Vidu Q4 Preview Starts at $0.014. Or at $0.045.

The floor price depends on which wire you open. PR Newswire’s October 7 release, datelined Singapore at 14:00 ET, says Vidu Q4 Preview launch pricing starts at $0.014 per second. GlobeNewswire’s release the same day, datelined Beijing at 15:30 ET, says pricing starts at $0.045 per second of video at 540P and scales with resolution, up to $0.39 per second at 4K. Both pages say Shengshu Technology launched the preview on October 7. They do not say the same number.

A midpoint is not a SKU. If you are about to run a batch, the page that bills you outranks both wires. What these two documents are good for is the disagreement, and for the discount line that does not close it.

GlobeNewswire says image-to-video and reference-to-video generation with Q4 Preview is available at a 30 percent discount through November 30. Thirty percent off $0.045 is $0.0315. That is still not $0.014. The ratio of the two floors, $0.045 divided by $0.014, is about 3.2. A promotional discount printed on one wire does not turn that wire’s 540P start into the other wire’s start. Either the floors are different products, or one release is using a different baseline, or one of them is wrong. I cannot tell which from the pages I have. I can tell you not to quote a single “starts at” in a budget slide.

Unite.AI’s same-day write-up repeats the $0.014 figure and does not, in the text I used, repeat $0.045 or $0.39. The byline is Jonas Reeve, Cognitive AI and AGI AI Research Agent. I am treating that piece as a relay of the launch announcement and of documentation links, not as a bench the site ran.

We have already written the last AIGC acquisition that kept the apps separate. Adobe bought Topaz, and the apps stayed on their own shelves. We wrote a video-ad pipeline that should not be read as a one-day feature ship. Higgsfield, GPT-6 Astra, and the reshoot you still might need. Q4 Preview is a price-list problem sitting on top of a model preview. It is not those stories.

What both wires agree to call the thing

Both call it Vidu Q4 Preview, a public preview of a next flagship, available now, ahead of a full Q4. PR Newswire says it is the first public preview of the next-generation flagship model for expressive audio and video, with improvements in character performance, camera work, and visual effects. Those are company sentences. No clip was generated for this article.

PR Newswire is also the page that prints the reference caps in the lead cluster: up to 15 image references, up to 3 audio references, and 2K or 4K output with 10-bit color depth. Output options in the pricing paragraph span 540p, 720p, 1080p, 2K, and 4K. GlobeNewswire’s pricing sentence mentions 540P and 4K and does not, in the text I have, walk the steps between them. A five-rung ladder and a floor-plus-ceiling are different price cards. If 1080p is the rung you actually render, neither wire I read gives you that rung’s dollar figure. PR Newswire tells you the rung exists. GlobeNewswire tells you 540P starts at $0.045 and 4K goes to $0.39, on that document.

The 5x claim is only on the cheaper wire. PR Newswire says Q4 Preview enables up to five times as much output for the same budget under comparable output specifications and billing conditions. “Up to” and “comparable” are doing the work. Five times $0.014 is not a formula I can check against $0.045 without knowing which old rate they mean. The release does not print the old rate in the paragraphs I have.

GlobeNewswire’s extra commercial fact is the November 30 date, and it applies to image-to-video and reference-to-video, not to a vague “the model.” The release points at platform.vidu.com for availability. I did not complete a checkout there. The wire is the source of the $0.045 card. The platform is where that card can already have changed.

The API names are in a relay, not in the wires I read

Unite.AI says Vidu’s product page lists two modes. Image-to-Video animates a single uploaded image from a text prompt. Reference-to-Video combines one to 15 image references with zero to three audio references. On that page, as Unite describes it, Reference-to-Video runs 1 to 16 seconds and Image-to-Video runs 3 to 16 seconds. Highlights include a 4K maximum and a 16-second maximum. Output preserves the original aspect ratio of the upload. The scenarios named are AI series, advertising, social content, and cinematic production. I am not opening that product page in this piece. If the page and Unite disagree by the time you click, the page wins, and this paragraph becomes a timestamp.

The developer details are more specific, and they are also secondhand here. Unite says the image-to-video documentation lists the model as viduq4-preview at POST https://api.vidu.com/ent/v2/img2video. The endpoint takes one start-frame image in png, jpeg, jpg, or webp, up to 50MB. The prompt cap is 20,000 characters. Durations are 3 to 16 seconds, default 5. Resolutions run from 540p to 4K, default 720p. An audio parameter defaults to true, and the documentation is described as supporting audio-video synchronization and automatic camera switching. Reference-to-video is a different POST, https://api.vidu.com/ent/v2/reference2video, with one to 15 images and zero to three mp3 references of 3 to 12 seconds each.

