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TLDR
Higgsfield launched an API for its video and image generation models, making it possible to use a pay-per-usage billing instead of the previous $60/month subscription. A free Codeex skill automates API key setup, model selection, and cost tracking, allowing users to generate assets like YouTube thumbnails and UGC videos via natural language. The pay-per-usage model is cheaper than a subscription if you generate fewer than roughly 16-19 clips per month (depending on the plan).
Key points
Higgsfield released an API that supports pay-per-usage billing instead of fixed monthly subscriptions.
A free Codeex skill simplifies connecting the Higgsfield API and managing video/image generation.
The skill can automatically poll for completion, download MP4s, and show per-generation costs.
Higgsfield API launch includes a 7-day promotion with up to 50% off selected models and $15 free credits.
Breaking even between pay-per-usage and subscription depends on generating fewer than 16-19 monthly clips (Plus plan).
Tools mentioned
Techniques
- pay-per-usage API billing
- polling for generation completion
- natural language prompt for video generation
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Transcript (captions)
One of the great things about Codeex is that right inside of it, it can make images for you. As you can see right here, I gave it these three images and I said, "Hey, I need a YouTube thumbnail."
I described what I want and then I got it right here. But if I asked it to turn this into an animated video, it wouldn't be able to do it with its native capabilities. It would have to find some
other form. It would have to build code like here. It wants to use hyperframes. So, typically what you do is you'd connect it to something like Higsfield that has a bunch of video and image
models like Cance 2.5 and all these other ones like Cling and Omniflash and Miniax. The problem with Higsfield was that it was way more expensive because you had to get on a subscription. If we
look at the monthly, if you wanted to use Cedance 2.5, you had to be on a 60 bucks a month plan and you still had a limited number of credits. But Higfield just actually dropped an API which means
that you can actually just pay per usage. Meaning you can connect codeex to Higsfield API and then you're not actually paying every single month. You're only paying for the times that
you actually make requests. So today I'm just going to show you real quick how easy this is to set up. So let's get right into it. So this is a completely separate account. What you're going to
do is you're going to go to Google and you're going to type in Higsfield API and then you're pretty much just going to click on this first link right here and it's going to take you to this API
dashboard where you'll be able to create your own key and create your own account. And when you sign up, you're going to get a ton of discounts because they just dropped this which is 15% off
sale models up to 50% off your favorites and you get 15 bucks right away in your account to play with. So create an account and then when you're inside of that it's going to look like this. What
you're going to want to do is you're going to go to either the quick start on this right hand side and you can copy this prompt if you want, but you don't have to. It's it's a lot easier than
that. But you do have to make an API key. So you'll click on create API key. You'll type in a name. So I'll just call this one demo and you'll create your key. And then all you have to do is copy
this key right here and then hop into Codex and I'll show you what to do next. Real quick before we hop into CEX, I just wanted to show you guys how to make sure you take full advantage of this
launch because this is a 7-day limited offer. So, these things up here that we see, 15% off all sale models. That is just when you sign up, you'll already have that discount. In order to get up
to 50% off your picks, you have to come into the pricing section and it says choose three models with max discount up to 50% off. And then you would just come in here and choose two video models and
one image model. And you can see all of the prices over here. As you can see, with 30% off, we would be getting it for this price compared to the original current price. And then the last one is
getting 15 free dollars to play with on your account. All you have to do here is connect a credit card and use an eligible business domain email. And then once you've claimed all of that stuff,
you now have that API key. You now have everything set up and you can run 30 generations at a time. So let's hop back into codeex and I can show you how to get this all set up. So you're going to
open up a new chat and you're just going to say, "Hey, inside of myv file, can you just create me a placeholder for Higsfield API? I'm going to drop you in an Higsfield API key. And then you can
just figure out how that all works so we can start running some image and video generations. And then just shoot that off and it will tell you exactly where to paste in your key. You don't want to
paste it right in here into the chat thread. You want to paste it into thev file. So you can see I already have that in there. So it says, "Hey, that already exists. But if it doesn't, it'll give
you a placeholder." And then all you have to do is ask for the file path that you can actually open this up. So I could rightclick this, go to open with, and I can just open this with whatever I
want. I'll choose default app. That opens up my notes where I can go ahead and see right here it added Higsfield API key. And then you will just go ahead and paste in your API key right there.
