Captions pricing (2026): Basic, Max and Frontier explained

You record short videos for your business, you want them captioned, and Captions' pricing page opens at $24.99 a month. That isn't the cheapest plan. Captions costs $0, $9.99, $24.99 or $69.99 and up a month. For talking-head videos with captions, a teleprompter and eye contact, the $9.99 Basic plan covers it.

Here you get every plan with its source, the features that tip you into Max, how credits run out and a coach's month priced three ways. We make CreateSocial, a competing tool, and it comes up near the end.

Captions plans and prices in October 2026

Captions has a free plan, three paid plans, an Android-only plan and Enterprise. Frontier comes in three sizes.

Checked against Captions' pricing page, help center and App Store listing on October 26, 2026. Prices are in US dollars.

Basic isn't on the pricing page at all, though it's the plan most solo creators need. Neither is Lite. You'll find both in the plans article, and Basic in the App Store too. The pricing page also carries a note: "Features and prices reflect iOS plans only." More on that below.

Seats depend on which help page you read. Captions' billing help says subscriptions "are intended for single users and cannot be shared." Its Mirage plans page lists two seats on Max, one admin plus one more, then three on Frontier, four on Frontier 2x and five on Frontier 4x. That page doesn't list Basic at all. If an assistant will edit with you, ask support which one applies before you pay.

Is the Captions app free? Yes, for basic edits

Yes. Captions has a free plan, and it exports basic edits without a watermark. You get a one-time pot of 60 to 200 credits that never refreshes, captions in one template called "Eclipse," and the basic tools: the camera, trim, zoom, sounds, media, voiceover, transitions and resizing. The pricing page's comparison lists captions in 100+ languages on Free, but no teleprompter.

The line sits at export. Use a paid feature in a project, such as caption styles, eye contact or background music, and Captions' export help says you'll be asked to subscribe before you can save it.

So the free plan answers one question. Do you like how Captions' captions look on your videos? Record one short, caption it in the free template and export it. It costs nothing. If you're also weighing CapCut, our roundup of CapCut alternatives covers the other editors.

Android works differently. There's a Lite plan at $4.99 a month that adds caption styles, dubbing, eye contact and denoise, but only on Android. The Android camera and teleprompter are in the same list but not marked as needing Lite. Sign in on an iPhone or the web and you need a separate Basic, Max or Frontier plan.

Captions Basic at $9.99 covers most talking-head videos

For one person talking to camera, Basic is the plan. It's the old Pro plan under a new name, at $9.99 a month with 200 credits that renew monthly, and it exports with no watermark.

Look at what's in it: the camera and teleprompter, the script generator, captions and dubbing, eye contact, denoise, censor, zoom, voiceover, title cards, text and trim. That's the whole kit for a talking-head short.

The teleprompter is part of the phone app's camera. Captions documents it for iPhone, and the Android plan list names it too. It scrolls continuously or scene by scene, and you can undo your last segment to retry a line. Captions' eye contact tips say to look as close to the lens as you can. Keep your script slightly above or beside the camera, not below it. Our guide to eye contact correction explains how the fix works and where it still falls down.

Basic is cheaper by the year. The App Store listing sells it at $64.99 a year. That's about $5.42 a month, 46% less than paying $9.99 twelve times.

Skip the weekly option, though. The same listing sells Basic at $5.99 a week. Over a year that averages about $26 a month, more than Max costs.

One thing Captions doesn't spell out is how many caption templates Basic gets. The pricing page compares Free (one template) with Max (100+), and Basic isn't on it. If one particular style is why you're buying, try it on Basic before you commit to a year.

Captions Max at $24.99: AI Edit, Clips and the watermark rule

Max is for letting Captions do the editing. It costs $24.99 a month for 500 credits. It adds the chat-based editor, AI Edit, Clips, AI actors, up to 30 AI Twins, two video generations at once and a choice of models for generated footage, sound effects and music.

AI Edit takes a raw clip and adds captions, transitions, B-roll, music and motion graphics in a style you pick. For best results, its help page asks for a video of 3 minutes or less with one person talking, so it suits shorts.

Here's the rule that costs people money. On Basic, a project that uses AI Edit, the chat editor (Captions calls it Co-Editor) or AI-generated images or video exports with a watermark. Captions' fix is to take those features out or upgrade to Max.

An App Store reviewer hit exactly this in May 2026. They subscribed to the $9.99 tier and found their edit still needed the higher one: "No part of the trial shows what goes with what tier." Captions replied that "AI Edit features require higher tier subscriptions."

