Hailuo

You need to consider two things: how you will pay and whether the watermark on free videos works for you.

Who it is for. For people making short videos for social media and advertising who want sound and speech right in the frame rather than separate voice-over. The H3 model creates videos up to 15 seconds long with stereo sound and speaks 11 languages. You can animate a person's photo, keep one face consistent across every frame, and extend a finished video in the same window.

Who else. For anyone counting the price per second: on the entry plan a second of H3 at 768p costs about 7 cents, and through the vendor's API the same seconds go for 8. And for anyone with their own GPU server: the H3 weights are open, and at 768p the model runs with no checkout at all.

Who it is not for. And for anyone expecting the script to be followed exactly: practitioners complain about an unruly camera and a "turtle" walk, while the free plan leaves a watermark and queues jobs one at a time.

Good fit: section 3 takes you from signing in to your first video. If you are choosing between it and Kling, see the choice in section 7.

What vibecoding isStarting from scratch: how to set tasks for agents with no coding experience

Three layers: a video with sound from a description or photo, references for faces and motion, and above that an agent with a canvas and third-party models under the same subscription.

Video from text or a photo. Describe the scene, optionally add the first and last frame, choose a duration from 4 to 15 seconds and either 768p or 2K resolution, meaning 1440p, with H3; older models use 6- and 10-second videos. The H3 model produces video with native stereo sound: effects, music, and speech are created together with the image, so no separate voice-over is needed. Speech reliably works in 11 languages according to the vendor's specifications.

If you prepare the voiceover script separately from the video, compare the voiceover in MiniMax Audio. Start with the same text you plan to put in the clip.

References. A single prompt can contain up to 9 images, up to 3 videos, and up to 3 audio files, with no more than 12 files total. An example from the vendor's blog: take camera movement from the first video, make the character from the second image sing with the voice from the third file. This is also how one face is kept across every frame; the vendor calls this mechanic Subject Reference, Character Reference, or Omni Reference.

Extension and interpolation. A finished video or sound can be extended in Extend mode, the Upscale button raises the image to 2K and 4K, and 60 frames per second are achieved by generating intermediate frames. The model natively generates at 768p; 2K comes from a repeat pass through the vendor's closed module.

Agent and templates. Hailuo Agent takes a task in chat and assembles video, images, and music on an infinite canvas; a separate mode there is called Director. There are also dozens of templates for viral videos: hugs, dancing, kisses, product ads, and style transfer. Unlimited access does not apply in the agent; the vendor states this in a banner.

Third-party models. Paid plans sell Veo 3.1 and Sora 2 in the same window, while Nano Banana Pro and Seedream generate images. Third-party models are unavailable to free accounts, and Ultra at $124.99 does not provide access to Veo and Sora, although Standard at $10.50 does.

What the vendor itself shows. The vendor has no video showing a clean product interface: the 85 videos on its channel show results rather than the interface, so the header uses a collage of 2025 frames and the 2026 app storefront; the vendor does not show its 2026 website interface anywhere. We did not test Hailuo for this use case ourselves; the figures come from the storefront, site configs, model card, and third-party tests.

You can start on the site with no install.

Step 1. Open hailuoai.video and sign in with Google, Apple or a phone number with a code from SMS.

Step 2. Describe a scene or upload a photo, choose the model, duration, and resolution; the credit price is shown on the button. New users get 200 credits once, enough for four 6-second H3 videos at 768p, each with a watermark.

Step 3. For watermark-free videos with commercial rights, you need a paid plan.  

Surfaces. The website works in a browser on desktop and mobile, and there is an Android app in Google Play published by MiniMax AI. There is no iPhone app: the App Store link from the vendor's site returns 404, and unrelated apps under the Hailuo name appear in the store, with subscriptions of up to $29.99 per month. The MiniMax Design desktop app is a separate company product with its own plans.

Do it yourself. The H3 weights sit openly on Hugging Face, with no application form; the license forbids use in the EU, the UK, South Korea and the US. Locally the model runs only at 768p and needs several GPUs, and ready-made builds exist for ComfyUI. Through the API the same model costs 8 cents per second at 768p, and the smallest credit pack there is $5.

Steps verified on Sep 7, 2026 against the live hailuoai.video storefront, the interface dictionary and the model card

The two arenas see H3 differently: on arena.ai it is first out of 47 models in image-to-video, while Artificial Analysis ranks it third and fourth, and the previous-generation Hailuo 2.3 sits in the thirties on both.

Arenas. On arena.ai, where videos are compared blind by human votes, H3 ranks first in the “animate an image” task with 36 thousand votes as of Sep 3, 2026 and eighth out of 48 in “text-to-video,” behind Gemini Omni, Wan 3.0, and Flux. In Artificial Analysis tables as of Sep 7, 2026, H3 is fourth out of 34 in text-to-video and third in image animation, while H3 Max holds the top line in image animation, a version fine-tuned by the fal service. The gap between H3 and the previous Hailuo 2.3 is wider than the gap between H3 and the leaders: 2.3 ranks 32nd and 28th on arena.ai. The benchmarker's pricing is also visible: a minute of Hailuo 2.3 costs $2.80, second from the bottom among fourteen models; a minute of H3 in 2K costs $7.80 in the same arena's table and $4.80 in 768p through the vendor API.

Company funding. MiniMax is public, so its figures come from its report, not its own claims. For the first half of 2026, revenue was $116.6 million, 3.8 times higher than a year earlier; the reported loss was $358 million, or $293 million under the company's methodology. Consumer products, including Hailuo, brought in $42.6 million, while selling model access to businesses grew eightfold and accounted for 63 % of revenue. The company does not disclose how much Hailuo specifically contributes, and by June 2025, 370 million videos had been made with its first model.

