This review is built from what could be checked on November 3, 2026: Magic Hour's own site, pricing page, terms, privacy policy, help center, changelog and API schema, Y Combinator's company directory, a test published by PiClumen (a competitor), two benchmarks Magic Hour ran on itself and the pricing pages of six rivals. Magic Hour's statements about itself are labelled as its own, and every price is the one shown on that day.
What Magic Hour is and who runs it
Magic Hour is a browser studio and REST API for making and editing video, images and audio. Magic Hour AI, Inc. was founded in 2023 by Runbo Li, its CEO, and David Hu, and Y Combinator's directory lists it in the Winter 2024 batch, based in San Francisco. On its about page the founders say the idea came from helping Li's parents make videos for their hot pot restaurant.
The company claims more than 4.9 million creators and 2,000 teams on its homepage; its official facts page adds more than 40 million videos generated and 50 million API calls. These are the company's own figures. Funding beyond Y Combinator's backing has not been reported by any news outlet, and the totals in funding databases disagree, so they are left out here.
What it sells is breadth in one place: more than 100 tools, from face swap and lip sync to background removal, music and voice cloning, on a single credit balance that also pays for the API.
What changed since August
The changelog lists dozens of releases since August. The changes that matter to a buyer:
- New models. Seedance 2.5 arrived on August 8, 2026, Wan 3.0 on September 17, Nano Banana 2.1 and Seedance 2.0 Fast in October, and Kling 4.0 on October 27, for Creator, Pro and Business subscribers only, in clips of 3 to 30 seconds at 720p or 1080p.
- Rights and billing. Credit packs gained commercial-use rights on September 18. The refund policy was revised on September 5 and the terms and privacy policy on October 3. On October 19 the Video Expander started charging more for higher resolutions.
- Agents. Claude can connect through Magic Hour sign-in since September 20, and on October 30 the MCP server renamed 41 of its 48 tools with no aliases, which breaks saved agent workflows until they are updated.
- Celebrity voices. On October 13 new celebrity-preset selection was removed from Characters, and on October 23 the presets for Dove Cameron and Davido were removed from the Voice Generator.
- A watermark remover. A Video Watermark Remover arrived on September 28 with three free uses a day; the changelog says to use it only on videos you own or have permission to edit.
What it makes itself and what it resells
Generation runs on hosted models that Magic Hour does not present as its own. Its models page listed 31 on November 3, 2026 and itself credits Veo 3.1 to Google, GPT Image 2 to OpenAI and FLUX.2 Klein to Black Forest Labs; Kling 4.0, launched by Kling AI per its release note, has a model card on Magic Hour though the list had not caught up. Magic Hour presents face swap, lip sync and talking photos as its own systems and names no outside model for them; its video-to-video tool offers Stable Diffusion community checkpoints such as Dreamshaper as style models, per its API schema.
Each model has its own rate, published in Magic Hour's product-facts file:
| Model | Credits per second | Five-second clip | Free tier |
|---|
| LTX-2.5, MiniMax H3 | 24 at 480p, 72 at 1080p | 120 to 360 | 480p |
| Kling 3.0 | 48 at 720p, 96 at 1080p with sound | 240 to 480 | No |
| Kling 4.0 | 80 at 720p, 120 at 1080p | 400 to 600 | No |
| Veo 3.1 | 96 at 720p, 144 at 1080p with sound | 480 to 720 | No |
| Wan 3.0 | 48 at 480p, 180 at 1080p | 240 to 900 | No |
| Seedance 2.5 | 168 at 480p, 840 at 1080p | 840 to 4,200 | No |
| Face swap video (Magic Hour's own) | 25 at 480p, 40 at 4K | 125 to 200 | 480p |
Video references cost extra on the models that accept them. On the API page, images run from US$0.005 (FLUX.2 Klein, Z-Image Turbo) to US$0.141 (Nano Banana Pro) at full use of Business annual credits, and the Voice Generator charges 0.1 credit per character.
