Who Is China's Cheapest Video Agent?

"Competing down to the third decimal place"

Was this year's Double 11 the quietest ever? I barely saw any ads for Tmall, JD.com, Douyin or other e-commerce platforms — maybe everyone's obsessed with buying tokens now.

Belike: selling Qwen Office token cards and Trae monthly passes in livestreams is basically like a plantation owner during the Triangle Trade buying a couple of slaves to stock up before planting season.

Beyond the people hawking token cards in livestreams, the biggest mess this Double 11 was video agents.

One after another they raced to sell Seedance 2.5 at the lowest price, scrambling to pay tribute to Dai Tan at Volcano Engine — just look at how Dreamina and LibTV have driven their prices down to the third decimal place.

Which tells you the essence of a video agent is a supermarket. These video agents really should be valued at consumer-company multiples. Zero added value — pure middlemen.

Of course, Melvin Chen is different. LibTV really is worth $3 billion (trust me bro.jpg).

Melvin clearly grasped that video agents are essentially big-box stores, so LibTV came out of the gate with a 39%-off monthly membership.

And ever since, he's kept his eye glued to everyone else's prices, at minimum claiming to be the cheapest while always undercutting Dreamina by one cent.

What a pair of star-crossed lovers

For example, on the same Double 11 discount blitz: Dreamina announced last week that its Seedance 2.5 720P price was the lowest at ¥0.17/s;

The very next day, Melvin bought up a bunch of press releases — oh sorry, I mean a bunch of Melvin fanboys spontaneously posted that his Seedance 2.5 720P was as low as ¥0.16/s, and that Seedance 2 Fast and Seedance 2 Mini were being thrown into a 30-day unlimited-use-at-zero-credits deluxe package.

Just one cent cheaper than you. Annoying, right?

Dreamina later adjusted its prices again to match LibTV. You can imagine how many late nights the Dreamina monetization team had to pull, how many extra Lark docs they had to write, just to shave off that one cent...

While all Melvin had to do was click a "lower price" button...

I now suggest Melvin cosplay Tibo: install a price-cut button, and every time he thinks of some CapCut executive badmouthing him or an old colleague freezing him out, he just presses it. Go on, Dreamina people — keep busy!

Chen later explained in an interview that he never intended to start a price war: "It's just low pricing — where's the subsidy?"

His explanation: "You assume a consumption rate and renewal rate, calculate how much the user pays over the whole cycle and how much it costs to serve them, then work backward to a price that holds at a not-too-high early-stage profit margin."

But has anyone considered that Melvin launched the 39%-off annual plan on day one — no validation period needed?

To which I can only say: Melvin, as expected of someone from a CapCut monetization background — just how far can those eyes of yours see?

Still, everyone keeps saying LibTV is cheap — but how much does Seedance 2.5 actually cost on LibTV? Is LibTV really the cheapest?

Since I had nothing better to do, I went and thoroughly worked through the real prices of Dreamina and LibTV, down to the third decimal place, to see who really is China's cheapest video agent.

Some asked why I didn't include OiiOii, which recently also bought a bunch of ads about its own price cuts. My take: there's a difference between a one-off price cut and continuous price cuts.

We'll use SD2.5 720P with a reference image as the main benchmark — it's the model people use most for creating content right now — to see who's cheaper per second for SD2.5 720P.

Before we can calculate how much one second of SD2.5 720P actually costs, we first need to figure out how many credits one second of SD2.5 720P consumes.

I generated a reference-based SD2.5 720P video on both LibTV and Dreamina: LibTV consumes 46 credits per second, Dreamina consumes 26 credits per second — meaning 1 Dreamina credit equals 1.77 LibTV credits.

On the discount side, we also have to note one premise: LibTV's annual Premium, Deluxe and Ultimate tiers have a limited-time 50%-off credit consumption deal for Seedance 2.5 (with reference), and Dreamina's Super and Premium memberships have similar credit discounts.

With the credit benchmark in hand, let's start calculating each plan.

01

Annual

First up, LibTV's most expensive annual auto-renew Ultimate plan: ¥16,999 for 1,581,000 credits a year, averaging ¥0.51 per second of SD2.5 720P — or ¥0.25 with the half-price Seedance deal stacked on.

That's LibTV's — very thoughtful, they even offer Huabei installments

So then I got curious: where does that ¥0.16/s come from?

I later realized they divided the single-month price by the single-month credits, because the first month gives the most credits. The calculation goes something like: 16999/15/(92000+67000)×46/2=0.16.

Good grief, that's pure extreme-case math.

This is Dreamina's

Dreamina's Super membership likewise arrives at ¥0.16 per second via the same extreme-case math.

Back when this model first launched, a second cost over ¥1 — clicking generate actually hurt, it was pure luxury. After running the numbers today, the lowest price is down to ¥0.16 a second.

So let's keep using the extreme-case method. What follows is dry — pure elementary-school arithmetic:

LibTV's annual auto-renew Premium (16.3K): ¥3,899 a year, 17,800 credits a month, ¥0.018 per credit, ¥0.42 per second of SD2.5 720P;

Dreamina's annual auto-renew Premium membership (12.3K): ¥5,199 a year, 16,520 credits a month, ¥0.026 per credit, ¥0.42 per second of SD2.5 720P.

