There is no single price, because "AI video search" covers products that meter completely different things. What you pay divides into two parts: a one-time cost to make each hour of footage searchable, and a recurring cost every time someone asks a question of it. Which part dominates your bill depends on the ratio between hours loaded and searches run. A large archive with a few questions a week and a small archive with a hundred questions a week are priced very differently, and the cheapest option flips between them. So the first useful move is not collecting quotes. It is writing down those two numbers for your own team.
The four meters to ask about
Almost everything in this category bills on some mix of four things. There is the footage you process on the way in, usually counted in hours or minutes. There is storage, since the footage and whatever got derived from it has to live somewhere. There is the search itself, either metered per query or bundled as an allowance inside a tier. And there are seats, if more than one person needs to log in.
A vendor quoting one number is bundling the other three. Ask which of the four moves when you double your archive, and which moves when you double your searches. Those two answers tell you more than a per-hour rate does, and what actually drives the number on the quote rarely turns out to be the headline meter.
Not every search costs the same
Retrieval tools often give you more than one way to ask, and the modes do not cost alike. A quick scan tells you which videos in a project are probably relevant, which is enough when the question is just whether the material exists at all. A precise pass narrows to the specific seconds, attaches a line of reasoning to each range, and makes you wait for the whole job to finish. In practice that is a two-step habit rather than a choice: scan first to confirm something is there, then spend the expensive search only where you know it is. Vivu is built on the same split, and each video is indexed once when it goes into a project, so the cost of asking again next month is the search rather than the footage. It has a free tier and paid tiers, and the allowances live on its pricing page rather than being repeated here.
The cost that never appears on an invoice
Whatever you buy, someone opens the results and decides. Retrieval hands back candidates, and candidates include near misses: a range that matches the words you typed but not the thing you meant, or a moment that is related in a way only a person would accept. Empty results cost more than that, because no result does not tell you whether the footage lacks the moment or your question was too narrow, and the usual response is to rewrite and search again. Whether that review time outweighs the subscription depends on how many searches you run and whose hour it is.
If you build it instead
The do-it-yourself route is transcription, some form of embedding, a vector store, and the code holding them together. The per-hour API charges are the visible part and usually the smaller one, since what you have really bought is a pipeline you now maintain. the line items for a thousand hours are worth reading before anyone estimates this, and should-i-build-a-video-rag-pipeline-or-use-mcp takes the buy-versus-build version of the same question.
When you should not pay anything for this
If your library is a few dozen videos you shot yourself in the last year, you are the index. A folder per shoot and a text search over transcripts you already have will reach most moments. The threshold is not hours of footage. It is whether the person who knows the footage is still the person doing the searching, and that usually stops being true through headcount rather than volume.
What to work out before you ask for a quote
Count the hours you would load in the first month, count the searches you expect in a normal week, and name who reviews the results. Large archive and rare questions means you want a model that charges for footage once and does not punish you for asking later. Small archive and constant questions means the per-search line is the one to negotiate. And if the person asking the questions is the person who shot the footage, the honest answer is that you are not in this market yet.
FAQ
Is it cheaper to pay someone to log our footage instead?
It depends on whether logging is a backlog or a habit. A one-time pass over an archive by a freelancer is a fixed cost you can quote and compare directly against per-hour indexing. Logging every new video forever is a recurring salary line, and it degrades the moment that person leaves, because the value sits in their judgment about what was worth writing down.
There is also a difference in what you get. Human logs answer the questions the logger anticipated. Retrieval answers questions nobody wrote down, which matters when the request is "the part where someone mentions the migration" two years later.
Do I pay again every time I search the same video?
In most pricing models, yes for the search and no for the video. Indexing is generally a one-time charge per hour of footage, and searching is either metered per query or capped by a tier allowance, so the second question about the same video costs a search and nothing else.
Watch for models where reprocessing happens per query rather than per upload, because your bill then scales with curiosity instead of with archive size.
Why do vendors charge per hour of footage rather than per search?
Because processing footage is the part with a hard compute floor. An hour of video costs a predictable amount to run through indexing regardless of who asks anything afterward, so that cost is easy to price and easy to pass on.
Search is cheaper per unit and far less predictable, which is why it more often shows up as an allowance inside a tier than as a line item. The practical consequence is that archive size, not team activity, tends to set the floor on what you spend.
Is there a free way to search my own video?
Yes, if you accept working from words rather than pictures. Free or low-cost transcription plus any text search over the resulting files will find anything that was said out loud, which covers a large share of real requests in interview and course footage.
What that route cannot do is find what was only shown: a shot of a product on a table, a slide on screen, someone laughing. Those need something looking at the frames, and that is the point where free options run out.