Is Opus Clip free? What the free plan actually includes

Quick answer

Opus Clip is free to start, but not free to publish with at scale. The Free plan costs $0 and gives you 60 credits a month. One credit is one minute of source video, so that is roughly one hour of footage. Every clip carries the OpusClip watermark, you cannot use the editor, and exports stop working 3 days after processing. A separate 7-day free trial unlocks most paid features, still with the watermark. Removing the watermark requires a paid plan, which starts at $15 a month (full Opus Clip pricing).

Opus Clip free plan limits

These limits come from the Free column of the vendor’s pricing page and the help center’s plan description, both read on October 11, 2026.

What you do get on Free: AI clip selection, auto reframe to vertical, AI captions with emoji and keyword highlights, one brand template, and the option to choose a clipping timeframe and clip length before processing. That is the core of the product, which is why Free works as a quality test even though it does not work as a production plan.

The two limits that matter most

The 3-day export window is easy to miss. If you process a video on Monday and plan to review clips at the weekend, the clips may no longer be exportable. Review and download the same day. The minute budget is the other constraint: a single 90-minute podcast exceeds the monthly allowance unless you use the processing-timeframe slider to send only part of it.

The Opus Clip free trial

The Starter and Pro buttons on the pricing page read “Start your free trial” with “No credit card required”. The billing help article adds a qualifier: no card is needed if you are in one of the countries Opus Clip serves at full capacity. According to the help center, a trial account converts to the Free Forever plan automatically after 7 days, and a trial cannot be paused.

The trial is designed to show core Pro features, but the help center lists exclusions. The ones that affect a fair evaluation:

• Videos exported during the trial include the OpusClip watermark.
• No direct posting or scheduling to social media.
• No 100 GB cloud storage or project auto-save, and no bulk downloads.
• No team workspace, speaker-based caption colors, transitions, music, custom media uploads, intro/outro cards or 4K export.
• No reprocessing a video for a credit refund.

Use the 7 days for the question the trial can answer: does Opus Clip pick complete, publishable moments from your recordings? Prepare two or three representative sources before you sign up, so the clock is spent reviewing output rather than finding footage. Our testing protocol lists what to record.

The watermark, and the legitimate way to remove it

On Free and during the trial, clips show the OpusClip brand logo. The help center’s answer to removing it is short: upgrade to a paid plan, and the watermark is removed automatically from your Free plan and free trial projects. That last detail is useful. If you processed good clips during the trial, you do not need to reprocess them after upgrading, which would cost credits again.

We do not recommend watermark-remover tools, cropping the logo out, or blurring it. Cropping changes the framing the tool just optimised, blurring looks worse than the watermark, and stripping a vendor’s branding from free-tier output can conflict with its terms of use. If a watermark-free clip matters, a single month of Starter is the cheaper fix. Our watermark guide walks through the upgrade and re-export steps.

When the free plan is enough

• Evaluating fit. One hour of footage a month is enough to see whether clip selection suits your genre.
• Internal drafts. Watermarked clips are fine for showing a client or teammate which moments the AI found.
• Occasional personal posts where the watermark does not matter to you.

It is not enough when you publish on a schedule, need clips older than 3 days, edit captions before posting, or work in 16:9 or 1:1. At that point compare the paid plans on cost per accepted clip, as shown in our Opus Clip cost-per-clip example.

A sensible upgrade path

If the free run convinced you, you do not have to commit to a year. Starter is monthly-only at $15, removes the watermark (including on projects you made while on Free or trial) and gives 150 credits. Use one month to process a realistic month of recordings, count how many clips you actually post, and only then decide between staying on Starter, moving to Pro for more minutes and formats, or switching tools. Monthly credits stay valid for 60 days, so a short gap between upgrading and processing does not waste them.

Free Opus Clip alternatives

Several competitors publish free tiers. They meter different units, so compare them on the limit that matters to you. Free-tier details below were read from each vendor’s pricing page on October 11, 2026; we have not yet run them.

For who each tool suits and where it falls short, see free Opus Clip alternatives in our full comparison.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

Vendor facts on this page come from these public pages, checked October 11, 2026. Prices and plan limits change; confirm them at checkout.

• OpusClip pricing page
• Help center: Plans
• Help center: How do credits work?
• Help center: Features not included in the free trial
• Help center: Pause or cancel a free trial
• Help center: How can I remove the OpusClip watermark?
• Help center: Payments & billing info
• Vizard pricing
• quso.ai (formerly Vidyo.ai) pricing
• 2short.ai pricing
• Descript pricing
• CapCut pricing