Fix your eye contact without signing up for a subscription

Why it's always a subscription

Eye contact correction didn't arrive as a product. It arrived as a feature inside editors that were already sold on monthly plans, and the pricing simply inherited that model. Subscriptions also make sense for the vendors: predictable revenue, and every additional AI feature increases the value of the same recurring fee.

The result is that the pricing reflects the suite's economics, not the cost of correcting your gaze.

What you're actually paying for

If you use one feature from a suite, most of your subscription is funding capability you never open — timelines, captions, avatars, dubbing, stock libraries, collaboration. That's not waste if you use them. It is if you don't.

A useful test: open your billing page and count the features you touched last month. If it's one, you're paying suite pricing for tool usage.

There is a second, quieter cost: the seat. Several of these plans are priced per person or per member, so a two-person team that wants one button ends up buying an entire editor twice.

The expiring-credit problem

Even inside subscriptions, most AI features are metered by credits — and most credit pools reset monthly. Record nothing in February and those credits are gone. This is the detail people most often miss when comparing plans, because it's rarely on the pricing page.

Credits that roll over, or don't expire at all, are worth materially more than the headline number suggests.

What pay-per-use actually exists today

It is worth being precise here, because "no subscription" gets used loosely in this category. Checked in August 2026, this is what the pay-per-use end of the market actually looks like — and, more usefully, where each option stops.

• Media.io — the closest thing to true pay-per-credit gaze correction, with free credits on signup and, in its own words, a fix costing as low as 1 credit with no subscription. The catch is decisive: it is a photo tool. Its own FAQ, asked what to use for video, points readers towards options like NVIDIA Broadcast rather than to itself.
• CapCut — free in the app, which is the honest floor if budget is the whole objection. Slow processing, uneven availability by region, and audio drifting out of sync after the re-encode come up often enough in user reports to be worth planning around.
• NVIDIA Broadcast — free and real-time, but it needs an RTX GPU and is built for live calls and streams, not for a file you have already recorded.
• Submagic — publishes API credit packs priced per minute, from $0.15/min down to $0.10/min at volume. Read the small print on its pricing page: those packs are recurring monthly charges added on top of a plan you have already bought, not credits you buy once.
• Descript, VEED, Captions, Kapwing — all monthly, with the correction metered out of an AI credit allowance that resets or caps.

Credits, minutes and videos are not the same unit

The hardest part of comparing these plans is that almost none of them price in the same unit. Descript's own pricing page lists a monthly AI credit allowance — 400 on Hobbyist, 800 on Creator, 1,500 on Business, at $16, $24 and $50 per person per month on annual billing. Submagic counts whole videos plus a separate small pool of AI credits: 15, 40 and up to 100 videos a month at $19, $39 and $69 per member on annual billing. Captions sells a single pooled credit balance shared across every generative feature. None of these translate cleanly into minutes of gaze corrected.

That is not necessarily a trick. Different AI features genuinely cost different amounts to run, and one pooled currency is a reasonable way to handle that. But it does mean you cannot answer the only question you actually have — what does it cost me to fix ten minutes of talking-head footage — from any of these pricing pages. You find out by spending.

The shared pool has a second effect that is easy to miss. Every credit spent on an avatar experiment, a generated B-roll clip or a translation is a credit no longer available for gaze correction, so the real cost per corrected minute depends on what else you happened to do that month.

Running the numbers on your own usage

Subscription value depends almost entirely on how evenly you use it. Two questions settle it:

• How many minutes of video did you actually correct in the last three months?
• How many of those months would you have paid the subscription and used none of it?
• Take that second answer and multiply it by the monthly price — that is what you paid for nothing.
• On a $24/month plan, two idle months in a quarter is $48, usually more than correcting the footage you did shoot would have cost.
• If the answer is zero and you record every month without fail, buy the subscription: it is very likely cheaper per minute.

What pay-as-you-go looks like

GazeFix is built around the opposite model: buy credits in packs, 1 credit corrects 1 minute, and credits never expire. There's no monthly floor, so a quiet month costs nothing, and a busy one costs exactly what you used.

That's not universally better — if you correct hours of video every month without fail, a subscription is likely cheaper per minute. It's better for uneven usage, which describes most people who aren't full-time video producers. GazeFix is live now — start with 1 free credit, no card required.

The honest limit of this model is that it only holds while the tool stays narrow. A single-purpose tool can price in the unit you care about — one minute of corrected video — precisely because nothing else is competing for the same credit. The moment it grows an avatar studio and a B-roll generator, the pooled-credit problem comes straight back.