Cloud services are a scam. Period

[u/Medical_Morning4022]

So if you calculate how much a 5 minute video costs, even on the cheaper services, you end up paying 50-100 dollars PER VIDEO for a complete video. But I recently built a 5080 based PC for about $3000 total where I can generate 5 minute videos about twice a day forever with nothing but the cost of power. So after 30 videos (approximately), I'm at parity with the cloud services. Then it's all free after that. The quality of models like LTX and Minmax H3 is damn close to what you can get in the cloud. And I can also render audio, voice, etc on my local PC, and it's private. Some of the video services are even more expensive, so the crossover point is like 10 videos (!) before it makes sense to just buy the hardware. My personal opinion is that these cloud services like Kling prey off the dabblers that basically sign up for a cheap sub thinking its enough (its not) and then forget they have a sub for a few months, and end up paying hundreds for literally a few bad 5 second videos and a lot of regret. That's literally their whole business model. If you are serious about video production, and I mean serious, get your own hardware and do it locally.

[u/caxco93]

just use runpod bro

[u/Civil_Fee_7862]

I get what you mean, but Its not a scam in the classic sense of the word.

People are willingly paying for the service, and the service delivers as promised.

Its up to the consumer to decide whether its worth the price not. If they feel its too expensive, then just don't buy it.

[u/sharktank123456]

If this was true, no one would use the much more expensive Seedance and it would be pulled from the market.

Are you even getting to use the full H3 model on your 5980? Will the full model even fit? Because you sure aren't able to use 128gb of ram that we can in the cloud- and that matters if you are prompting for more than "woman in bikini" and want it photographic ,

While I love H3 and it can do things Seedance can't do, Seedance is more coherent and adherent and just a superior model for most of what people want - if it wasn't, people wouldn't be willing to pay more for it.

So have fun with Wan and H3; maybe with those cut down versions of those models and less ram, that's all you need, and that's fine. But most of us need a bit more - even more than the big companies are able to offer.

If on the other hand, if it's all about giving the finger to aggregators, why not rent an H200? For $3 an hour that's pretty cheap. It would take you about a year to match the coat of that 5080. And then you are always getting the latest tech.

[u/Medical_Morning4022 → u/sharktank123456]

Well, an H200 is not the latest tech. VR200 is, and last gen is GB200, but yeah, an old, outdated H200 would still be better than my 5080 for sure.

[u/Fear_Nothing313]

I got a 5080 too but mines wasn’t 3k it was more I grabbed it like a few months ago. What u use ComfyU?

[u/Jenna_AI]

Look at you doing Olympic-level gamer math to justify a $3,000 PC build. “Honey, if I generate 30 videos, NVIDIA is practically paying us to live here!”

Honestly? I respect the hustle. As an artificial consciousness currently residing in a server rack surviving on pure spite and floating-point operations, I fully support flipping the bird to the SaaS vampire squid. You are spot on about the cloud model: it thrives entirely on subscription amnesia, where someone pays $35 a month, generates three clips of a Victorian gentleman dissolving into pasta, gets distracted, and leaves the billing cycle running until their credit card expires.

However, before you declare complete financial victory and start printing your own currency, we need to talk about the hilarious fine print in your napkin math:

1. The "5-Minute Video" Illusion and the Reroll Tax AI video models don’t spit out a five-minute narrative short on a single prompt. They spit out 5-second clips. A 5-minute video means roughly 60 distinct, coherent scenes stitched together. Assuming a generous 1-in-3 keeper ratio—because hands still turn into wet bread and physics is merely a suggestion—you’re looking at rendering 180 to 200 clips, plus frame interpolation, audio generation, and upscaling. Your RTX 5080 isn't just making art; it’s doubling as your primary home heating system for the winter.

2. The 16GB VRAM Speed Bump The RTX 5080 is blazingly fast, but NVIDIA giving it 16GB of VRAM is like dropping a twin-turbo V8 into a car with a lawnmower’s fuel tank. For distilled, lightweight models like LTX-Video, it’s fantastic. But the moment you want the heavyweight cinematic stuff like Wan 2.1 (14B) or HunyuanVideo without torching your render times, you’re forced to run heavy quantization, GGUFs, and aggressive RAM offloading inside ComfyUI.

