Method
What we read, how often, from where, and how each number is checked.
What we read
Each tool's public pricing page, the one anyone can open without signing in. We never sign in, never solve a captcha and never get around a block. If a page cannot be read automatically, we check it by hand about once a week and show the date of that check next to every number.
How often, and from where
Once a day. Overseas tools are read from a Cloudflare data center in the eastern US, so the prices are the ones a US visitor sees, in US dollars. China versions are read once a day from a home connection in mainland China, in yuan.
How a number gets on the page
- We save the pricing part of the page as text. If nothing changed since the last read, we only record that the numbers were confirmed that day.
- When the text changed, a language model lists the plans, prices, credits, costs per clip, free tier, deals and models, each with the sentence it comes from.
- Code checks every number against that sentence on the page. A number that is not there is thrown away.
- A change goes live only when every check passes, and most kinds only after two reads in a row agree. A change that cannot be confirmed is held back: the page keeps the previous number with the day it was last confirmed, and after 7 days it says so.
- Deals come down on their end date, worked out by code from the date on the page.
What the labels mean
- Checked Oct 3: the last day the page showed this number.
- Checked by hand: a person read the page on that day.
- Not confirmed for 8 days: we could not confirm the number for more than 7 days. It may be out of date, and it does not take part in sorting.
- Not published: the tool does not say. We never estimate it.
- ≈ $0.16 for a clip: the tool's own monthly price divided by its monthly credits, times the credits a clip takes. Only where the tool publishes all three.
- ≈ $0.12 a second of video: the same price per credit, times the credits one second takes. Credits a second are the tool's own per-second figure, its per-minute figure divided by 60, or a clip's credits divided by the clip's stated length. The resolution is the one the tool states, or "resolution not stated". A clip whose length is not stated gets no per-second figure. Money figures stay in the plan's currency; yuan are compared with dollars only at that day's reference rate.
Every number has a record
Each read, each extracted number and each change is stored with its date and the sentence from the page, and never edited afterwards. When a rule changes, we recompute from the stored text instead of rewriting history.
Data downloads
The full record, free to reuse under CC BY 4.0: credit ReelTicker and link to reelticker.com.
- prices.csv: every plan price read (regular, first-period and struck-through), with the day it was first read, the day it was replaced and the day it was last confirmed; the last columns are the plan's credits at that time and the pricing page it was read from.
- changes.csv: every public change with its day, the old and new value and the quote from the pricing page.
- changes.atom: the latest changes as an Atom feed.
The files follow the site: a change shows in them within an hour. Values a tool does not publish are not in them. Columns are only ever added at the end.
Our crawler
We read each page about once a day and follow robots.txt. Our requests identify themselves as:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ReelTickerBot/1.0; +https://reelticker.com/method#bot)
Tools and how we read them
| Tool | How | Last check |
|---|---|---|
| Adobe Firefly | Automatically, from the US | Checked |
| Dreamina | Automatically, from the US | Checked |
| Google Flow | Automatically, from the US | Checked |
| Grok Imagine | Automatically, from the US | Checked |
| Hailuo (China) | Automatically, from mainland China | Checked |
| Higgsfield | Automatically, from the US | Checked |
| ImagineArt | Automatically, from the US | Checked |
| Invideo | Automatically, from the US | Checked |
| Jimeng (China) | Automatically, from mainland China | Checked |
| Kling | Automatically, from the US | Checked |
| Krea | Automatically, from the US | Checked |
| Leonardo | Automatically, from the US | Checked |
| Magnific | Automatically, from the US | Checked |
| OpenArt | Automatically, from the US | Checked |
| Pika | Automatically, from the US | Checked |
| PixVerse | Automatically, from the US | Checked |
| Pollo AI | Automatically, from the US | Checked |
| Runway | Automatically, from the US | Checked |
| Vidu | Automatically, from the US | Checked |
| Wan | Automatically, from the US | Checked |
| Wan (China) | Automatically, from mainland China | Checked |