How to get the best deals on WAN â pricing breakdown, savings tips, and alternatives
WAN offers a free tier â you might not need to pay at all!
Perfect for trying out WAN without spending anything
đĄ Pro tip: Start with the free tier to test if WAN fits your workflow before upgrading to a paid plan.
per month
Don't overpay for features you won't use. Here's our recommendation based on your use case:
Most AI tools, including many in the video generation category, offer special pricing for students, teachers, and educational institutions. These discounts typically range from 20-50% off regular pricing.
âĸ Students: Verify your student status with a .edu email or Student ID
âĸ Teachers: Faculty and staff often qualify for education pricing
âĸ Institutions: Schools can request volume discounts for classroom use
Most SaaS and AI tools tend to offer their best deals around these windows. While we can't guarantee WAN runs promotions during all of these, they're worth watching:
The biggest discount window across the SaaS industry â many tools offer their best annual deals here
Holiday promotions and year-end deals are common as companies push to close out Q4
Tools targeting students and educators often run promotions during this window
Signing up for WAN's email list is the best way to catch promotions as they happen
đĄ Pro tip: If you're not in a rush, Black Friday and end-of-year tend to be the safest bets for SaaS discounts across the board.
Test features before committing to paid plans
Save 10-30% compared to monthly payments
Many companies reimburse productivity tools
Some providers offer multi-tool packages
Wait for Black Friday or year-end sales
Some tools offer "win-back" discounts to returning users
If WAN's pricing doesn't fit your budget, consider these video generation alternatives:
AI-powered video and image generation tools for creators, filmmakers, and artists, building foundational General World Models.
Starting at $0/month
â Free plan available
AI-powered video and image generation platform that converts text and images into dynamic videos, featuring text-to-video, image-to-video, lip sync, and various video effects capabilities.
Free tier available
â Free plan available
WAN (wan.video) is an AI video generation platform developed by Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen (Qwen) team, the same group behind the Qwen large language model series. It is built on the open-sourced Wan 2.x family of video foundation models, which were released in 2025 and have been positioned as one of the leading open video generation models. The platform exposes more than 40 generative abilities, ranging from text-to-video and image-to-video to specialized tasks like sketch-to-video and video super-resolution. It is hosted on Alibaba Cloud infrastructure, giving it access to large-scale GPU compute.
WAN operates on a freemium model with a free tier and pay-as-you-go paid usage billed through Alibaba Cloud credits. The free tier provides a limited daily generation allowance for core tasks like text-to-video, image-to-video, and text-to-image at no cost. Paid usage is billed per generation through Alibaba Cloud's DashScope API pricing: standard-resolution text-to-video clips (typically 4â5 seconds) cost approximately $0.12â$0.20 per clip (~ÂĨ0.24 per second of generated video at 480p), while higher-resolution outputs and advanced abilities like video super-resolution cost more, roughly $0.25â$0.50 per clip at 720p+. Image-to-video and sketch-to-video are priced in a similar range. A light creator generating 5â10 clips per day might spend approximately $3â$8 per month, while a moderate production user running 20â40 generations daily could expect $15â$40 per month. This compares favorably to Runway's entry plan at ~$15/month (which includes a fixed credit bundle) and Pika's ~$10/month starter tier. However, because WAN uses variable per-generation pricing rather than a flat subscription, actual monthly costs depend directly on usage volume, resolution choices, and which abilities are used.
WAN supports a wide range of video generation modes, including text-to-video (generate from a written prompt), image-to-video (animate a still image), sketch-to-video (turn a rough drawing into motion), and speech-to-video (drive a character or scene from audio). It also offers post-generation tools such as video extension to lengthen an existing clip, video repainting to restyle a video, video composite edit, and video super-resolution to upscale output quality. This breadth makes it suitable for short-form social content, product animations, and creative experiments alike.
Compared to Runway, WAN offers a much broader menu of image and video abilities in a single interface, while Runway has a more polished editor and stronger ecosystem integrations. Versus Pika Labs, WAN is better suited for users who want one platform for both image and video work. Against OpenAI's Sora, WAN's advantage is open access today plus a free tier, whereas Sora is gated and US-centric. Compared to Kling, WAN has stronger backing from a hyperscale cloud (Alibaba Cloud) and an open-source model lineage, which is meaningful for developers and researchers.
Commercial use is generally permitted under WAN's terms when content is generated through a paid plan or an account in good standing, but rights and restrictions can vary by region and ability type. Since WAN is operated by Alibaba, the terms of service follow Alibaba Cloud's content and IP guidelines, which require that prompts and outputs do not infringe third-party rights. For high-stakes commercial campaigns, users should review the latest terms inside the console and confirm licensing for any specific ability they rely on. For the open-source Wan 2.x models themselves, license terms on the model release should be checked separately.
Start with the free tier and upgrade when you need more features
Get Started with WAN âPricing and discounts last verified March 2026