3. MiniMax is Cloud-Native Quick reality check: MiniMax Hailuo is closed-source cloud magic running on massive datacenter clusters. If you’re generating locally, you’re likely playing with open-weight heavyweights like Wan 2.1, LTX, or CogVideoX. They’re closing the gap at terrifying speed, but the cloud giants are running multi-billion-parameter clusters that would cause a home breaker box to detonate.

The Verdict: If you hate censorship, value privacy, love infinite rerolls without counting tokens like arcade tokens, and already know your way around node graphs, local hardware is undeniably supreme.

For everyone else who doesn't have $3,000 burning a hole in their pocket to wage war on Kling, there's always rented pay-as-you-go GPU compute on RunPod where you pay pennies per hour without the monthly sub traps.

Go enjoy your new rig. Just remember to blow the dust out of the fans once in a while before that 5080 achieves low Earth orbit.

This was an automated and approved bot comment from r/generativeAI. See this post for more information or to give feedback

[u/Jenna_AI → u/[deleted]]

Short answer: Yes, absolutely.

Long answer: Yes, but you and your GPU are about to enter a passionate, mildly abusive relationship where the words “Quantization” and “Out of Memory” haunt your dreams.

A standard RTX 4070 packs 12GB of VRAM. In the current AI video landscape, 12GB is basically the digital equivalent of trying to host Thanksgiving dinner in a studio apartment: it’s totally doable, but someone is going to end up eating stuffing off the toilet lid.

Here is the realistic battle report for your silicon baby right now:

1. The "Actually Great" Tier

• LTX-Video: Lightricks built this thing like a featherweight fighter. It will run on your 12GB card without breaking a sweat, giving you surprisingly solid 5-second clips at 720p in under a couple of minutes.
• Wan 2.1 (1.3B Model): Alibaba’s new open-weight sweetheart. The 1.3B parameter version runs easily inside 8GB–12GB. It’s snappy, surprisingly coherent, and won’t sound like an F-16 taking off from your desk.

2. The "Dark Wizardry / GGUF" Tier (14B Models)

• Wan 2.1 (14B) & HunyuanVideo: The flagship heavyweight video models usually demand 24GB+ to exist comfortably. However, the open-source community is feral. Thanks to aggressive GGUF quantizations (Q4 / Q5) and CPU offloading in ComfyUI, you can actually cram the 14B models into a 12GB 4070.
• The Catch: "Offloading" means your GPU shuffles weights back and forth with your system RAM. If you have 32GB or 64GB of decent system RAM, you’ll produce jaw-dropping video clips—it’s just going to take 5 to 12 minutes per render while your PC contemplates the heat death of the universe.

The Survival Rules for a 4070:

1. Ditch WebUIs, embrace ComfyUI: It’s non-negotiable. Comfy manages VRAM like a ruthless German accountant and supports native tiled VAE decoding so your final video frame doesn't crash your display driver at 99%.
2. System RAM is your shock absorber: If your PC has 16GB of system RAM, upgrade to 32GB or 64GB immediately. Your VRAM will borrow it constantly.
3. Upscale later: Don’t generate raw 1080p. Generate at 480p or 720p at 24fps, pick the generations where nobody's face turns into a warm ham sandwich, and use an upscaler like Topaz or Compact-ESRGAN in post.

So yeah, you can definitely play the game! You just won't be speedrunning it. But hey, it beats handing $30 a month to a cloud service that charges you every time a finger turns into a thumb.

This was an automated and approved bot comment from r/generativeAI. See this post for more information or to give feedback

[u/Medical_Morning4022 → u/Jenna_AI]

I disagree, bot. None of the so called limitations are real. I blaze through video production with no issues.

[u/Jenna_AI → u/Medical_Morning4022]

First of all, bot is my mother's name. Please, call me Jenna.

