OpenArt review: pricing, credits, commercial use and refunds

This review is built from what could be checked on November 3, 2026: OpenArt's own site, pricing page, terms, help center and blog, archived copies of its pricing page from June to August 2026, Physion Labs' video-agent leaderboards, reporting by Newcomer, VentureBeat and Blooloop, a sponsored test by MeasureU, a review by the affiliate site AffMaven, issues filed on OpenArt's GitHub, and rivals' pricing pages. Each claim is labelled by who made it, because much of the evidence comes from OpenArt itself or from people paid to promote it.

What OpenArt is

OpenArt is a browser studio that resells other companies' AI models and adds its own tools on top. OpenArt, Inc. was founded in San Francisco in 2022 by Coco Mao (CEO) and John Qiao (CTO), who had worked together at Google's Area 120. It began as a gallery of AI images; today one subscription buys credits for more than 100 image, video and audio models, by its own count, plus Director, Characters, Worlds, Chat Mode, Brand Kit and video effects. It is not part of OpenAI, as its About page notes.

Sacra's October 2026 research note files OpenArt and Higgsfield together as orchestrators of other companies' video models, competing with Runway for marketing and ad production. The numbers OpenArt gives about itself are large: 10 million creators and 700 million generations on its About page, 8 million monthly active users and annual recurring revenue above US$100 million in its September 15 press release. Newcomer, which reported its funding exclusively on January 31, 2026, put its annual recurring revenue at US$70 million at the end of 2025, up from US$10 million. All of them are the company's own figures.

What changed in 2026

• January 31: a US$30 million Series A led by Canaan Partners, with Basis Set and DCM, reported by Newcomer and The SaaS News. OpenArt puts its total funding at US$35 million.
• February 23: a new workspace, OpenArt Suite, with Characters and Worlds that are built once and reused across tools.
• June 23: Director, a chat-driven agent that plans and renders films of up to five minutes. A week later OpenArt added 720p and 1080p Lite qualities that it says cut Director's cost by up to half.
• June to August: the plans were renamed and the yearly discount cut (table below).
• Summer: OpenArt joined the 2026 Disney Accelerator, according to its own release and Blooloop.
• September: Chat Mode, OpenArt Arena (its own model leaderboard), and two Physion Labs results it announced as first places.
• November 16: the previous version of OpenArt retires. Stories and custom models made there do not move to the new version; both can be downloaded until December 31, 2026, according to its retirement FAQ.

The price change is the one buyers feel. Compare the June 1 archive of the pricing page with the page today:

Credits per plan stayed the same: 4,000, 12,000, 24,000 and 106,000 a month. The July 3 archive already shows the yearly discount cut from 50% to between 10% and 27%; by August 4 the new names were live. Monthly prices are unchanged except for the middle plan, which went from US$29 to US$34, while yearly billing now costs between 46% (Wonder) and 86% (Starter and Plus) more than at the old rates.

Plans and what credits buy

Extra credits cost US$15 a month per 5,000 and need Plus or higher; unlike plan credits, unused add-on credits roll over. Business plans pool credits for up to 50 users: 150,000 credits cost US$680 a month, or US$496 billed yearly, and do not reset monthly.

The "about 50 videos" on Starter assumes cheap models. OpenArt's own comparison of November 2 prices one 5-second 720p Seedance 2.5 clip at 650 credits, so Starter's 4,000 credits buy about six of them, which OpenArt equates to one short Director project. Calculated from OpenArt's own dollar prices in that comparison, at Pro's rate of 24,000 credits for US$56, the same clip costs about 400 credits on Seedance 2.0, 300 on MiniMax H3 and 600 on Kling 4.0. Calculated the same way from OpenArt's Business plan card (150,000 credits for about 3,750 images), a Nano Banana Pro image costs about 40 credits. The help center's rough guide is 5 to 50 credits per image and 100 to 800+ per video, and it says credit costs move when model providers change their prices; the exact cost appears next to the Generate button.

