# What does Twelve Labs cost? > We don't publish other companies' prices here, and a figure typed into an article ages badly, so the number has to come from Twelve Labs in writing… Canonical URL: https://vivu.ai/guide/what-does-twelve-labs-cost We don't publish other companies' prices here, and a figure typed into an article ages badly, so the number has to come from Twelve Labs in writing, on the day you are buying. The part you can settle before that conversation is the shape of the bill. Video indexing is priced off a small number of moving parts, and once you know which parts a vendor charges for, you can price anything in this category, including the products that only quote by email. ## The parts a video indexing bill is built from Four things tend to show up. The first is processing at ingest: something has to watch and listen to each hour of footage before any of it is searchable. The second is storage, both of the footage and of whatever index sits beside it, which keeps billing quietly for as long as the copy exists. The third is search, because asking questions is not always free, and on some products it is the line that grows fastest. The fourth is access, meaning seats or a plan tier that decides how many people are allowed to use the thing at all. Vendors bundle these differently, and that is the real reason two quotes are hard to lay side by side. One may fold search into a flat tier while another meters it. Until you know which, you are comparing rates that describe different work. ## "Per hour of video indexed" is a clean unit that hides two questions Per hour is the unit most people expect, and it is a fair one for the ingest line. What it leaves out is how many times an hour gets processed. Ask what a re-index costs, because footage gets reprocessed more often than budgets assume: a better model ships, your team starts asking a kind of question the first pass never covered, or you move products and start from zero. Ask as well whether the hourly figure covers both the spoken words and what is on screen, since a pass that only reads speech is priced against a different amount of work. The other half of that unit is on your side of the table. You pay for the hours you upload, including the dead air at the top of every interview and the takes you already rejected. A cull before ingest moves the bill more than any negotiation will. ## Search can be the line that surprises you A quick sweep and a slow pinpointing pass are not the same amount of compute, and products that meter search reflect that. In our own runs on Vivu's connector, one visual question asked in the broad mode came back as whole candidate files with no position inside them, while the precise mode returned the short stretches where the thing actually appeared with a line of reasoning on each. The first answers "is this in here anywhere". The second is the one you can hand to an editor. On [Vivu](https://vivu.ai/platform) those two are separate things to spend on, which is worth knowing before you model a year of daily use; there is a free tier and a paid tier, and the limits themselves live on the pricing page. ## Turning a quote into your own number To compare two offers, convert both into your workload: hours already shot that you would genuinely ingest, hours added per month, searches per person per week, and how many people need access. Then ask both vendors what a re-index costs and what leaving looks like. The variables behind those questions are laid out further in [what the licensing line actually depends on](https://vivu.ai/guide/what-are-the-typical-licensing-costs-for-video), and if you are weighing assembling the pipeline yourself, [the arithmetic on a thousand hours](https://vivu.ai/guide/how-much-does-it-cost-to-transcribe-and-index-1) spells out the cloud bills version. If the shortlist itself is still open, sorting candidates by which part of the job they replace does more for you than sorting by price, which is the approach in [the replacement-by-function view](https://vivu.ai/guide/what-are-competitors-to-twelve-labs-for-video-ai). ## When you shouldn't be pricing this at all If someone on the team can name the videos in your archive from memory, or the retrieval need shows up a few times a quarter, the honest answer is a naming convention and an afternoon of scrubbing. Paying for indexing starts to make sense when the same kind of question gets asked repeatedly by people who were not there when the footage was shot. And if what you need is a cut, captions, or generated footage, this is the wrong shelf entirely: indexing products find material, they do not produce it. ## Which side of the line you are on If you cannot yet write down the hours you would ingest and the number of searches a week, any quote you collect is a rate without a denominator, and it will look reasonable no matter what it says. Teams that can fill in those two numbers usually find the decision turns on the unit, not the rate. Teams that cannot are still deciding whether they have an archive or just a lot of files. ## FAQ ### How much does Twelve Labs API cost? Only the vendor can give you that number, and it should arrive in writing with the units named. Developer-facing pricing in this category is usually quoted per unit of processing, while packaged plans are quoted per seat or per tier, and the two are not convertible without knowing your monthly hours and query volume. Before you ask for a figure, decide which of the two you want quoted, otherwise you will get the one that flatters the product. ### Is it cheaper to build video search myself instead of buying it? It moves the cost rather than removing it. Assembling your own pipeline turns a licence line into engineering time, cloud processing, a vector store to maintain, and ownership of every re-index from then on. That trade works out when you already run data infrastructure and have someone whose job includes keeping it alive, and it works out badly when the pipeline becomes a side project for one person who later changes teams. ### Do I pay again to search the same footage next month? That depends on the model, and it is the single question most worth asking directly. Some products process each file once and then charge for queries or seats, others reprocess on some cadence, and storage of the footage and its index keeps billing in either case. Ask the vendor to describe what happens in month twelve to a file uploaded in month one. ### What is the cheapest way to find one old clip once? Do not buy anything. Ask the people who made the video, look in the folder where that project was delivered, and scrub the likely file at high speed. A one-off retrieval costs an hour of someone's attention, and no product beats that on price for a single job.