How to Use Pika 2.5

Pika 2.5 is the model Pika’s own pricing page sells today. Most pages ranking for “how to use pika” are not Pika: pikaslabs.com, pikaais.com and pikartai.com borrow the old Pika Labs branding and official stills, and one runs its own sign-in page. The official entry points are pika.art/pricing and pika.art/faq.

This guide covers which official page to open, what each plan gives you, and what a clip costs.

Which site is actually Pika, and which model is current

Two official pages carry what you need, and they disagree. The pricing page is on Pika 2.5 and lists four plans. The FAQ still reads “Pika 2.2, our latest model” — an official page that has not been updated. Where they conflict, this guide follows the pricing page.

Pika’s FAQ describes a video generation platform and app built from Pikaffects, Pikascenes, image-to-video and text-to-video, running a model Pika trained from scratch in-house. It says nothing about the data used.

The Pika hub collects the model line; the Pika API guide covers the self-serve key and call sequence.

The four plans and their monthly credits

All figures come from pika.art/pricing, billed yearly.

One number is disputed by Pika itself: the FAQ gives Basic 150 credits a month, the pricing page 80. Paid figures match across both pages, so the free allowance is the one that drifted.

Choose the input type before you write a prompt

Pika 2.5 generates from text, from one still, or from footage you already own, and the input type sets the controls you get. Two other video models here live in the Veo hub and PixVerse hub.

Text-to-video and image-to-video

Text-to-video takes a prompt; image-to-video adds one still to animate. Both run at 480p, 720p or 1080p for 5 or 10 seconds, and free stops at 480p.

Pikaffects: the button below the prompt bar

Pika’s FAQ gives the click path: click the “Pikaffects” button below the prompt bar, choose an effect, upload an image. The pricing matrix lists Pikaffects as image-to-video and as video-to-video, so one effect serves a still or footage you already have; free includes the image-to-video form only.

Pikaframes: two stills and up to 25 seconds

Pikaframes is the keyframe feature: upload a first and a last frame as stills and the model generates the motion between them. Only Pikaframes goes past 10 seconds — 5s, 10s, 10-15s, 15-20s, 20-25s — and it starts at Standard.

Worked example: two generations, start to finish

Both cases start at the cheapest setting that makes sense; only the prompt line is yours to write.

Case 1: animate a still at 480p for 12 credits

Input: image-to-video
Model: Pika 2.5
Resolution: 480p
Length: 5 seconds
Cost: 12 credits
Prompt: slow push in, coat fabric rippling in the wind, hair lifting, background bokeh holding steady, no camera shake

Twelve credits is the floor for image-to-video on Pika 2.5 and the setting a free plan can afford most often. The same 5-second clip costs 20 credits at 720p and 40 at 1080p; doubling to 10 seconds doubles each.

Case 2: Pikaframes, first frame to last frame

Input: image-to-video (Pikaframes)
Model: Pika 2.5
Resolution: 480p
Length: 20-25 seconds
Cost: 60 credits
Prompt: hold the subject steady at both ends, let the crowd move through the frame in between

The same 25-second clip costs 100 credits at 720p and 200 at 1080p, because Pikaframes is billed per length step, not per second.

What one video actually costs

pika.art/pricing publishes a single credits matrix, and it is the only place these numbers exist.

Pikaformance is billed per second against the audio track, at 720p. Credits do not roll over month to month; extra credits bought on Standard, Pro and Fancy do, and the FAQ lists packs at $10, $20 and $30.

The free plan, commercial rights and watermarks

Commercial use is a paid-only right, and not at the first paid tier. Pika’s FAQ says Pro and Fancy allow commercial or non-commercial use, while Basic or Standard content cannot be used commercially, so the $8 Standard plan does not buy client work.

Watermarks follow the export route, not the plan. Pro and Fancy download watermark-free; videos shared directly from Pika carry a watermark on every tier.

The pricing page lists both under Basic too, but inclusion there is marked with icons rather than text, so the FAQ’s sentences stand.

Videos created after Pika’s terms update of 29 November 2024 may be selected for the Templates page, so Pika states your videos are not private.

What Pika does not publish

Several things you would want before committing a budget are absent. Pika 2.5’s architecture, parameter count and inference hardware are unpublished, and so is the time one generation takes. Training-data provenance is not detailed: Pika says only that the model was trained from scratch. Taxes, currencies and refunds are not published either. Paid tiers are described only as fast, faster and fastest, with no concurrency figures. The pages list no frame-rate control; 8-to-24-fps talk is from the Pika 1.0 era.

Frequently asked questions

What site is official? pika.art; the developer portal is dev.pika.art.

What does a first video cost? A 5-second 480p image-to-video clip costs 12 credits, so the free plan’s 80 monthly credits cover roughly six.

Which model should I name? Pika 2.5; the FAQ says 2.2, but the pricing page is on 2.5.

Can I use free output commercially? No. Commercial rights begin at Pro, and Standard does not include them.

Is a paid plan watermark-free? Downloads are, from Pro upward; videos shared from Pika carry a watermark on every tier.

Learn the loop once — input type, resolution, length, credits — and Pika stops behaving like a slot machine with a confusing name.

Published

Sep 14, 2026

Information verified

Sep 14, 2026

By

AI Tool Blog Editorial Team