So decide before you edit. A project that only uses captions, eye contact and trims exports clean on Basic. Tap AI Edit once and it becomes a Max project.

Clips is the other reason to buy Max. Upload a video of up to 3 hours or 10GB, or paste a YouTube link, and it returns a ranked batch of clips around 30 seconds long. The help page says "Up to 30+ clips." That's a lot of candidates to watch for one webinar.

CreateSocial's Find Clips takes the opposite view. It suggests up to five clips from a long video, each with a strength score, and never pads the list with weak moments. A suggestion can join a setup and its payoff from different parts of the talk. For what per-minute clipping costs elsewhere, see our Opus Clip pricing breakdown.

How Captions credits work and what uses them up

Credits pay for AI work, not for the app. Every AI feature "deducts usage from a customer's allocated credit limit," says Captions' credits page. Here's what the common jobs cost.

Captions says actual costs vary with video length and the model you pick. Captions, the teleprompter and eye contact don't appear on the table.

The rules around the meter:

• Paid plans refresh every month. The free plan's credits come once.
• Unused credits roll over on Basic and above, up to three times your monthly allowance.
• Downgrade and your balance drops to the new plan's cap. The rest is gone.
• Cancel and your credits disappear at the end of the billing period.
• You can't buy single credits. Run out and the answer is the next plan up. Only Frontier 4x and old Teams and Business accounts can top up.
• Credits are spent whether or not you export.

That last rule is the one to remember. A generated B-roll shot you throw away still costs its credits. If you're pricing Descript too, our Descript review shows where its credits go.

What a coach's month on Captions really costs

For most coaches it's $9.99 a month. The bill climbs only when you hand Captions the edit or ask it to generate footage.

Take a hypothetical business coach. They film three talking-head shorts a week on an iPhone, 60 to 90 seconds each, for Reels, TikTok and LinkedIn. That's 13 a month. They also post one 15-minute YouTube video a month.

The credit figures come from Captions' published rates. Two inputs are our assumptions: each AI Edit lands inside Captions' stated 10-to-40 range, and each short gets one generated B-roll shot. Captions says real costs move with video length and the model you pick.

Divide each plan by the 13 shorts. Basic works out to 77 cents a short, or about 42 cents on the yearly plan. Max is $1.92 and Frontier is $5.38. On Max, 13 AI Edits at 10 to 40 credits each use 130 to 520, so a heavy month runs past 500. Rollover cushions that. A month that still runs dry means upgrading.

The jump to Frontier comes from generated footage, not editing. Max can use Veo 3 too, but one 4-second Veo 3 shot costs 64 credits. Add one to each short and that's 832 credits before any AI Edit, well past Max's 500.

The YouTube video hits a different limit. Captions' help center caps same-language captions at 10 minutes on iPhone and desktop and 5 on Android, and translated captions at 5 minutes everywhere. The web walkthrough on the same page is tighter still: 60 seconds at most, vertical video only. So a 15-minute video goes in as two projects on the iPhone.

The last row is the one no Captions plan covers. Captions' export help ends with you saving the video "to your device." Deciding what to say, writing the LinkedIn post and scheduling every platform is still a job. A scheduler alone can cost more than Captions Max (our Hootsuite pricing breakdown shows one). That row is the job CreateSocial was built for. It gives you 80 personalized ideas a month from what you know, writes the LinkedIn post from each video, and posts everything for you once your accounts are connected. It's priced in the last section.

Is Captions cheaper on the web than in the App Store?

There's no public way to tell. Captions publishes its iOS prices and leaves the web price to checkout. Its plans article says that at checkout you may see your local currency, at a price "above or below the USD price." The same article says the plan screen appears once you generate or export a project. We couldn't see the web checkout price without an account, so we haven't listed it.

Where you pay changes more than the price:

• An App Store plan is tied to your Apple ID, and refunds go through Apple.
• A web plan is paid through Stripe and tied to the way you sign in. Monthly web plans are non-refundable.
• Lite works only on Android, so it won't follow you to a laptop.
• Deleting the app or your account doesn't cancel the plan. Cancel at least 24 hours before renewal.

Check the price on the checkout screen before you tap subscribe. If you want the yearly Basic, the App Store's $64.99 is the one figure you can see in advance.

Is Captions now Mirage? What the rebrand changed

The company is Mirage now. The app is still Captions. Mirage's about page puts it plainly: "Formerly known as Captions, we rebranded in 2025 to reflect our expanded mission and product suite." The App Store listing now reads "Built by Mirage." Besides the app, Mirage builds its own foundation models for generated talking video and the Mirage API.