Demand. The place among video tools is shown under the card title, and the full tool ranking lives on a shared page.

Entry costs $10.50 per month for 1,000 credits, while a second of H3 video in 768p costs 7 credits, or about 7 cents.

Credits. H3 charges 7 credits per second in 768p and 12 per second in 2K; the fast H3 Max costs 4 credits per second in 480p. Older models charge per video: Hailuo 2.3 takes 25 credits for 6 seconds in 768p and 80 for 1080p, Sora 2 takes 40 to 120, and Veo 3.1 takes 120 for 8 seconds. Credits are not charged for failed generations.

How many videos. The storefront promises Standard “up to 83 videos,” but calculates this using the cheapest mode of an older model. With H3 in 768p, 1,000 credits cover 23 six-second videos; in 2K, 13. Top-ups from $5 do not include subscription privileges, and the vendor gives conflicting expiry periods for purchased credits: one year in the FAQ and two on the storefront.

Plans. According to the storefront billing on Sep 7, 2026, Standard is $10.50, Pro $38, Master $89, Ultra $124.99, and Max $216 per month. The storefront displays a struck-through “was” price for the three lower plans, but there is no discount end date in the data, so these are exactly the amounts you pay. Annual Standard costs $100.80 upfront, which the storefront presents as “$8.40 per month.”

Badge trap. The site header still says “from $9.99 per month.” No plan costs that: billing archives show Standard at $9.99 from August 2025 through July 2026, and there is an indirect trace of the same price in December 2024. In summer 2026, the vendor raised four plans by 5–11 %, while Max received more credits and Ultra was unchanged; the old prices were last visible in the archive on July 8, while the new ones appeared by August 6.

Unlimited. After credits run out, Ultra and Max generate without limits, but only on older models and in a slow queue, according to the vendor itself: Ultra on Hailuo 1.0, Max on Hailuo 1.0 and 2.x. H3, Sora 2, and Veo 3.1 are not included in unlimited usage and always charge credits; the agent has no unlimited option at all.

Free. New users get 200 credits once, with no monthly credits. Every free video has a watermark, third-party models are unavailable, and the queue allows up to four tasks with one running. For installing the MiniMax Design desktop app, the vendor promised 3,000 credits in September 2026.

Three questions: whose videos are these, who are you contracting with, and what is the California lawsuit about.

Whose videos. The vendor does not claim ownership of uploaded or generated content, and its FAQ says that a video downloaded without a watermark is yours and suitable for commercial use. Three caveats: the download window on the same site calls the file “for personal study only,” the free plan does not remove the watermark, and the terms grant the company a perpetual, irrevocable license to use your content, create derivative works, and earn revenue from them; the license survives account deletion.

Your data. The word “training” appears nowhere in the terms or policy, neither permission nor opt-out. Under the policy, faces from uploaded photos are processed only to create the video and deleted with the photos after generation. When removing a watermark, you separately confirm that the video is not a deepfake, while the vendor places responsibility for AI-content labeling laws on you.

Who you contract with. The terms, the policy, the model license and the Google Play app are signed by MiniMax's Singapore subsidiary under the name Nanonoble, with an address on Beach Road. Disputes run under Singapore law, you can sue only in Singapore, and the company reserves the right to come to your country, arbitration in Singapore at its choice, minimum age 16, one year to file a claim.

Court. On Sep 16, 2025, Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. sued in California: they say Hailuo generates Darth Vader, Minions, and Shrek on request and promotes itself as a "Hollywood studio in your pocket." On May 22, 2026, the court denied the defendants' motions to dismiss on both grounds, including the argument that "a US court has no authority over us," finding the allegations plausible for both training and output, and on Jun 5, 2026 Singapore's Nanonoble filed a counterclaim. As of Sep 7, 2026, the case is ongoing, with the parties exchanging documents under a protective order.

Open weights with geographic limits. Because of this lawsuit, the H3 license prohibits use of the model in the EU, the UK, South Korea, and the US, which the company itself explained as legal risk. A second trust issue: on Feb 23, 2026, Anthropic accused MiniMax of collecting over 13 million Claude responses through fake accounts, four-fifths of the total described volume. This is a statement by a direct competitor, Anthropic did not sue, and MiniMax has not responded.

Outages. The vendor's status page is live: video generation maintained 100 % uptime for the 90 days through Sep 7, 2026, while 25 incidents from 12 August through 5 September affected text models and lasted minutes. Practitioners' complaints about queues and slow generation do not appear in this feed: slow does not mean unavailable.

The split is not entry price, both are around $10, but what you buy: a top-ranked model with open weights or an ecosystem with an iPhone app.

Kling. Kuaishou's Chinese offering: the entry plan is $10 a month for 660 credits, with free daily credits and iPhone and Android apps. On arena.ai in September 2026, H3 ranks first for image animation; we did not capture Kling's position there. Choose Kling if you need a daily free allowance and an iPhone; choose Hailuo if you count video seconds or want your own server with weights.

Higgsfield. A storefront of third-party models for $19 per month, and Hailuo itself is available there: the Sep 6, 2026 snapshot of its neighbor includes Hailuo 2.3, H3, and H3 Max alongside Kling, Sora, and Veo. The axis is the same as with Kling, only reversed: the same model costs less from its creator, while the storefront lets you try a dozen in one pipeline. Hailuo's own storefront also sells third-party Veo 3.1 and Sora 2, but only as add-ons to its own model.

Over two years, the product went from a viral lightsaber video to the top of the leaderboards, with a lawsuit from those very studios, the company's IPO, and open weights barred in four territories in between.