# AI Video Cost Control — Approve Before You Render | PV30 > Read the script and storyboard, see the server-side credit quote for each step, and approve before anything renders. How PV30 keeps AI video spend predictable. Canonical: https://www.pv30.com/cost-control/ Read the plan, see the price, decide. Credits move only after you approve. Most AI video tools charge at the moment you press generate, which means the first time you learn whether an idea works is also the first time you have paid for it. Cost control reverses that order: the script, the shot design, the exact prompts and a credit quote all exist before any paid media is produced. PV30 prices each paid step on the server and shows the quote for you to confirm. Nothing is charged for reading the plan, rewriting a line, or reordering shots — those are text operations. ## Facts - **Paid steps:** Images · video · voice - **Quoted:** Server-side, per step, per model - **Approval:** You confirm each quote - **Auto mode:** Approves inside your budget, asks past it - **Free to change:** Script, shots, order, prompts ## The problem with paying per generation Per-generation pricing hides the cost of being wrong. You write a prompt, pay, look at the clip, and discover the framing is off. The second attempt costs the same as the first, and so does the tenth. The waste is not the price of one clip. It is that the clip was never the unit of work — the film was. Pricing by clip forces you to buy the film one experiment at a time. ## What you can read before spending The script, in full and editable. The shot list, with framing, camera movement, lighting and duration for each shot. The storyboard design. The exact prompt that will be sent to the model for a given shot. And the quote for that step. Reading any of it costs nothing. Rewriting a line, reordering shots or changing an element is a text edit, and text edits never quietly trigger paid regeneration. ## Auto mode: a budget instead of a click Confirming every quote is safe but slow on a long film. Auto mode lets the assistant approve allowed quotes inside a session budget you set, and it stops to ask again before exceeding that budget or before anything destructive. The point is that the ceiling is yours. Automation decides the order of work, not the size of the bill. ## Changing your mind without paying twice Regeneration is per node, so fixing one shot does not re-run the film. Each node binds the exact asset version you chose, and regenerating never overwrites that version — you pick which one a shot uses. When an upstream change invalidates something downstream, the affected nodes are marked stale rather than silently re-rendered, so you decide what to redo and what to leave alone. ## What this does not promise It does not fix a total price in advance. A quote covers the step you are approving, and how many steps a film needs depends on how many revisions you ask for — an honest answer is a range, not a number. It also does not make generation free to experiment with. The saving is in not paying for the shots you rejected before rendering, and in not re-running a whole film to fix one moment. ## Questions ### Can I see the cost before a video is generated? Yes. Each paid step carries a server-side credit quote that you confirm before it runs. The script, shot design and prompts are readable before any quote is issued. ### What happens if a run would exceed my budget? With Auto mode on, the assistant approves allowed quotes inside the session budget you set and asks you again before exceeding it, or before doing anything destructive. ### Do script edits cost credits? No. Rewriting a line, reordering shots or changing an element is a text edit. Text edits never silently regenerate paid media, so you are not charged for thinking again. ### Can I preview the prompts that will be sent to the model? Yes — you can read the exact prompts for a shot before paying for video generation, which is the point at which a bad instruction is still free to fix. ### Is cost controlled per shot or per project? Per step. Quotes are issued for the step you are about to run, and regeneration is per node, so a project is a sequence of individually approved costs rather than one commitment. --- Screenshots and frames on this page come from demo projects made in PV30; brands and characters are fictional. Results depend on the models and settings used.