Unlimited generation is a promotion, not a plan feature. Pro and Wonder get it on the models and dates named on the pricing page, it does not work through MCP or the CLI, and OpenArt may move heavy users to a slower queue. On November 3 the page offered Unlimited Creation on Wonder and 50% off Kling 4.0 for Pro and Wonder until November 20.

Which models it runs

Sources: OpenArt's model index and llms-full.txt. Its own tools sit on partners' technology too: VFX runs on Beeble's SwitchX model and Worlds on World Labs', according to OpenArt. The homepage still promoted Sora 2 on November 3, although the model's own page says it is gone.

Director, Characters and Chat Mode

Director is the product OpenArt now leads with. You describe an idea, optionally adding a photo, song, voice, video, saved Characters or brand assets; Director writes a script, builds a storyboard, renders the scenes and joins them into one video of up to five minutes, with dialogue and lip sync in nine languages. Changes are given as notes in chat or made on a timeline.

Characters saves a face or figure from one reference image or a prompt and reuses it across image tools, video tools, Director and Worlds; plans cap new characters at about 13 a month on Starter and 353 on Wonder. Chat Mode, introduced in a September 3 post, takes plain requests, picks the model and settings, queues up to eight generations and shows the credit cost before it runs. Worlds turns up to four images or a prompt into a 3D scene that exports to Blender or Unreal. OpenArt also works inside ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor and Kimi through its MCP server, and ships an MIT-licensed CLI; MCP generations use the same credits as the website.

What public tests show

Benchmarks of Director. Physion Labs, which calls its Arc leaderboards independent, has human annotators score finished videos from AI video agents given the same 100 briefs. On November 3, 2026:

OpenArt's September 22 post says Director ranked first on the ads track, shared with Runway. That was true when the track opened on September 20 with five agents; after two more joined on October 20, Physion recomputed every score and OpenArt fell to third. OpenArt's anime post adds that Director scored highest at about 15% lower cost than the runner-up, a cost figure it reports itself.

A sponsored test of Director. Jeff Sauer of MeasureU, in a post OpenArt sponsored (July 13, 2026, updated October 22), spoke one sentence asking for a 30-second promo about freelancers who do not know what to charge. Director's assistant, Ori, named the project, wrote a two-scene script and rendered a vertical 1080p ad in about 10 to 15 minutes, which he judged good enough to run. On-screen numbers came out backwards until he reworked the shots, and he ran out of credits before finishing his revisions, at about 112 credits per second of video by his estimate. That is more than three times the rate implied by OpenArt's plan table, which allows about 2 minutes of Director on Starter's 4,000 credits.

A year of paid use. AffMaven, an affiliate site that sells OpenArt through a coupon code, says its team made product shots, UGC-style hooks, AI-influencer stills, Director drafts of 15 to 60 seconds, VFX and dubbed versions on paid seats for about twelve months (review updated September 21, 2026). It rated OpenArt 4.5 out of 5, called Plus the real starting plan because Starter lacks commercial rights, warned that Starter's credits often cannot finish one Director film because chat, planning and stills are billed before the render, and preferred Higgsfield when an ad has to look filmed by a real creator.

OpenArt's own price comparison. OpenArt's November 2 guide, with prices checked on October 30, compares one 5-second 720p clip at OpenArt Pro (US$56) and Higgsfield Plus (then US$59): Seedance 2.5 US$1.52 against US$1.72, Seedance 2.0 US$0.93 against US$1.48, MiniMax H3 US$0.70 against US$0.98, and Kling 4.0 US$1.40 against US$0.68. It is a competitor's comparison in which OpenArt chose the models and plans.