LibTV annual auto-renew Advanced: ¥1,199 a year, 4,600 credits a month, ¥0.021 per credit, ¥1 per second of SD2.5 720P;

Dreamina annual auto-renew Standard membership: ¥1,099 a year, 2,210 credits a month, ¥0.041 per credit, ¥1.06 per second of SD2.5 720P.

LibTV annual auto-renew Standard: ¥569 a year, 1,500 credits a month, ¥0.032 per credit, ¥1.45 per second of SD2.5 720P;

Dreamina annual auto-renew Basic membership: ¥393 a year, 725 credits a month, ¥0.045 per credit, ¥1.17 per second of SD2.5 720P.

02

Quarterly

LibTV quarterly auto-renew Ultimate: ¥6,699 a quarter, 92,000 credits a month, ¥0.024 per credit, ¥1.12 per second of SD2.5 720P;

Dreamina quarterly auto-renew Super membership: ¥4,999 a quarter, 54,600 credits a month, ¥0.03 per credit, ¥0.39 per second of SD2.5 720P.

LibTV quarterly auto-renew Premium: ¥1,599 a quarter, 16,300 credits a month, ¥0.0326 per credit, ¥1.5 per second of SD2.5 720P;

Dreamina quarterly auto-renew Premium membership: ¥1,227 a quarter, 12,320 credits a month, ¥0.033 per credit, as low as ¥0.53 per second of SD2.5 720P.

LibTV quarterly auto-renew Advanced: ¥499 a quarter, 4,600 credits a month, ¥0.0361 per credit, ¥1.66 per second of SD2.5 720P;

Dreamina quarterly auto-renew Standard membership: ¥568 a quarter, 2,210 credits a month, ¥0.085 per credit, ¥2.23 per second of SD2.5 720P.

LibTV quarterly auto-renew Standard: ¥179 a quarter, 1,500 credits a month, ¥0.0397 per credit, ¥1.83 per second of SD2.5 720P;

Dreamina quarterly auto-renew Basic membership: ¥188 a quarter, 725 credits a month, ¥0.086 per credit, ¥2.25 per second of SD2.5 720P.

03

Monthly

LibTV monthly auto-renew Ultimate: ¥3,099 a month, 92,000 credits a month, ¥0.0336 per credit, ¥1.55 per second of SD2.5 720P;

Dreamina monthly auto-renew Super membership: ¥1,706, 54,600 credits a month, ¥0.0312 per credit, ¥0.82 per second of SD2.5 720P.

LibTV monthly auto-renew Premium: ¥649 a month, 16,300 credits a month, ¥0.0398 per credit, ¥1.83 per second of SD2.5 720P;

Dreamina monthly auto-renew Premium membership: ¥398, 12,320 credits a month, ¥0.032 per credit, ¥0.832 per second of SD2.5 720P.

LibTV monthly auto-renew Advanced: ¥199 a month, 4,600 credits a month, ¥0.04326 per credit, ¥1.99 per second of SD2.5 720P;

Dreamina monthly auto-renew Standard membership: ¥100, 2,210 credits a month, ¥0.045 per credit, ¥1.18 per second of SD2.5 720P.

LibTV monthly auto-renew Standard: ¥66 a month, 1,500 credits a month, ¥0.044 per credit, ¥2.02 per second of SD2.5 720P;

Dreamina monthly auto-renew Basic membership: ¥33, 725 credits a month, ¥0.046 per credit, ¥1.18 per second of SD2.5 720P.

Let me also separately calculate LibTV's annual, quarterly and monthly Deluxe plans: the price per second of Seedance 2.5 720P with reference is ¥0.34/1.26/1.68 respectively — so annual really is the way to go.

Based on all the above extreme-scenario number-crunching, we can conclude:

If your main use case is Seedance 2.5 720P with reference, then among individual monthly auto-renew plans — whether Super, Premium, Standard or Basic — Dreamina is cheaper across the board;

Among individual quarterly plans, Super and Premium are cheaper on Dreamina, and the gap is fairly large — suggesting Dreamina is the better pick for quarterly, mainly because Dreamina has an exclusive discount at that tier — while Standard and Basic are cheaper on LibTV;

As for individual annual auto-renew plans, the two are roughly neck and neck, each with its strengths.

The above calculations were done based on Double 11 promo-day prices; actual purchases may differ slightly, and I haven't counted the free video allowances.

Oh no — how is my Melvin no longer the lowest price across all plans on the whole internet? Especially in individual monthly auto-renew plans, how is he trailing so badly? Has he gotten so focused on fundraising that he's forgotten to give everyone perks — forgotten his roots?

For now it looks like LibTV and Dreamina will keep fighting forever. It's just a question of whether Melvin's money runs out first, or the Dreamina folks raise the white flag on subsidies first.

I get the feeling the two sides are starting to feel a grudging mutual respect.

Melvin looks at Dreamina and sees so many people with such strong organizational power; Dreamina looks at LibTV across the way and sees not much money but real guts to spend it. What a thoroughly exhilarating battle.

So I'm confident that once I publish their prices side by side, Melvin will definitely adjust his prices again and offer everyone even better deals!

At which point, I'll go back to using the cheapest, most economical LibTV!

Still, why does this piece read so much like grocery-store grandpas and grandmas endlessly calculating pennies in discounts... When will video agents finally level up from offline supermarkets back into the content industry?

(This article's cover image was generated by ChatGPT; the writing is entirely human.)

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