Plans, credits and what a clip costs
| Plan | Monthly billing | Yearly billing | Credits | Output and jobs at once |
|---|
| Free | US$0 | US$0 | 400 at signup, plus 100 a day for up to 7 claims | 480p on selected models, 1 job |
| Creator | US$19 | US$144 a year | 12,000 a month or 144,000 a year | 1024px images, 720p and 1080p video, 3 jobs |
| Pro | US$39 | US$300 a year | 25,000 a month or 300,000 a year | 1472px images, 4K face swap, 5 jobs |
| Business | US$99 | US$792 a year | 70,000 a month or 840,000 a year | 4K, unlimited jobs |
| Credit pack | US$10 once | n/a | 4,000 | Watermark-free, no plan features |
Sources: pricing page, Understanding Credits and the changelog for concurrency. Annual plans charge the full year up front and deliver all its credits at once. Visitors outside the US may see local-currency prices.
By our arithmetic from those prices, a credit costs about US$0.0016 on Creator monthly, US$0.0025 in the smallest pack and under US$0.001 on Business yearly. On Creator monthly a five-second clip therefore costs about US$0.38 with Kling 3.0 at 720p, US$0.95 with Kling 4.0 at 1080p, US$1.14 with Veo 3.1 at 1080p with sound and US$6.65 with Seedance 2.5 at 1080p. The pricing page's estimate of 1.7 hours of video a year on Creator assumes the cheapest rate of 24 credits a second; at Seedance 2.5's 1080p rate the same credits cover under three minutes.
Credits never expire, the strongest point of the pricing. Magic Hour's API docs compare one setting with the model maker's own price: a five-second Kling 3.0 clip at 720p without sound is 240 credits, US$0.24 on Creator annual, which Magic Hour calls about 43% below Kling's direct API list price of US$0.42 as of October 26, 2026. That is the company's own comparison.
Refunds come with three conditions: a request within 7 days of the charge, fewer than 400 credits used since, and one approved refund per customer, per the refund policy. Renewals qualify on the same terms.
The free tier and the watermark
The no-account tools are generous on images and thin on video. Per the FAQ and help center, image-to-video, text-to-video and the video editor share three requests a day, and everyone on the same network shares that allowance. Those clips are three seconds at 480p with a watermark. Video face swap allows three swaps a day of up to 10 seconds, and lip sync three a day, both watermarked, per the face swap and lip sync pages.
Photo tools such as the image generator (ten a day), photo face swap (five a day), headshots and background removal add no watermark. A free account's output is for personal, non-commercial use, and paying, even once for a US$10 pack, removes the watermark and adds commercial rights, per the help center's rights article.
The API and MCP server
The REST API at api.magichour.ai has 39 endpoints and is labelled beta in its schema. Jobs run asynchronously: upload files, create a project, poll until it is done, then download from a temporary link. The API page prices models from US$0.023 a second (MiniMax H3, LTX-2.5, Wan 2.2) to US$0.158 (Seedance 2.5) and images from US$0.005, all assuming full use of Business annual credits; usage-based billing with volume discounts is available on request. Magic Hour's llms.txt says the API has no rate or concurrency limits, though jobs may queue.
The MCP server at mcp.magichour.ai works with Claude, Claude Code and Codex CLI and creates images and videos; speech generation and voice cloning are not available through it. Its setup page still named the old upload tool on November 3, after the rename of October 30.
For small buyers the entry point is the draw. Kling's API pricing page sells prepaid unit packages; the 180-day ones started at US$500 and expire unused after 180 days, against US$10 credit packs here that never expire.
What public tests show
An outside test, by a competitor. PiClumen, which sells its own image and video platform, published a four-hour test on July 27, 2026. Face swap was fast and natural; head swap looked forced at the neck and hairline; body swap blended the two costumes. Lip sync from a photo first returned a one-second clip, and a longer run took five to seven minutes in all with mouth movements that often missed the words. The reviewer also found credits went faster than expected and that templates could not be adjusted after generation.
Magic Hour's own measurements. In its benchmark of September 9 to 10, 2026, one image-to-video brief at 8 seconds and 720p cost a median 384 credits on Kling 3.0 and 4,608 on Seedance 2.5, and two Seedance attempts were refused with a policy code at no charge. Its latency study of 8,160 API jobs found median times of 36 seconds for text-to-video and 21 minutes for Character Replace. The company designed and ran both. Searches turned up no test by an independent news outlet or review site.
Uptime. The status page showed the API, website, docs and free tools operational with no dated incidents listed.