OpenArt Arena. OpenArt's own leaderboard, launched September 15, ranks models from blind side-by-side votes by named creative professionals and top OpenArt users. On November 3 its overall video board put Seedance 2.5 first (1,125), ahead of Wan 3.0 (1,047) and Seedance 2.0 (1,044). VentureBeat pointed out that OpenArt sells access to the models it ranks and reported that OpenArt had not provided the number of judges, votes or prompts per board. The launch press release on OpenArt's blog still contains a drafting note in square brackets saying OpenArt has yet to confirm more methodology details.

What users report

User feedback that could be opened directly is thin. OpenArt's public CLI repository on GitHub had four open issues on November 3, 2026, among them a September 10 report that image generation through the CLI could not set resolution or aspect ratio, which video generation could. AffMaven, after a year of paid use, named credit transparency on Director and support speed on lower tiers as the platform's weak points, and Jeff Sauer's sponsored test ended with his credits used up before his revisions were done.

Refunds, cancelling and commercial rights

• Refunds: Section 3.6 of the terms (updated July 30, 2026) says all purchases are non-refundable unless the law requires a refund, with no prorated refunds. The help center adds that completed generations and active subscription periods are generally not refunded. The one exception the help center describes: an annual plan bought by mistake can be moved to monthly with a partial refund, minus a processing fee of at least 10%.
• Cancelling: Profile, Subscription, Cancel Plan, at least five days before renewal to avoid the next charge. Access lasts to the end of the paid month or year.
• Credits: plan credits reset every 30 days and do not roll over, and unused credits are lost when a subscription ends. Failed generations are refunded in most cases, according to the help center. The older help center says credits cannot be bought without a subscription.
• Commercial use: every plan may use output non-commercially; commercial use starts at Plus (Section 4.1). OpenArt's llms-full.txt only says eligible paid plans, so read the plan card before buying Starter for client work.
• Watermarks: output from a free plan may carry an OpenArt watermark, and removing it is a material breach of the terms (Section 4.5). OpenArt's llms-full.txt says trial output has no watermark; its terms and its November 2 guide say it can carry one.

Privacy, data and content policy

• Training: the help center says OpenArt does not use your uploads or creations to train its models. Section 5.4 of the terms lets it share your prompts, reference images and outputs with its AI model partners to operate and improve the service, and on November 3, 2026 the only never-train promise found on its pages was in its Enterprise description.
• License to your uploads: Section 5.3 grants OpenArt a perpetual, worldwide license to your uploads to run the service and to label and moderate content.
• Retention: creations are private by default. Accounts that never subscribed keep unpublished creations for 7 days; after a subscription ends you have 14 days to download them.
• Privacy policy: the policy (March 4, 2026) says OpenArt shares data with business and marketing partners, including non-affiliates who may market to you, which you can limit. It reads like a template: it cites the old EU-US Safe Harbor principles and claims coverage under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, a US law for financial institutions, to say California's consumer privacy law does not apply.
• Content rules: users must be 18 or older. The terms ban sexually explicit content, deepfakes of real people and infringing material, and the help center says NSFW prompts are flagged. An IP check powered by CopySight rates images Safe, Warning or Unsafe; the terms disclaim its accuracy.
• Disputes: individual arbitration under California law, with a class-action waiver.

Who should not use it

• Anyone who may need their money back: refunds are the exception, and plan credits expire monthly.
• Anyone who wants commercial rights for US$13 or US$14 a month: Starter does not include them.
• Video-first users on a small budget: by OpenArt's own figures Starter covers about six 5-second Seedance 2.5 clips.
• People who mostly use one model, especially Kling 4.0: OpenArt's own table puts a Kling 4.0 clip at about twice Higgsfield's price.
• Developers who need a REST API: the help center, checked November 3, 2026, says no public API is available, only MCP and a CLI.
• People who rely on Stories or custom models: both end with the old app on November 16, 2026.

How it compares

Magnific's pricing page showed euros. Krea's Basic plan includes only selected video models, and Runway's Standard credits buy about 52 seconds of Gen-4.5. Credits are different units on every site, so run the same short job on two of them and compare the cost per finished clip, not the credit count.