And then make sure you save that before you close out of it. And then just go, okay, cool. I put in that API key. Can you see what models are available for me through that Higsfield API? And then
just go ahead and shoot off a test video generation where there is a man sitting at a laptop using Higsfield and using codecs to generate videos. But you guys won't have to worry about that at all
because I have this skill right here called Hicksfield API generations and it has all these defaults in here. It has all of the settings. It has all of the different things that you might need or
you would have your agent have to normally go out and do research on. Everything's right here. So basically all you have to do is you've put in your Higsfield API key into your and now you
can see it's basically going to use that whenever you need an image or a video and it knows exactly how to work with Higsfield API. It knows about all of the different functionality and options that
it has in there. And now it's just generating me a bunch of different images and videos that you can see right here on screen with just using natural language. So pretty cool stuff. If you
want to grab this skill, it's completely free in my free school community. The link for that is down in the description. Just head into the free school community. You're going to go to
classroom and click on all YouTube resources and there will be a huge database with a bunch of resources. You should be able to find it right in there. And that skill is also going to
tell you exactly how much each of your generations cost you so that you don't have to be constantly going back into your Higsfield dashboard to look at the analytics. You will just get that right
there in your chat thread. So, while that's running, I'll just go over here and show you real quick what actually this stuff can look like. So, we have Higfield API benchmark out of all of
these videos that I generated. So, I'll show you each one like how much it costed or sorry, cost. My goodness, how dare I? You can see that the total spend for these was $7.40 and we were using
models like Cance 2.5. And once again, this would have been only available to us on a 60 bucks a month plan. And then you're just sitting there paying 60 bucks a month even if you don't generate
anything that month. So anyways, we have some video outputs here. You can see this is Cance 2.5. This one has no audio, but you can generate these with audio as well. So that's a super super
clean shot. Same exact prompt went off to Cling 3.0. And this one has I don't know, those letters look a little bit different compared to that image, but they have similar sort of like
background. The letters in this one are also off. So it's really good to get in here and shoot off the same prompt to a bunch of different AI models and see which one comes back best. In this case,
Nova came through only as Nova in Cance 2.5. So in this case it was the best. But of course with CS2.5 you are going to be paying a little bit more but once again it's only pay per usage. So here
this one was 1.6 bucks. This one was only about 20 cents and this one was only about 50. But they also can generate sound. So let me play you guys a few examples of some UGC content and
we'll take a look at the cost as well. I used to skip breakfast. Now I grab Nova protein coffee. 20 gram of protein real coffee and I'm out the door. So, this was Cedance 2.5 and it was
$3.23. Here is Cling 3.0. >> I used to skip breakfast. Now I grab Nova protein coffee. 20 g of protein, real coffee, and I'm out the door.
>> And as far as realism, I think Cling 3.0 did a really, really good job here with this character, you know, selfie style UGC for only 60s. Whereas this one, you wouldn't say I don't know. It's like
it's not noticeably better as far as like makes a huge difference. But in general, I mean, Cedance 2.5 is in my opinion the leading video generation model right here. But we also have
Miniax, and this one was a$110. >> I used to skip breakfast. Now I grab Nova protein coffee. 20 grams of protein, real coffee. >> Anyways, I think that this one was
clearly the worst out of just these three very, very simple videos. But it's important, like I said, shoot off the same prompts with different models. See how the cost differs, see how the
quality differs, see what they're good at. because Cance 2.5 might be the best at like people and product shots, but maybe Miniax or Cling is better at different sort of like cartoon
animations or something like that. And then of course you can use codec image generation. GBT image 2.5 is really really good. It's probably my favorite, but there are also other image models
you can try out like Hicksfield Marketing Studio here or Grock Imagine 2.0, Soul 2.0. And these are obviously much cheaper than generating videos. But I did take this exact same prompt and
put it into codecs and this is what we got here. So, if you like this better, then maybe you want to just stick with GBD 2.5. And then you also have the benefit of this just counting towards
your codec subscription or your chatbt subscription rather than paying separately per usage for that. Anyways, hopping back here into codeex. What's cool about this is codeex will go ahead
and do all the research. So, you don't have to think about the API endpoints. You don't have to give it anything else. You just tell it to figure it all out and it will. And so that's why back in
