The Free AI Video Map — Every Route That Survived the Great Shutdown, Ranked + Priced, With the License Traps in Red
The companion to the video. The 2025 'everything is free' era of AI video is dead — Sora was shut down entirely on April 26, 2026 (OpenAI's own help article), Grok Imagine went subscribers-only overnight in March, and Google moved free video out of the Gemini app. This map is everything that still works, verified against official docs and license files on August 9, 2026. PAGE 1 — THE COLLAPSE TIMELINE plus TIER 1, FREE TODAY: all 7 surviving free routes ranked (Google Flow's 50 credits/day no-card deal, Gemini's 10-free-Omni promo with its hard Aug 11 deadline, YouTube Create's built-in Omni Flash, Qwen Chat's no-watermark Wan generations, wan.video's daily check-in credits, Hailuo's shrinking trial that secretly runs the new MiniMax H3, and Kling — with the §4.6 contract trap flagged in red), each with limits, watermark status, and commercial-use verdict. PAGE 2 — TIER 2, THE CHEAP APIs: the price-per-second board (Veo 3.1 Lite $0.05/s · Grok $0.08/s · MiniMax H3 768p $0.08/s · H3 2K with native stereo audio $0.13/s — a 5-second 2K clip for $0.65) plus TIER 3, OWN IT FOREVER: the local open-weights table — Wan 2.2 (Apache 2.0, runs on 8GB VRAM via ComfyUI, THE PICK), LTX-2.3 (the only open model with synced audio), HunyuanVideo 1.5, Kandinsky 5.0 — with minimum hardware for each and the honest Apple Silicon reality check (official FP8 checkpoints crash on Metal; the workaround took 82 minutes for a 2-second clip on an M1 Max). PAGE 3 — THE LICENSE TRAPS: the territory ladder nobody reads (Wan's Apache 2.0 excludes nobody → Hunyuan's license grants the EU/UK/Korea nothing → MiniMax H3's Community License excludes the United States too — outputs included, quoted verbatim from the Hugging Face license file), Kling's free-tier commercial ban, LTX's $10M double-damages tripwire, the fake 'Wan 2.7' SEO ecosystem, and THE 10-SECOND TERRITORY CHECK that protects you before you build on any 'open' model. Independent map from Hyperautomation Labs.
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