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Vidu Q4 Preview launched with two different starting prices in two of Shengshu's own press releases

One release puts launch pricing at $0.014 per second, the other at $0.045 per second for 540p rising to $0.39 at 4K, and the advertised 30 percent discount does not bridge the gap.

By Daniel Ochoa · 9 October 2026

Shengshu Technology launched Vidu Q4 Preview on October 7, 2026, and the two press releases it put out that day do not agree on what the model costs. One states that launch pricing starts at $0.014 per second. The other states that pricing starts at $0.045 per second of video at 540p and scales up to $0.39 per second at 4K. The 30 percent promotional discount the company advertises alongside the launch does not reconcile those two numbers.

What actually shipped on October 7

Vidu Q4 Preview is the first public preview of Shengshu's next flagship model for video with native audio, released ahead of the full Q4 version so that creators apply it to real projects and feed the results back into the final build. It runs through Vidu's web product and its API platform, with output options spanning 540p, 720p, 1080p, 2K and 4K, and 10-bit color at the higher tiers. The reference workflow accepts up to 15 images to fix characters, wardrobe, props, products and environments inside one setup, plus up to three reference audio clips meant to keep a character's voice and emotional delivery consistent across a scene. Image-to-video and reference-to-video are the two modes described, and both carry the 30 percent discount through November 30.

The two price figures do not meet in the middle

Take 30 percent off the $0.045 per second 540p rate and you land at $0.0315, which is more than twice the $0.014 per second headline figure published the same day. Neither release explains the difference. The $0.014 announcement carries a line saying that final pricing, supported resolutions, feature availability and usage terms may vary by plan and region, which is the closest the launch material comes to acknowledging that the lowest number is conditional on something it does not name.

Per-second rates are also hard to compare across vendors that bill in credits or per finished clip. For a reference point on a model we track, here is what a 10-second 1080p generation from Seedance 2.5 costs across the platforms on our price radar.

A five times claim with nothing named on the other side

Shengshu says Q4 Preview delivers up to five times as much output for the same budget under comparable output specifications and billing conditions. The comparison model, resolution and duration are not identified, so the multiplier cannot be reproduced. Co-founder and CEO Yihang Luo is quoted saying that "Advanced video models should prove themselves beyond carefully selected demos," and the launch material then offers a creator testimonial about explosion lighting and Chinese text rendering rather than a scored result. Reported placements on Artificial Analysis's image-to-video leaderboard have Vidu Q4 Preview entering third with an Elo of 1,179, against 1,056 for the older Vidu Q3 Pro in nineteenth, but no benchmark number of any kind appears in Shengshu's own announcements.

Character performance is the hardest claim to check from a curated reel, which is why we score it on fixed prompts instead.

The discount window puts a clock on every cost comparison

Any cost math done this month rests on a promotion that expires November 30, and the full Q4 model it previews has no announced date. Until there is one published rate card instead of two starting prices, the cheapest honest statement about Vidu Q4 Preview is that it costs somewhere between $0.014 and $0.39 per second depending on resolution, plan, region and the calendar.

Sources: PR Newswire, GlobeNewswire.

Daniel Ochoa: Covers model launches, shutdowns and pricing changes as they happen. Reads deprecation notices for a living so you do not have to.