here, you can copy this prompt if you want or you can just say like figure it out because you can see this prompt is literally pointing it to the actual Higsfield API documentation. You can see
it says your key authenticated successfully. The live catalog returned 76 endpoints. 18 are text to video, 44 are image to video, 11 are text to image, and plus there's a few other
routes. And it's going to use Cance 2.0 for this first run. The request was accepted with this ID. And now it's basically just going to keep polling on that request until the generation is
done. And polling just means it's going to check in and then if it's not done, it's going to wait and it's going to check in again. If it's not done, it's going to wait and it's going to keep
pulling or checking until that video is actually done. And then it will download the MP4 locally. And so while this is finishing up, let me just show you what else is available inside of the
Higsfield API. If you go to pricing right now, it says that you can get up to 50% off. And this is only for the next 7 days. So if you're watching this early, go here and you can choose two
video and one image models to get 50% off on. So you literally just come in here and it will say, "Hey, what are your models you want to choose?" I personally chose Cance 2.5 and Clink
3.0. And then for the image model, I chose the marketing studio image. But then you can just go ahead and look at all of the models in here and you can see the different modes that they run in
like standard or turbo or, you know, 4K, whatever it is. And you can see all of the information about all these different types of models and their pricing. And then the analytics will
basically just show you how much you've spent. Um, what is your request looking like, what are the models you like to use and things like that. So just a pretty little analytics dashboard for
you. But you can see we have this video back. Now, this is already looking a little bit weird with Cance 2.0 because the laptop is facing the wrong way, but let's give this a quick play.
Now, I'm really not quite sure if anybody uses a laptop like that, but either way, this was Cance 2.0 and there is a better model out there now. But what's important to realize is that the
model isn't just going to run perfectly for you. You have to be able to prompt it in the right way. And you will start to build skills around how you like to prompt image generations and video
generations. And that's where this gets really powerful is when you work in all of these different skills. And you can add things too like your brand guidelines or a consistent character
that you want to have. And then over time, your ability to just inside of codecs generate these different videos and image assets is going to get better and better. Now, I did want to end off
this video talking about is this actually cheaper? And the answer is yes and no. It all depends on the break even point because now that you're being charged per usage rather than based on
your credits that reset every month, there's a break even point. And if you're paying per usage to the point where you're going over that break even point, then this is probably where you'd
want to be on a subscription. But if you're only infrequently generating videos and images on a monthly basis and you're below that break even point, then it's much cheaper obviously to be on the
pay per usage billing. Especially when you're trying to figure out like what is your cadence, then starting with pay per usage is a lot safer than just committing to a monthly subscription.
And so I've run the math here and on the plus and ultra plans within Higsfield, this is what it would kind of look like as far as those break even points. So if you're on the plus monthly, it's about
fewer than 19 clips. And if you're on the plus annual, then it's roughly 16 clips. And if you're below that, then the API makes more sense. If you're on ultra, it looks like 50 on monthly or 39
on annual. So ultimately, these are the three kind of questions I wanted to answer here. If you're maxing out your subscription plan every single month consistently, then you probably just
want to stay on a subscription. If you're only generating things occasionally, like maybe some months you'll run, you know, 15 videos, some months you won't do any at all, then API
will win. And if you need programmatic workflows or you want to bake this API into your own, I don't know, your own website or SAS product or your own internal tools or whatever it is, then
the API is going to win there as well. So, it's always hard in the AI space or in the tech space to just come out of the gate and say, "Yes, this is objectively cheaper," or, "Yes, this is
objectively better." It's always very situational. So, hopefully this all kind of makes sense and you can kind of use this to figure out in your specific situation, what is probably the right
path for you. And what's really cool is when you get all that dialed in, you can do all this in bulk. So we've actually done things where we've generated assets for like our events or for you know ads
or whatever it is and we basically just use codeex or claw to help us brainstorm all the briefs and all the angles and then we just shoot off a bunch of workers to generate all those assets and
then you wake up and everything is done. So anyways guys that is going to do it for this one. I hope you enjoyed you learned something new and if you did please give it a like. It helps me out a
ton and as always I appreciate you guys making it to the end of the video and I'll see you on the next one. Thanks everyone.