives you a rough yardstick for reading the paid plans.
How InVideo AI Credits Work
InVideo AI charges credits for nearly every AI action, and the agent’s planning chat counted too: our free balance fell from 10 credits to about 5.4 before anything was generated. InVideo’s help center explains why: when the agent responds, it may be “reasoning through your brief, generating images, producing video clips, designing voice, and more,” and each of those draws from your balance (InVideo Help Center: AI agent credits).
Here is how the official pages describe the system, as of October 23, 2026:
- Credits work like currency. They pay for video generation, generative image and audio models, agent workflows and some premium features (How Do Credits Work?).
- Video models are priced per second. The help center gives the formula “Total cost = credits/sec × video duration,” and says resolution, video input and audio generation change the rate (Plan Limits).
- Models cost very different amounts. The same page says a quick Kling 2.6 Standard video “might cost 5 credits,” while a Veo 3.1 4K video with audio “can cost 100+ credits.”
- The agent has three tiers: Lite, Pro and Ultra. Lite is “fast and credit-efficient,” Pro has a “higher credit cost per generation,” and Ultra adds 4K video and upscaled images on top of Pro (AI agent credits).
- Some things are free. You are not charged for downloading content you already generated or for editing existing videos (How Do Credits Work?).
- Credits don’t roll over. On paid plans, the allowance resets each month on the day you subscribed, annual plans included.
- Prices can change. InVideo “reserves the right to update credit costs at any time, without prior notice” (Plan Limits).
What does that mean for a beginner? Two habits help. First, after each agent reply, click the three dots on that message: the help center says this shows exactly how many credits that exchange used. Second, check the Usage page under your profile icon before a long session.
There is also a permission setting worth changing on day one. By default the agent is set to “Always allow,” which means it can generate without asking. The help center lists two stricter options, “Ask before generating videos” and “Always ask before generating,” which show an approval box with the prompt, model, duration and aspect ratio before anything runs.
Free Plan Limits We Saw: Credits, Storage, Stock Footage and Watermarks
The InVideo AI free plan in our account came with 10 credits per period, 10 GB of storage and no licensed iStock footage, as shown on the Usage & cloud storage page on October 21, 2026. We read those numbers under You, then Settings, then Usage & cloud storage.
| Limit | What our free account showed |
|---|---|
| Credits | “5.3 / 10 credits — 53% used — Resets on 26 Oct” |
| iStock footage | “0 / 0” with the note “Stock footage are licensed only when you export videos” |
| Storage | “0 / 10 GB” |
| Payment | “No payment method on file” |
Before the test, the account showed “10 credits left.” So roughly half of the free allowance went into one planning conversation that produced no video.
What about the watermark? We could not reach an export, so we could not check a file ourselves. The subscription page said: “Free plan — Upgrade for all AI models, workflows, trends, avatars & watermark-free exports.” InVideo’s help center says the same thing in plain words: “You can download the videos with a watermark on the free plan” (InVideo Help Center). The same article says you may share free-plan videos on social media.
How often does the free allowance refill? The help center says the free quota “is reset weekly on Monday at 12 a.m. UTC” (Can I use invideo AI for free?). Our reset date, October 26, 2026, fell on a Monday, which fits. The same article does not give a credit number for the free plan; it says only “limited credits,” so the 10 we saw is what our account showed, not a published promise.
One more friction point. The app offered “Timeline Editor (Free).” We clicked “Create a blank timeline,” and in our session no editor opened. That is one session’s result, not a verdict on the editor.
What InVideo AI Says It Can Do: Agents, Avatars, Voice and Generative Models
InVideo AI’s own product pages describe a lot more than we could try: an agent with three tiers, a stock library of “16 million premium clips, images, and music tracks,” avatars and dozens of third-party models (Agent Two). We tested none of this, because every one of these features needs credits. Why describe features we couldn’t use? Because they are what you’d be paying for, so here is what the official pages say.
The AI agent
The product page calls the current agent “Agent Two” and lists what it can read: “Videos, scripts, PDFs, links, rough cuts.” It also mentions Playbooks (standing rules the agent follows on every project), Notebooks (direct work with individual models), Slate (an editor inside the agent) and ready-made workflows for jobs like casting, storyboards and localization. The page says “Nine live, or build and save your own.”
The page also says the agent “is built on every frontier model: Claude, Gemini, GPT.” That is a vendor statement. We can only confirm that the Lite agent asked good questions and priced its plan before running it.
Avatars
The help center explains how to make an avatar of yourself: open “AI twins” in the prompt box, pick a Free or a Pro avatar, follow the setup steps, and confirm the “Looks good” checkboxes. The Free avatar setup includes a consent step, and the app asks you to re-record if consent is missing. Creating a Pro avatar “costs 200 credits,” per the same article (How to create my avatar?). That one action alone is 20 times our free allowance.
Generative models and voice
The pricing page names image models such as Nano Banana Pro at about 2.5 credits per image, and video models such as Seedance 2.5 at about 56 credits per 5 seconds in 720p (InVideo pricing). On paper, 10 free credits would cover about four Nano Banana Pro images. The help center says the free plan can generate images through the Agents & Models flow, but we spent our credits on the agent chat instead, so we did not try it. The site menu also lists voice tools, including voice cloning, without a credit price on the pages we read.
