If you want to use one of the big Chinese AI video generators from Singapore or Malaysia, the licence is not your problem and the sign-up is not your problem. The checkout is. Two of the four open-weight video models carve out Western jurisdictions — a developer in Frankfurt, London or Seoul is excluded from Tencent's Hunyuan without asking — and not one excludes this region. Meanwhile ByteDance's flagship video model is served to this part of the world from a data centre in Johor.
That is the inverted geography most comparison pages miss, because they are ranking the models on how good the videos look. This guide is about the steps before that: signing up, paying, and working out what a clip actually costs once you have picked a resolution. It walks through those steps in the order you meet them, across the nine vendors our Chinese AI video model comparison tracks.
The email address is enough
The fear most people arrive with is that these services need a mainland phone number or a Chinese ID. For most of them, on the international route, they do not. Kling's own developer quick-start tells you to log in with your email, and its international API lives at api-singapore.klingai.com — the documentation says in as many words that the endpoint is for users whose servers are outside China. Kling's consumer terms are governed by the laws of Singapore.
Kling is not unusual. Four of the nine vendors are domiciled in Singapore or have chosen Singapore law and arbitration. ByteDance sells internationally through BytePlus Pte Ltd, Kling contracts under Singapore law, and MiniMax and PixVerse are both Singapore companies. Alibaba runs its model platform in six regions, one of them Singapore — and its pricing tables state, repeatedly, that certain models carry a free quota available only in Singapore.
"Domiciled" is not the same as "run from", and one detail makes the point. BytePlus is a Singapore company, but its published region for the Seedance video models is Johor Bahru, across the causeway. The company is here; the machines are in Malaysia.
Two gaps we could not close, so we are not going to paper over them. For ByteDance's domestic 即梦 app, the claim that it needs a +86 number is an inference from the sign-up flow rather than anything ByteDance states. And for Tencent's Hunyuan video service, we could not confirm from the outside whether an overseas account can buy it at all.
The till is where it stops
Sign-up usually works. Paying is where people get stuck, and the problem is different depending on which platform you use.
Zhipu, whose CogVideoX models are on this list, runs two platforms. On the mainland one, its own recharge agreement says top-ups go through third-party payment providers and names them: Alipay and WeChat Pay, in renminbi. A Singaporean can register there and cannot pay.
The international platform, z.ai, takes cards — and then its help page says this, which is the most useful single sentence in the whole exercise:
"When using a credit card to recharge, please ensure that you are not using 3DS verification. 3DS verification is not supported in our platform at this moment."
3DS is the extra confirmation step — a one-time code or a banking-app prompt — that card issuers use for online payments. It is effectively standard on consumer cards issued in Singapore and Malaysia. So the obstacle is not your passport; it is the card in your wallet.
ByteDance has a smaller hurdle of its own. Before BytePlus switches on its Seedance video models for you, your account needs a balance above USD 30.
The cheapest route and the API route are different products
Kling is the clearest example of how different the two routes — API and consumer — can be. Its developer API is sold in prepaid resource packages, not pay-as-you-go: the smallest standard package on its own pricing page is USD 700 for 5,000 units, valid for 180 days, with no rollover or extension. A unit costs USD 0.14. If you want to call Kling from code, that is the entry ticket, and it expires.
The consumer subscription is a different animal. Kling's consumer plans include a Standard subscription at USD 8.80 a month for 660 credits and top-up packs from USD 5.00 for 330 credits that last two years. One rule is important for budgeting: failed generations do not consume credits.
So "how much does Kling cost" has two honest answers that differ by two orders of magnitude, and which one applies depends entirely on whether you are clicking a button or writing a program.
The price you were quoted is the cheapest row
Every per-second price on a video vendor's page is a row in a table, and the headline figure is almost always the cheapest row. On Kling, the table for its 2.6 model has a dash in the cell for 720p with native audio: asking for sound forces you up to 1080p, which takes the rate from USD 0.042 to USD 0.14 a second — more than triple. Audio is not an add-on; it is a different row.
Zhipu is the one flat-rate vendor of the nine. CogVideoX-3 is priced per video — one yuan on the mainland platform, USD 0.20 on the international one — and neither resolution nor duration is priced separately. Everyone else scales with resolution, length, or both.
The practical rule is to fix your resolution and your need for sound before you compare anything. A comparison done on each vendor's headline figure compares nine different products.
One generation is ten or fifteen seconds, not two minutes
The single most common disappointment is length. A single generation on these models runs to a fixed set of short durations or a range capped around ten to fifteen seconds; anything longer is stitched from several generations. We have covered the stitching problem in detail for one model in how to make MiniMax videos longer than fifteen seconds, and the wider landscape in our guide to image, video and voice models. The vendors do not agree on the shape of the limit. Some offer a fixed menu of lengths, some a free range, and some a range written as "3~15s". A "15-second" model on one site is not necessarily comparable to another.
The licence excludes Frankfurt, not Johor
Four of these models also ship as open weights: the trained model itself, published for anyone to download and run on their own hardware, under a licence. Those licences are where the geography flips.
- Tencent Hunyuan grants its licence worldwide, excluding the European Union, the United Kingdom and South Korea, and adds a threshold for services with more than 100 million monthly active users.
- MiniMax H3 excludes the same three and the United States.
- CogVideoX is licensed worldwide.
- Wan is plain Apache 2.0, with no territorial carve-out at all.
Two of the four carve out Western jurisdictions. None excludes Singapore, Malaysia or anywhere else in ASEAN. That is what the licence text says, read on the dates below; it is not a statement that any particular use of what you generate is permitted, and if you are making something to sell, the terms you signed with the vendor are the ones to read.
The prices, domiciles, regions and licence terms here were read on each vendor's own published pages on 25 and 26 September 2026, and they describe published list prices only; enterprise agreements and promotions are invisible from outside. When we re-checked 31 of the stored figures in our comparison tool against vendors' current pages, 26 matched exactly. This is a check of our own data, not an audit of the vendors. The single most useful pages to read yourself are Kling's international API notice and z.ai's payment FAQ. Video pricing moves faster than almost anything else we track, and every figure here belongs to that week in September; by the time you read this, at least one of these checkouts will have changed.
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