Captions AI Review

Captions is the editor to buy when you film yourself, talk to the camera and want the cut, captions, B-roll and music done in one pass on a phone. Max is the plan that makes sense for most creators, because the cheaper Basic tier leaves out AI Edit, Clips and the chat-based editor, which are the features people download the app for.

The real question is not which plan has which feature but how fast your editing habits drain the Max allowance, and that depends far more on which AI models you call than on how many videos you post.

This review prices every tier, converts the credit costs Captions publishes into dollars, and sets the result next to OpusClip, Submagic, Descript and HeyGen.

For the wider field, see our best AI video editors guide and the best AI tools for video creators roundup.

Toolradar data: among the 17 subtitles and captions tools on Toolradar as of October 2026, Captions is listed as an alternative to 4 other tools, twice the category median of 2, and 16 of the 17 tools offer a free plan, so a free tier is table stakes here rather than a selling point.

Captions is an AI video editor and generator for iOS, Android and the web, made by Mirage, a New York company. It started as an automatic captioning app and now sells itself as an editor that cuts footage the way a professional would.

The homepage claims 20 million current users, captions in more than 100 languages and over 100 caption styles; those are the vendor's figures.

The product has two halves. The editing half takes footage you recorded: AI Edit applies a chosen style that cuts scenes, overlays B-roll and adds music, Clips turns a long video into a batch of shorts, and the chat-based editor lets you request changes in plain language.

Eye contact correction, denoise, filler and pause removal, translation and Lipdub sit alongside. The generating half makes footage you never shot: AI Twins and AI actors, prompt to video, and B-roll from third-party models such as Veo 3.1, Kling, Sora 2 and Seedance 2.0.

Every generative action draws from one monthly pool of credits, which is why the pricing page reads like a credit menu.

You record in the in-app camera with its teleprompter or import a file, then either pick an AI Edit style or open the timeline and edit by hand. AI Edit costs 10 to 40 credits per run depending on length and model, and switching the clip style afterwards costs 1 credit.

The chat-based editor charges 2 credits per message plus 1 per action it takes, and any image, video or music it generates adds that model's own cost.

Generation is where the meter moves fast. Prompt to video costs 16 credits for every 6 seconds, a 4-second Veo 3.1 clip costs 64 credits, Kling 2.1 costs 140 credits per clip, and cheaper models such as Hailuo 2.3 Fast and Ray 2 Flash cost 8.

Images run 1 to 6 credits. Credits are spent even when you never export the project, according to the vendor's credits help article, so a long session of trial prompts costs the same as a finished video.

Unused credits roll over on Basic and above, capped at 3 times the monthly allowance. Two rules hurt: downgrading cuts your balance to the new plan's cap and forfeits the excess, and cancelling forfeits everything at the end of the billing period.

You cannot buy individual credits on Max; top-ups are limited to Frontier 4x and legacy Teams and Business accounts, so running dry mid-month means upgrading.

Captions prints four paid prices on its pricing page, checked October 2026, and labels them as monthly iOS plans in USD. Max gets 500 credits a month, Frontier 1,400, Frontier 2x 2,800 and Frontier 4x 5,600; Enterprise is a custom quote with bulk credit discounts and training data exclusion.

The vendor's subscriptions article adds two tiers the pricing page leaves out: Basic, formerly Pro, at $9.99 a month for 200 credits, and an Android-only Lite plan at $4.99 a month for manual editing. Free users get 60 to 200 lifetime credits that never refresh.

The per-credit price is flat across every paid tier. Divide each printed price by its credits and Basic, Max and all three Frontier tiers land at about 5 cents a credit. Frontier does not buy cheaper usage; it buys more of it plus the top model tier and faster generation.

The same help article says yearly plans are billed upfront at a discount over twelve monthly payments, but Captions does not print the yearly rate, so every figure on this page is monthly billing and compared with other vendors' monthly prices.

Three workloads show where each tier breaks, using the credit costs in the help center. A creator who runs one AI Edit a day at the top of the 10 to 40 credit range uses about 1,200 credits a month and needs Frontier; at the bottom of the range, the same habit fits in Max.

A brand making 30-second prompt-to-video ads spends 80 credits each, so Max covers 6 a month and Frontier 17. Someone who only needs captions and eye contact fixes on their own footage can stay on Basic, since those tools draw few or no generative credits.

On monthly billing against the field, Max costs less per month than OpusClip Pro, Submagic Pro and HeyGen Creator, and about the same as Descript Hobbyist; the table below has each rate. Each meters something different: OpusClip counts upload minutes, Submagic counts videos, Descript counts media hours plus AI credits, and HeyGen counts generation credits.

All four were read on the vendors' pricing pages in October 2026: OpusClip, Submagic, Descript and HeyGen.

Buy Captions Max if you are a solo creator, coach, real estate agent or small brand who films short talking-head videos on a phone and wants them finished without learning a timeline. It is the strongest phone-first editor at its price, because AI Edit, captions, eye contact correction and AI Twins come in one app and one bill.

Move to Frontier only after you have run out of Max credits two months in a row, since rollover already lets a quiet month fund a busy one.

Skip it in four cases. If your source is hour-long podcasts, our OpusClip review covers a clipper priced per upload minute with a scheduler. If you only need styled captions, the best AI subtitle generators guide lists cheaper options.

If you edit long episodes on a desktop, see the Descript review.

If you want presenter videos without filming at all, the HeyGen review and our best AI avatar generators list go deeper; for dubbed or lip-synced versions, compare the best AI lip sync tools and best AI dubbing tools.