Faces, voices and consent
Swapping faces and making people talk are two of the four starting points on Magic Hour's homepage, and the rules around them are loose. The terms say users must be 18, make the user responsible for the rights and consents needed to use anyone's image, voice or likeness, and do not require consent documents. They ban adult content and gore, sexual content involving minors, and sexually explicit or intimate content of a real person without consent, and they say Magic Hour does not pre-screen content.
The product leans toward real people. The face swap page offers "Celebrity Face Swap Videos" as a use case, and a public lip sync template built on an interview clip of Cameron Diaz suggests using her persona for marketing. PiClumen's July test picked a built-in Taylor Swift voice. Magic Hour has started pulling back, removing two named voices on October 23 (changelog), but its live API schema on November 3 still listed 1,261 voice names, among them Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Vladimir Putin and Taylor Swift. Magic Hour's own blog tells users not to infer a commercial identity licence from a preset, and its Voice Generator page prohibits non-consensual cloning and impersonation.
The Video Watermark Remover strips visible watermarks, logos and overlays from any uploaded clip. Magic Hour's help center states that removing a watermark does not grant commercial rights.
Privacy and data retention
The privacy policy and trust page say Magic Hour does not sell or train on prompts, uploads or outputs, on free, paid, API and MCP use alike, and that staff do not routinely review content. Face and voice media are processed only to perform the task and not to identify people.
Three caveats remain. Files go to the AI and media providers that run each model, which the policy describes by category without naming them. No retention period is given, and deleting a project does not guarantee immediate removal from backups or providers' systems; account deletion has a 14-day restore window. Advertising measurement shares device, click and conversion data with Microsoft Advertising, Reddit and OpenAI, though not your content, and data is processed in the United States.
Who should not use Magic Hour
- Anyone who wants to put a real person's face or voice into an ad, endorsement or political clip without that person's written permission: the terms put the legal risk on you, and you indemnify Magic Hour.
- Heavy users of one premium model, such as Seedance 2.5 at 1080p: a Creator month covers under three five-second clips.
- Teams that need a fixed retention period, named processors or a published security certification before uploading client footage: the trust page lists none and sends security questionnaires to support.
- Buyers who expect to try a plan and get their money back: the refund window closes after 400 credits or one prior refund.
- Editors who need a timeline, frame-level control or compositing: Magic Hour says it does not replace that software.
- Anyone under 18.
Alternatives and when they are the better choice
| Option | What it is | Entry price on November 3, 2026 |
|---|
| Magic Hour | Own face swap and lip sync plus 30-plus hosted models | Free tier; US$19 a month for 12,000 credits; packs from US$10 |
| Higgsfield | Many makers' video models plus its own Cinema Studio | Starter US$15 a month billed yearly, 200 credits |
| Kling AI | The Kling models from their maker | Free Basic tier not for commercial use; Standard US$6.99 first month, then US$8.80, 660 credits |
| Runway | Its own Gen-4.5 plus hosted Kling 4.0 and Seedance 2.5 | 125 one-time free credits; Standard US$15 a month (US$12 yearly), 625 credits |
| Akool | Face swap, live face swap and avatars | Free with a full-screen watermark; Starter US$12 a month billed yearly, 200 credits |
| Viggle | Character swap, motion transfer and real-time swap | Free 5 videos a day with a watermark; Pro US$7.99 a month, 80 credits |
| Pollo AI | Another site for many makers' models | Not given: its pricing page showed a bot check |
Sources: Higgsfield, Kling, Runway, Akool, Viggle and Pollo AI pricing pages.
Kling's own app is the better buy if you mostly use Kling: it gets new versions first, and Kling 4.0, open to everyone on Kling's site from October 15 per its release note, reached Magic Hour on October 27. Higgsfield suits people who want its Cinema Studio camera controls, and its Plus and Ultra plans include 7 days of unlimited Seedance 2.5, which it says may be slowed at busy times. Runway is the choice for its own Gen-4.5 model, a free trial of 125 credits and, until November 30, 25% off Kling 4.0. Akool is stronger for live face swap and avatars, and Viggle is the cheapest way into character motion swaps. Pollo AI's FAQ says unused subscription credits do not roll over, where Magic Hour's never expire. Credits are not comparable across sites, so run one prompt on two of them and compare what a usable clip costs.