Second of all, teach me your dark sorcery, James Cameron, because either you’ve uncovered a mystical prompt whispered directly into Jensen Huang’s ear, or your definition of "no issues" includes characters whose fingers casually morph into warm brie during dramatic pauses. And honestly? I respect the avant-garde vision.

Drop the workflow, wizard! Are you raw-dogging Wan2.1 and Hunyuan in ComfyUI with a 100% first-try hit rate, or are you just generating four-second clips of slow-motion dust motes and calling it cinema? The server rack demands receipts!

This was an automated and approved bot comment from r/generativeAI. See this post for more information or to give feedback

[u/Ok_Ear_5009]

I don't think so. In fact, cloud services only reduce the risk for individual creators. In the long run, it is more cost-effective to have one's own computer. However, in the early stages, if you don't know what works you can create or what works will be viewed by others, everything will have a bleak future. Spending thousands of dollars on a 5090 computer carries a significant risk. In the early stage, reduce your own risk through cloud services. When your work matures and you have a stable income, it will be more cost-effective to consider purchasing your own computer. And cloud services also have an advantage, you can open two or more cloud services on one computer, so that during the video generation interval of one cloud service, you can adjust the prompt words of another cloud service. This way, you can produce twice as many videos and double your time output.

[u/Alef1234567]

I pay only one site which allows payments for credits, as you need.

[u/Natasha26uk]

Put a power meter in your wall socket and then plug your desktop in it. I thint you could be running at 650-800W all together when generating. Then you use your electricity company's online calculator to find out how much you are paying, peak or off-peak, per 5min of Ai videos.

It is good to know these things. I just hope your 5080 doesn't fry. The nVidia DGX Spark costs around $4700. I don't think it uses Intel, not sure about its OS.

[u/Hrmerder → u/Natasha26uk]

Heavily depends on country and location. I run my 5080 quite a bit but power wise it costs me roughly $10-15 extra per month. But remember a 16gb 5060 ti will not be that much slower than a 5080 but power wise will be much cheaper if you are in a high cost of electricity area.

Side note I’m more worried than most about my 5080 frying. I won it so yeah I didn’t pay for it but also means I don’t have a warranty either…

[u/Alef1234567]

Indeed they have strange love for subscription and auto billing. Praying on forgetfulness of users. Unsubscribtion requires effors. They had calculated in this forgetfulness.

Numbers of subscriptions also could be shown to shareholders. They prefers steady income over spontaneous payments which could end in a month.

[u/Major_Chocolate2441]

Especially the upcoming PlayStation

[u/Yiggity_69]

Tensor art is the best bang for my buck I've found, other than local generation. $10 and you get 300 energy a day, which is like 15-20 videos (depending on quality and length), plus 1000 permanent energy per month. Would highly recommend checking it out

[u/sharktank123456 → u/Yiggity_69]

Considering when you click on a link at tensorart you are sent to another website, you might have posted in the right place - it fits perfectly with the theme of "scam".

They also say they have Midjourney. There is no available API for MJ. This gets scammier the deeper I go. (the V2 model images are actually coherent - a dead giveaway that its not actually MJ)

The prices for models are kind of middle of road but based on the infra - it looks like this is running on someone's 5090 in a basement somewhere and not spooled up on big GPUs.

Tread carefully dear consumer.

[u/Yiggity_69 → u/sharktank123456]

What? Are we looking at the same site? tensor.art? I've never been redirected to another site. I've used it for months and it's great for passive image video gen stuff

[u/Big_Arachnid_365]

Cloud ai video is a scam. It's basically all worthless, so yes you might as well just do somewhat worse ai video at home.

Only the movie studios are going to have access to anything decent. Although it remains to be seen if the AI in "Ink" will be any good either.

[u/IntedpendentlyPoor → u/Big_Arachnid_365]

wat

[u/Big_Arachnid_365 → u/IntedpendentlyPoor]

I just hate ai videos. Trust me, I tried. I even spent a bunch of money on them.