Pricing

API access requires an active Standard or Pro subscription. On top of that, work is billed per job against your Cinevva credit balance.

100 credits = $1.00, the same credits the Cinevva web tools use. An API key and the browser tool draw on one balance.

Subscription

The API is not available on the free plan. A key created on a free account authenticates correctly but every /v1 call returns 402 with code subscription_required until a subscription is active.

Check your own status any time with GET /v1/account, which reports the plan, its status, and whether it is set to cancel at period end. A pipeline that watches cancel_at_period_end can warn you before access lapses instead of failing mid-batch.

Plans are managed at cinevva.com/pricing.

Per-operation cost

Operation	Credits	Approx. USD	Typical time
Rig, Fast engine	20	$0.20	15–30s
Rig, Pro engine	31	$0.31	up to 150s
Retarget, per clip	10	$0.10	a few seconds

For comparison, rigging the same character costs $0.25 at Tripo and around $1.00 at AutoRig.online, and neither includes the CC0 animation catalog.

Fast handles the large majority of models. Use Pro selectively on meshes where Fast fails rather than as a default; see engines for the fallback pattern that keeps costs near the Fast price.

A rig with two clips baked in is one rig plus two retargets. Retargeting in your own engine instead costs nothing — see below.

Retargeting

Applying an animation through the API is a server-side retarget, and it is billed as its own operation on top of the rig.

This is the one place where the API and the browser differ, so it is worth being precise. In the web tool and in Cinevva games, retargeting runs in the browser on your own machine, which costs us nothing and is therefore unmetered. An API caller has no browser in the loop: we run the retarget on our hardware and hand back a file with the motion already in it. That is real compute and it is charged.

Pass animation_url on POST /v1/rigs to bake a clip into the result. If you would rather not pay per clip, download the rigged character and the CC0 clips separately and retarget in your own engine — Unity, Unreal, Godot, and three.js all do this natively, and the animations guide shows how.

What is free

Browsing the catalogs. Listing clips (/v1/animations) and assets (/v1/assets) costs nothing, and the files themselves are served from our CDN under CC0. You are only charged when we do work on your model.

Polling. GET /v1/rigs/{id} costs nothing. It counts against your rate limit but not your balance.

Format and account lookups. /v1/formats and /v1/account are free.

Credits are spent by POST /v1/rigs — the rig itself, plus a retarget for each clip baked in.

When you are charged

Credits are reserved when a job is accepted, not when it completes. A request that is refused up front, with any 4xx, costs nothing.

If a job is accepted and then fails during processing, that is a refundable case. Refunds are not yet automatic through the API: email [email protected] with the rig ids and we will credit them back. We would rather say that plainly than imply an automation that does not exist.

Check headroom before a batch with GET /v1/account. Credits are reserved per job, so a batch that runs out mid-way leaves you with some rigs done and the rest failing on insufficient_credits.

Getting credits

Top up at cinevva.com/pricing. Credits bought outright do not expire. Credits included with a subscription plan expire on the plan's own schedule.

Higher volume

Above a few hundred rigs a day, get in touch. Sustained throughput at that level is worth planning capacity for rather than discovering the ceiling in production, and volume pricing is available.

Self-hosting

For studios that cannot send assets to a third-party service, an on-premise deployment is on the roadmap. The Fast engine runs on ordinary CPU hardware with no GPU requirement, which makes this genuinely practical rather than theoretical. If it would unblock you, tell us — customer demand is what will decide whether it ships.