Hailuo, Pika and Luma: The Free Tiers That Weren't There

Our 7-tool free-tier test has a split personality. Three tools generated real clips — the head-to-head is in the same Short made in 5 AI video tools. This article is the other four: famous names that appear in every "best free AI video generator" list and gave us, between them, zero seconds of video. Each failed at a different stage — before sign-in, after sign-in, at the credit counter, and at the pricing page.

Hailuo AI (MiniMax) — the door that wouldn't open

Hailuo has no scores in our test, because we never got inside. On October 31, "Continue with Google" for our first account completed on Google's side every time — account chooser, MiniMax-AI consent screen — and Hailuo rejected it on return with "Login failed, please try again": four chooser attempts plus a fresh sign-in, via both the homepage modal and the login page. The email-code fallback failed too: Hailuo replied that the email is not registered and email sign-up is not supported.

Late that night we tried a second, separate Google account. Google's side completed in full again, including the phone approval — and Hailuo rejected that login as well, twice. To be precise: this documents our access failure, from our browser, on October 31 – November 1. Hailuo may work fine from a different device or network, and we claim nothing about its output quality. But a free tier you cannot reliably reach is not one a creator can plan a posting schedule around. Result: zero generations, no scores, not ranked.

Runway — the free credits that never arrived

Runway let us in; it never gave us anything to spend. The account was created on October 31 via Google sign-in — "Mohin — Personal · Free". Runway's own pricing and help pages advertise 125 one-time free credits that never expire, with a note to "allow up to a few hours" if they don't appear immediately. Ours never appeared: the balance showed 0 credits at signup, 0 about twenty minutes later, and still 0 when we rechecked after midnight on November 1 — in both the header balance and Plan & Billing ("0 one-time Free plan credits"). A welcome email arrived; the credits didn't.

What makes this sting is the one genuinely good finding. Runway's Terms of Use (updated October 23, 2026, §4.4) do not restrict commercial use of outputs — the most creator-friendly terms of any tool we checked, in a test where most other free tiers barred commercial use outright. If the credits ever land, we will run the identical test prompt there and update both this article and the main test with real numbers. Until then: documented, not ranked — and no claims about Runway's actual output.

Pika — a free plan with 0 in it

Pika's failure is the quietest: there is a free plan, and you can open an account on it. It currently lists 0 monthly video credits — so generating a video is not possible on it without buying a credit pack. There was nothing to measure. A free plan that contains no credits is a signup page, not a tier. Documented, not ranked.

Luma — the free plan that was removed

Luma Dream Machine's failure happened before we even arrived. Its official pricing page no longer lists a free plan at all; paid tiers start at $30/month, as documented in our Article 1 research. Older "best free" lists still rank it as free, which tells you when they were written. We did not test Luma, because there was no free tier left to test. Documented, not ranked.

What "free" turned out to mean

Across seven tools, the word "free" meant four different things. A daily refill: Google Flow's 50 credits a day — the only genuinely daily-usable free tier we found, covered in our main test. A monthly taster: Kling's 66 credits a month at 50 credits a clip — roughly one clip a month, as our Kling beginner's guide breaks down. A signup-credit taster: PixVerse's 60 signup credits plus 30 a day — whose daily grant cannot buy one 38-credit clip, as our PixVerse free-plan guide shows. And the fourth meaning, in four flavours: nothing at all. The tasters at least produced a clip you could judge.

(Both images here come from tools that did generate. The four above produced no frames to show — which is, in one sentence, the whole article.)

The checklist we now run before calling a tool "free"

Every dead end above broke a different assumption, so the assumptions became a checklist. Before a tool counts as "free" in our comparisons, it has to pass four questions:

• Can we actually sign in? An account existing is not the same as an account opening. (Hailuo failed here twice, with Google's side completing perfectly.)
• Do the credits actually land? An advertised allowance is a promise, not a balance; we read the number inside the account, then re-read it later. (Runway's 125 were still 0 on every recheck.)
• Can the balance buy one whole clip? Credits that can't purchase a single generation at usable settings are decoration. (Pika's 0 is the extreme case; PixVerse's daily 30 against a 38-credit clip is the quieter one.)
• What do the terms actually allow? Watermark burned in? Commercial use barred? A clip you may not publish on a monetised channel is not a free clip — and the one tool with genuinely open terms is the one whose credits never showed up.

None of this requires insider knowledge — just twenty minutes, a notes log, and refusing to copy a free-tier claim from another listicle. Free tiers change quietly and often; Luma's disappeared between list seasons. If any of these four changes — credits landing, a sign-in fixed, a free plan restored — we retest with the same prompt and update this page.

Testing note: Written from our hands-on attempts on October 31 and November 1, 2026. Hailuo AI was tried with two separate Google accounts (Google-side sign-in completed in full both times, including phone approval on the second; Hailuo rejected it every time, and the email-code fallback failed). Runway's balance was rechecked repeatedly, including after midnight on November 1 — 0 credits at every check, against 125 one-time credits advertised on Runway's own pages. Pika's 0 monthly free credits and Luma's removed free plan (paid from $30/month) are as listed on their official pricing pages when checked. These four tools produced zero generations between them, so nothing here claims anything about output quality. Total spent: $0; no payment details entered anywhere. Figures are as shown on those dates and can change. This post contains no affiliate links.