Hailuo

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

Of six common requests from Russia, three run into checkout and button language, while the free trial, app, and official website work out.

Search volume — Wordstat, Russia region, 07.09.2026

Who it is for. For those making short videos for social media and ads who want sound and speech directly in the shot rather than separate voice-over. The H3 model makes videos up to 15 seconds long with stereo sound and speaks 11 languages; Russian is on the vendor's list. You can animate a person's photo, keep one face across every frame, and extend a finished video in the same window.

Who else. For those calculating the price per second: on the entry plan, a second of H3 at 768p costs about 7 cents; through the vendor's API, those same seconds cost 8. And for those with their own GPU servers: H3 weights are open, its license does not prohibit Russia, and at 768p the model runs without checkout at all.

Who it is not for. For those with only a Russian card: checkout charges in dollars and rejects Russian cards, according to practitioner reports from 2026. And for those expecting precise adherence to a script: T—Zh practitioners complain about an unruly camera and a “turtle-like” walk, while the free plan leaves a watermark and queues tasks one at a time.

It's a fit: section 3 takes you from sign-in to your first video. If you are choosing between it and Kling, see the fork 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. You describe a scene and, if desired, add the first and last frames; with H3, choose a duration from 4 to 15 seconds and a resolution, 768p or 2K, meaning 1440p. Older models generate videos in 6- and 10-second lengths. The H3 model outputs video with native stereo sound: noises, music, and speech are created together with the image, so no separate voice-over is needed. Speech works reliably in 11 languages according to the vendor specification, with Russian listed alongside Chinese and English.

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 window: 85 videos on its channel show results rather than the screen, so the header uses a collage of 2025 footage and the 2026 app storefront; the vendor does not show its 2026 reference website window anywhere. Russian prompts are accepted: a Habr practitioner wrote prompts in Russian and got results in July 2025, while T—Zh editors advised translating them into English for accuracy. We did not run Hailuo ourselves for this task; the numbers come from the storefront, website configs, model card, and third-party tests.

You can start on the website without installing anything; it opens from Russia, and payment is the only place you will stumble.

Available from Russia. A test on 09/06/2026 from a Moscow node returned code 200 for the homepage, workspace, and pricing page, while the same node at the same minute could not open LinkedIn or Instagram. The address is absent from the registry of banned domains, and the only “region not supported” stub in the website code is written for mainland China. There is no need to switch a Russian IP address to a foreign one.

Step 1. Open hailuoai.video and sign in with Google, Apple, or a phone number using an SMS code. Practitioners from Russia signed in through Google in 2025; the vendor does not say whether a Russian number is accepted.

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 videos without a watermark and with commercial rights, you need a paid plan, while checkout accepts only foreign cards: from Russia international payment required or use an intermediary for a fee.

Surfaces. A website in the browser on desktop and phone, plus an Android app in Google Play under the MiniMax AI name; in RuStore, the listing was created by the store itself and its publisher is not the vendor. There is no iPhone app: the App Store link on the vendor's website returns 404, while the store has other apps named Hailuo, some with Russian descriptions and prices up to $29.99 per month. The MiniMax Design desktop program is a separate company product with its own plans.

Russian. The website is translated into six languages, with no Russian among them; an address with /ru returns the English version, and the word “Russian” in the storefront code appears only in the list of voice-over languages. A T—Zh practitioner saw “everything in Russian” after signing in in January 2025; today's code does not confirm this. The model creates Russian speech in the shot and accepts Russian prompts.

Do it yourself. H3 weights are openly available on Hugging Face without an application; the license prohibits use in the EU, the UK, South Korea, and the US, but does not name Russia. Locally, the model generates only at 768p and requires several GPUs; ready-made builds exist for ComfyUI. Through the API, the same model costs 8 cents per second at 768p, and its smallest credit package is $5.

Steps checked 09/07/2026 against the live hailuoai.video storefront, interface dictionary, model card, and an HTTP test from Russian nodes on 09/06/2026

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 03.09.2026 and eighth out of 48 in “text-to-video,” behind Gemini Omni, Wan 3.0, and Flux. In Artificial Analysis tables as of 07.09.2026, 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. “Hailuo” gets 13,5 thousand searches per month, with another 6 thousand for “hailuo ai,” while the Cyrillic “khailuo” gets only 215 (Wordstat, 07.09.2026). One and a half thousand monthly queries misspell the name as “hailuo al,” because in most fonts an uppercase I and lowercase l look like the same stroke. Its place among video tools is shown beneath the card title, while the full tool ranking is on the overview 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 07.09.2026, 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.

Paying from Russia. Checkout runs through Airwallex, prices are only in dollars, and Russian cards are declined according to accounts from practitioners in 2026. Intermediaries, based on their price lists from 27.08 and 07.09.2026, charge from 350 to 1 050 ₽ depending on the amount, or 20 % with a 300 ₽ minimum; we did not verify these figures. Marketplace accounts are cheaper than the official price, but the vendor blocks shared access. There are no refunds in any case, as the vendor repeats in three places.

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, policy, model license, and Google Play app are signed by MiniMax's Singapore subsidiary, Nanonoble, at a Beach Road address. Singapore law governs disputes, you can only sue in Singapore, and the company reserves the right to sue in your country, choose SIAC arbitration in Singapore, sets the minimum age at 16, and gives you one year to bring a claim. The documents do not mention "Russia" or list prohibited countries.

Court. On 16.09.2025, 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 22.05.2026, 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 05.06.2026 Singapore's Nanonoble filed a counterclaim. As of 07.09.2026, 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 23.02.2026, 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 07.09.2026, 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. A Chinese neighborhood rival from Kuaishou: the entry plan is $10 per month for 660 credits, with free credits every day and iPhone and Android apps. On the arena.ai leaderboard in September 2026, H3 ranks first in image animation; we did not record Kling's position there. Choose Kling if you need a daily free allowance and an iPhone; choose Hailuo if you count video seconds, want Russian speech in the frame, or your own server with weights. According to Kling's card in our catalog, both sites open from Russia, but payment requires an intermediary.

Higgsfield. A storefront of third-party models for $19 per month, and Hailuo itself is available there: the 06.09.2026 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.

From Russia. The video generator has no Russian competitor with a full card: Russian reviews compare Hailuo with Sber's Kandinsky Video and Yandex's Shedevrum, both paid in rubles. Those same reviews place Hailuo on the "understands Russian" side alongside them, rather than the "requires a workaround" side, a rare position for a foreign service.

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.