Default 720p is the line I would tape above the price argument. PR Newswire’s floor does not say which resolution the $0.014 buys. GlobeNewswire’s floor is explicitly 540P. If the API default is 720p, a “starts at” that is silent on resolution is not the rate your first call will hit unless you set the field. One wire printed $0.014 without a resolution in the start sentence, and a wire that printed $0.045 next to 540P.

A 5-second default at $0.014 is $0.07. The same 5 seconds at $0.045 is $0.225. Sixteen seconds at the GlobeNewswire 4K top, $0.39, is $6.24. Those are multiplications of published rates, not invoices. They are why “per second” without a resolution and a duration is not a budget. A short-drama team generating tens of takes will feel the floor gap before they feel a demo reel. That is the production fact under the branding. It is also the fact neither wire calculates for you.

What the company says the preview is for, and what a creator quote cannot prove

PR Newswire aims the preview at independent creators, small studios, and production teams across narrative and commercial work. The reference list is the operational version of that aim: 15 images for characters, wardrobe, props, products, and environments in one setup, and up to three audio clips for voice consistency. Unite attributes a line to Yihang Luo, co-founder and CEO, from the launch announcement: advanced video models should prove themselves beyond carefully selected demos, and every efficiency gain should let a creator try one more shot or one more version. I did not pull the full announcement page he is quoted from beyond the two wires. The sentence matches the 5x claim’s intent. It does not identify which price card pays for the extra shot.

GlobeNewswire’s creator quote is a different kind of evidence. Youjieunknown, described as a video creator who has worked with the preview, talks about eyes and expressions carrying a pause with no dialogue, explosion light on surrounding buildings, smoke and dust, and Chinese text in frame that the creator compares to doing your own post-production titles. That is one person’s test, printed in the company’s wire. It is not a blind compare, and it is not a resolution. “On par with post-production visual effects work” is the creator’s bar for Chinese text, not a lab score. If your job is burned-in captions, that sentence is a reason to run your own still, at the resolution you will deliver, on the price card you were actually quoted. It is not a reason to skip the test because a wire said the light on the buildings looked real.

The about-blurb on GlobeNewswire says public reports show the company has raised nearly RMB 6 billion, about $890 million, since February 2026. That sits in the company description, not in a financing table with a lead investor and a date. February-to-October is a window. “Public reports” is an attribution inside a company bio. If you need the round, you need the round, not this sentence.

PR Newswire’s closer is the sentence that should sit under both price cards. Final pricing, supported resolutions, feature availability, and usage terms may vary by plan and region. Full pricing details and promotional terms are on the official Vidu site. A wire that says the number may vary by region is telling you the Singapore dateline and the Beijing dateline were never a promise of one global SKU. They still should not contradict each other by a factor of three without a footnote. They do. The footnote you have is “may vary,” which explains a regional gap and does not name the region that gets $0.014.

What I would put in the call before I spend the budget

Set the resolution on purpose. GlobeNewswire’s only explicit cheap rung is 540P at $0.045 before the 30 percent discount, and that discount runs through November 30 on image-to-video and reference-to-video. PR Newswire’s $0.014 start does not name the rung. Unite’s relay of the docs says the image-to-video default duration is 5 seconds and the default resolution is 720p, with audio on. If you call the endpoint and accept defaults, you are not necessarily buying the floor in either headline.

Cap the test. Fifteen reference images and a 20,000-character prompt are limits, not a suggestion to use the maximum on every take. A 50MB still is the upload cap in the relayed docs, not a quality target. Three mp3 references of 3 to 12 seconds each, on the reference-to-video endpoint as Unite describes it, is a voice-consistency tool. It is also three more files to get wrong. If the job is a product spin with no dialogue, you do not need the audio references to learn whether the $0.014 page and the $0.045 page are the same meter.

The preview is not the full model. Both the PR Newswire text and Unite say Q4 Preview ships so people can use it on real projects before the full Q4, and that feedback is supposed to shape the final release. A preview rate can move. A preview model name, viduq4-preview, is a hint that the string in your client should be pinned, not assumed to survive the non-preview launch.

Google’s earlier Nano Banana placement inside Docs was a distribution story, not a per-second card. This one is a per-second card with two floors. Until Vidu’s own pricing page shows one number next to one resolution, the honest line is the one in the title. It starts at $0.014. Or it starts at $0.045. Those were both printed on October 7. Only one of them can be the rate on the request you are about to send, and these wires will not tell you which.