The plans were renamed too. Pro became Basic and Scale became Frontier. Captions' plans article says the features and prices stayed the same and only the names changed. So an older review quoting "Captions Pro at $9.99" is describing today's Basic.

Two more changes touch billing. Mirage Studio has been merged into Captions, and its subscribers now sign in to Captions online. Customers on the old Teams and Business plans can add seats without the previous $40-a-seat charge.

Where Captions is strong, and the part its plans leave out

Captions is strong at the phone edit for one person talking to camera. The teleprompter, eye contact, noise removal and captions in 100+ languages sit in one phone app, and Basic gets you all of it for $9.99. It holds 4.7 out of 5 from 39K ratings on the App Store.

It also downloads your captions as an SRT file. If you want closed captions on YouTube, that file is what you upload. Our guide to open captions vs closed captions explains when you'd want each.

The edit is the cheap part of a coach's week, though. In my video on creating content without becoming a full-time creator, I split the work into preparation, environment and execution, and I put it this way: "Recording day shouldn't be thinking day." Preparation means 10 to 15 ideas, each a hook with three or four talking points, before the camera goes on.

Captions' plans price execution. Its Script Generator writes from the few sentences you type, so finding ten things worth saying this week is still on you. That's why Max is the wrong first upgrade for most coaches. AI Edit polishes a video you already knew how to make. Start on Basic, and pay for the edit only once you're posting every week. I go deeper on that in why recording day is not thinking day.

Where CreateSocial fits if you're pricing Captions

CreateSocial helps you build a personal brand that brings in clients, speaking gigs and customers, without content taking over your week. It learns what you know and runs the whole content week, video and written: ideas, scripts, posts, recording, editing, thumbnails and scheduling. Captions edits the video. CreateSocial covers the whole week, the edit included.

Here's that coach's month inside it:

• Monday starts with ideas, not a blank page. Add your website, past videos and posts, and client stories to your knowledge base. You get 80 personalized ideas a month, each with a hook and talking points or a full script. Trending Now adds what your niche is talking about every Monday, and "Ask me first" asks you a few questions so the script tells your real story.
• Record all three shorts in one sitting. Record at your desk or on the iPhone app. The teleprompter sits near your camera, scrolled by hand or at a pace you set, with the current talking point highlighted. Each answer is its own section with one-tap retakes, and Dual mode frames 16:9 and 9:16 in the same take.
• Edit by deleting words. Cut the video by editing its transcript. Remove Silences takes out the pauses in one click. Eye contact correction keeps your gaze on the viewer, and subtitles go on in 11 styles, drawn into the video. B-roll comes from a free stock video search.
• Get shorts from the long one. That 15-minute YouTube video goes through Find Clips, and every clip you keep becomes its own vertical video with subtitles. Each one follows your edit, so deleted words and removed silences stay out.
• Write the posts from the same recording. Each video becomes a LinkedIn post, an X thread, a blog post, an email to your list or a LinkedIn carousel exported as a PDF or PNG, in your voice. On weeks you don't film, CreateSocial writes them with no video at all.
• Thumbnail it and schedule it. You get three YouTube thumbnails at a time, made from your video and photos of you in your brand style. Then schedule to TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook and X with a caption written for each platform, and we post it for you once your accounts are connected.

Also in the one plan: competitor tracking, knowledge base imports from Notion and Google Drive, screen recording with your camera as a bubble, reaction videos in Layout or Stitch mode, virtual backgrounds with or without a real green screen, platform safe-zone guides for TikTok, Reels and Shorts, uploads of videos you already have, and an Analytics page with followers, views, likes, comments and shares for your connected TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts.

Captions is venture-backed. Index Ventures led its $60 million Series C in July 2024, at a $500 million valuation. In March 2026 Mirage added $75 million in growth financing from General Catalyst, for more than $175 million in total. I'm Ben Moore, and I built CreateSocial on my own, bootstrapped, here in Cincinnati, Ohio, so you talk to me directly. Feature requests come to me, and a lot of what customers ask for gets built. Before CreateSocial, my agency generated millions of followers and millions of dollars in revenue for its clients, and I've generated hundreds of millions of views.

CreateSocial costs $129 a month, or $99 a month billed annually, and the pricing page promises "No add-ons, no per-feature charges." That one plan covers the ideas, the recording, the edit, the written posts and the schedule. Start your free trial and record this week's three shorts from the ideas it gives you. Rather talk your content plan through first? Book a free strategy call with me.