Opus Clip credits expire 60 days after you get them on a monthly plan. That part its help centre states consistently. What happens to those credits the moment you cancel is a different story: two Opus Clip help pages give directly opposite answers, and the one you land on decides whether you think you keep a month of rollover or lose it.
Disclosure: I run ScaleReach, which competes with Opus Clip. There is no affiliate relationship and I earn nothing if you subscribe to either product. This post is a documentation audit, not a hands-on billing test — every quote below comes from a page Opus Clip controls, read on 2026-09-24, and where its pages conflict I say so rather than picking the answer that flatters us.
The 60-second verdict
Monthly plans: credits last 60 days, so you effectively get one month of rollover. Consistent across every page.
Yearly plans: credits are valid 12 months, but Opus Clip’s own pages disagree on whether the full year arrives upfront or in twelve monthly grants.
If you cancel: one page says remaining credits die at the end of your billing cycle, another says they keep their original expiry date even if that falls later. These cannot both be true.
Bottom line: the expiry rules are knowable and mostly reasonable. The documentation is not consistent enough to plan a budget on, and the single place it contradicts itself hardest is cancellation — the exact moment money is at stake. Screenshot your balance before you touch the subscription page.
What is an Opus Clip credit?
A credit is one minute of the source video you import, not one clip you get out. Opus Clip’s credits article states it plainly: “processing clips will cost 1 credit per minute of the original video imported.”
- A 30-minute video costs 30 credits, regardless of how many clips it produces.
- Credits are charged at import, before you know whether the output is usable.
- Posting to X costs an extra 1 credit per clip published, on top of the processing cost.
- The processing-timeframe slider bills only the range you select, so you can import a 3-hour stream and pay for 20 minutes of it.
That last point is genuinely useful and under-advertised. If you already know which 20 minutes matter, dragging the slider is the single largest saving available on any credit-metered tool.
How I checked this
Six pages on help.opus.pro, the public pricing page, and the Terms of Service, all read on 2026-09-24. Nothing here is sourced from another blog post or a comparison article, because the last time we trusted a secondhand Opus Clip number we published a wrong one and had to rewrite a verdict.
What I did not do: buy a yearly plan, cancel a live paid subscription, or let credits sit unused past day 60. So I can tell you exactly what Opus Clip’s documentation claims, and I can show you where it contradicts itself. I cannot tell you which behaviour the billing system actually enforces when the docs disagree. Treat the contradictions as “ask support before you commit”, not as “the bad one is what happens”.
Do Opus Clip credits expire?
Yes. Monthly credits expire after 60 days; yearly credits are valid for 12 months. Both figures are consistent across the three Opus Clip pages that state them.
| Plan type | Stated validity | Practical effect |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | 60 days from grant | One month of rollover, then the older batch expires |
| Yearly | 12 months | Full year of validity, arrival mechanism disputed (below) |
| Top-up credits (Agent Opus) | 12 months from purchase | Locked while unsubscribed, restored on resubscribe |
Sources: How Do Credits Work?, Where did my minutes go?, Agent Opus Credits FAQ, all read 2026-09-24.
The 60-day window is the number that matters day to day. It means a monthly Starter subscriber sitting on 150 unused credits has one month to spend them before the first batch lapses, not indefinite banking. If you clip in bursts rather than weekly, that window is the constraint to plan around.
What happens to your Opus Clip credits when you cancel?
This is where the documentation breaks. Two Opus Clip help pages answer the same question in opposite directions.
“Where did my minutes go?” says the credits die with the billing cycle:
“Furthermore, if you cancel your subscription, the remaining credits will expire at the end of your current billing cycle.”
“How Do Credits Work?” says the opposite, that they survive it:
“If you cancel your subscription, any remaining credits will expire at their original expiration date, even if that is after your billing cycle ends.”
Both were live on 2026-09-24. The Agent Opus Credits FAQ sides with the second, stating that remaining credits “keep their original expiry date, even if that falls after your billing cycle ends” — so it is two pages to one in favour of the friendlier rule.
The difference is not academic. Cancel on day 25 of a monthly cycle holding 200 credits, and under the first rule you have five days to spend them. Under the second you have 35. That is the gap between salvaging your balance and losing most of it, and Opus Clip publishes both answers.
Why this collides with the downgrade path
The contradiction would matter less if cancelling were always optional. It isn’t. Opus Clip’s Plans article carries this restriction:
“You can only downgrade a Pro Monthly account to a Starter plan, as they are both Monthly plan types. If you’d like to downgrade a Pro Yearly to a Starter plan, please first cancel your plan, and then resubscribe under a Starter plan.”
So a Pro Yearly subscriber who wants to move down to Starter is required to cancel. The one plan change that forces you through cancellation is the one where the credit rule is documented two contradictory ways. If you are on Pro Yearly and considering Starter, get the answer in writing from support before you cancel anything.
There is a second gate worth knowing: downgrading to the Free plan is blocked unless you hold fewer than 30 credits, it takes effect immediately rather than at cycle end, and you lose paid features on the spot. Opus Clip’s stated reason is that Free output is watermarked. The practical effect is that a user with a large unused balance cannot park on Free — the docs tell them to cancel instead.