InVideo AI Paid Plans at a Glance
InVideo AI’s public pricing page listed three individual plans on October 23, 2026, from $10 to $75 per seat per month on annual billing, with 400 to 5,000 credits per seat per month (InVideo pricing). All three showed a “50% OFF” label that day.
| Plan | Annual price per seat | Credits per seat per month | Agent tiers | Storage | Seats |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $10/month (was $20) | 400 | Lite only | 200 GB | Up to 5 |
| Plus | $30/month (was $60) | 2,000 | Lite, Pro, Ultra | 600 GB | Up to 10 |
| Max | $75/month (was $150) | 5,000 | Lite, Pro, Ultra | 2,000 GB | Up to 20 |
The pricing page also lists premium stock footage allowances of 100, 200 and 500, full access to the timeline editor on all three plans, and “Lowest cost per credit” only on Max. Monthly billing costs more: the page says annual billing saves $120 per seat on Starter, $360 on Plus and $885 on Max.
How far does that go, measured against our quote? One 20-second voiceover video like ours, at about 350 credits, would fit once into a month of Starter, with about 50 credits left. On Plus, 2,000 credits would cover about five of them. That math assumes the agent prices a similar brief the same way on a paid plan, which we did not test.
A warning about InVideo’s help pages
InVideo’s own billing help pages list a different set of plans. On October 23, 2026, the Subscriptions and Refunds page showed Basic at $9/month with 190 credits, Pro at $30/month with 1,000 credits, and Ultra at $80/month with 3,000 credits, among others (Subscriptions and Refunds). The in-app plan picker in our test matched the pricing page instead (Plus, 2,000 credits). Go by the pricing page and the checkout screen, and treat the help-page table as possibly out of date.
Extra credits, cancelling and refunds
Paid plans can buy extra credits. The help center lists $50, $500 and $1,000 packs or a custom amount from $5, says purchased credits last 12 months, and warns that they expire if you cancel and are non-refundable (Extra Credits).
Cancelling stops auto-renewal, and the plan stays active until the end of the period you paid for. After that, the account moves to the Free plan, and the help center says “Cancelling does NOT trigger a refund.” Refunds are “pro-rated and usage based,” reviewed case by case through support@invideo.io (Subscriptions and Refunds).
How to Make a Small Credit Balance Go Further
InVideo AI’s credit costs are shown before you confirm each generation, according to its help center (How Do Credits Work?), so most of the saving happens before you click anything. Which habits matter most? These steps come from InVideo’s official pages; we could only try the first one ourselves.
- Write the brief before you open the agent. Our planning chat used about half of the free allowance. A script and a list of choices (format, voice, music, ending) ready in advance means fewer back-and-forth replies.
- Switch the agent’s permission to “Ask before generating videos.” You’ll see the model, duration and aspect ratio before credits go out.
- Stay on Lite while you sketch. The help center positions Lite as the credit-efficient tier and Pro and Ultra as higher-cost tiers.
- Keep test clips short. Video models are priced per second, so a 5-second test costs a fraction of a full cut.
- Check the three-dot menu on each agent reply, and the Usage page under your profile icon, to see where credits went.
- Spend credits on generation, not on downloads. Downloading content you already generated does not cost credits.
Credit meters are common on free plans, but they are rarely this tight. Semrush’s free account, for example, gives 10 reports a day across its tools, which was enough for us to run a real keyword lookup in our Semrush keyword research review. On InVideo AI, one weekly free allowance did not cover one short video.
Who InVideo AI Is For, and Who Should Skip the Free Plan
Based on our test, InVideo AI suits people ready to pay for at least a Starter plan with 400 credits a month (InVideo pricing), and the free plan suits only a look at how the agent works. This part is our judgment, drawn from what we saw, not from a test of the paid plans.
InVideo AI looks like a fit if you:
- want an agent to turn a script into a video plan, and like answering questions instead of dragging clips on a timeline
- make short YouTube or social videos often enough that a monthly credit budget makes sense
- are willing to watch the credit cost of each step, and to adjust the brief when a quote is too high
Skip the free plan, or skip InVideo AI for now, if you:
- need a finished, watermark-free video without paying; the free plan could not produce one for us, and free downloads carry a watermark per the help center
- want to test video quality before you buy; on our free credits, there was nothing to look at
- dislike sign-up flows that ask for a birth year you can’t change or that pre-check a lookup box
What would change our mind? A paid test that produces the same 20-second video, shows the real credit cost, and lets us check the export. Until then, we can’t rate the output, only the path to it. We follow the same rule on every review on this site, including our newsletter platform comparison, where tools we had not tested yet were left unscored.
Before You Spend Money on InVideo AI: Your Next Step
Before paying for InVideo AI, use the free plan for one thing: give the agent your real script and read the credit quote it returns. In our case that one quote, about 350 credits for 20 seconds, told us more than any feature list.
A short checklist to take with you:
- Did you uncheck “Allow invideo to look you up on the internet” at sign-up?
- Did you enter the right birth year? It can’t be changed later.
- Did you skip the plan picker until you saw a real credit quote?
- Did you switch the agent to ask before generating?
- Does the quote for your typical video fit inside the plan you’re looking at, with room for retries?
If the answer to the last question is yes, a paid plan is a fair next step. If it isn’t, try a simpler brief, or look at a tool that lets you export on a free plan before you commit.
References
- InVideo: Pricing
- InVideo Help: How Do Credits Work?
- InVideo Help: Plan Limits
- InVideo Help: Subscriptions and Refunds
- InVideo Help: Extra Credits
- InVideo Help Center: Can I use invideo AI for free?
- InVideo Help Center: Can I upload and share videos I download on the free plan to social media?
- InVideo Help Center: How credits are charged when using AI Agents
- InVideo Help Center: How to create my avatar?
- InVideo: Agent Two