MiniMax sells vertical AI video by the credit, not the minute

What was announced or recorded

Hailuo AI, the consumer video-generation product from the Chinese AI company MiniMax, describes itself on its own site as a tool for turning text prompts and still images into short clips. As retrieved on 16 September 2026, the product's own index of tools lists a flagship text-to-video engine built on what it calls the 'Hailuo 2.3' model, an image-to-video animator, and a dedicated 'AI Shorts & Reels Generator' described as "a bulk creation tool for vertical short-form video content (9:16 aspect ratio)" aimed at YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels and TikTok. The page gives no date for when the underlying video model was first released, and no version history or changelog was found on the pages checked.

What the documents establish

Hailuo's main site sets out several paid tiers as retrieved: a Standard Plan at $14.99 a month for 1,000 monthly credits, a Pro Plan at $54.99 for 4,500 credits, and a Max Plan at $199.99 for 20,000 credits that also grants slower-queue, uncapped generation on its 'Hailuo 01/02' models once credits run out. Credits, not minutes or licences, are the unit sold; the page states roughly how many six- or ten-second clips a given balance buys at different resolutions. MiniMax's own company page states only that the company was "founded in early 2022" and gives no history of its video products, so the two pages together describe current pricing and tools without dating the model's origin.

Announced versus delivered

What the company delivers, on its own account, is a subscription video generator whose outputs carry a disclaimer that "the content is generated by AI" and a request to use the feature "legally." What is not delivered, on this record, is any stated commercial licence for using generated footage in a distributed drama series, any content-rights warranty, or any acknowledgement that vertical-drama producers are a named customer segment — the 'Shorts & Reels' framing points at social clips, not paid serialised episodes. A producer reading these pages could reasonably use the tool for previsualisation or background footage; nothing states it as approved for finished, monetised vertical drama.

What to watch

Editorially, the figure worth tracking is not the model's benchmark scores but whether MiniMax or a drama platform ever publishes a rights or indemnification clause covering AI-generated footage used in a commercial series, since that term is absent from every page checked here.

• Does the vendor's terms of service grant a licence broad enough for commercial redistribution, not just personal sharing?
• Are credits priced per output resolution in a way that changes the true cost of a finished episode?
• Has any named vertical-drama platform stated, in its own materials, that it uses this tool in production rather than in marketing?

Reading a generative-video pricing page is not the same as reading a production contract, and this dossier treats it as exactly that: a retrieved description of tools and credits, not evidence of what any drama has actually been made with, or on what legal terms.