Do yearly Opus Clip credits arrive upfront or monthly?
Opus Clip’s own pages disagree, and this is the second time this specific number has caused trouble.
“How Do Credits Work?” describes a lump sum:
“You’ll receive the full year’s worth of credits immediately upon purchase, and they will expire after 12 months.”
The Agent Opus Credits FAQ describes twelve monthly grants and explicitly rejects the lump-sum reading:
“Yearly plan credits are billed annually, but they arrive monthly at the same rate as the monthly plan. The yearly figure shown on the plan card, for example 3,600 credits a year on Pro, is the sum of those monthly grants, not a single balance released up front. Unused credits roll over for 2 months.”
Part of the explanation is product scoping: the first page documents OpusClip, the second documents Agent Opus. But that defence is weaker than it looks, because the same page states that “paid plan credits and top-up credits work in both Agent Opus and OpusClip. One balance, either product.” If Pro is one plan with one balance spanning both products, its yearly credits cannot both arrive upfront and arrive monthly.
We have to correct ourselves here too. Three ScaleReach pages describe Pro’s 3,600 yearly figure as “delivered upfront on yearly billing”. That matched Opus Clip’s billing documentation when we wrote it and still matches one of its pages, but Opus Clip now publishes a page saying the opposite in so many words. Rather than flip our claim to the other side and risk being wrong in a new direction, we have added a dated note to each of those pages recording that Opus Clip’s own documentation is split. Getting this number wrong once already forced a rewritten agency verdict in our Opus Clip review, and the lesson we took was to publish the uncertainty instead of resolving it by guess.
Either way, the 3,600 figure is an annual total, not a monthly allowance. Pro is 300 credits per month. Any comparison article showing Pro at 3,600 credits a month is off by 12x.
Refunding a project or deleting it: which gives your credits back?
Two adjacent actions, opposite financial outcomes, documented on two separate pages.
| Action | Credits returned? | Conditions |
|---|---|---|
| Refund this project | Yes | Pro users only, no clip downloaded yet, within 14 days of upload |
| Delete project | No | Stated as final, no recovery |
Refunding a Project describes the recovery path: Pro users who have not downloaded a clip can open the three-dot menu on the clip preview page, choose “Refund this project”, give feedback, and get the credits back to re-upload. Once you download any clip, the option is gone. The window is 14 days from the initial upload.
Deleting a project is the trap:
“when you delete a project, any credits that were allocated or used on that project will not be refunded or added back to your OpusClip account.”
So the instinct when a run comes back badly cropped or wrongly transcribed — delete it and try again — is the one that costs you the credits. Refund first, delete never. And note the plan gate: Starter subscribers get no project refund at all, which makes a bad run on Starter simply a loss.
Two credit returns are automatic and reliable by comparison: a failed X post refunds its credit, and deleting a scheduled X post before it fires refunds it too.
What does Opus Clip’s credit maths actually round to?
The rounding rule is asymmetric, and in the user’s favour on longer videos. From the credits article:
- Videos shorter than 1 minute round up (a 30-second clip costs 1 credit).
- Videos with partial minutes round down (a 4.5-minute video costs 4 credits).
Rounding down on partial minutes is unusual and worth a small amount of money over a year of uploads. It is also the kind of detail that no comparison table carries, which is a reasonable summary of this whole category: the per-minute headline is easy to compare, and everything that determines your actual bill is three clicks deeper.
One more clause from the Payments & Billing page belongs in any billing summary, because it is the only place credits can vanish with no notice period at all:
“If any suspicious payment activity is detected by either us or Stripe, due to potential fraud, we reserve the right to suspend your account and forfeit any existing credits.”
Can you get a refund on an Opus Clip subscription?
Not on a prorated basis. Opus Clip’s Terms of Service, read 2026-09-24, is unambiguous:
“you will not be eligible for a prorated refund of any portion of the subscription fee paid for the then-current subscription period… Paid Services cannot be terminated before the end of the period for which you have already paid, and except as expressly provided in this agreement, OPUSCLIP will not refund any fees that you have already paid.”
Note the distinction that trips people up. Opus Clip’s project refund returns credits to your balance. There is no matching subscription refund that returns money to your card. Cancelling stops the next charge; it does not claw back the current period. This is standard for the category — our Klap and Submagic reviews found comparable terms — but it is worth reading before you sign up on annual billing rather than after.
What Opus Clip costs to run at these allowances
Prices read off opus.pro/pricing on 2026-09-24, with credit allowances from the credits article the same day.
| Plan | Monthly price | Credits (source minutes) |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 60 per month |
| Starter | $15/mo | 150 per month |
| Pro | $29/mo | 300 per month, per pack |
| Business | Custom | Customised |
Two gaps in that table are deliberate. The pricing page rendered no annual figure on the day I read it, so no annual price is published here rather than estimated from a discount claim. And the plan names do not agree across Opus Clip’s own surfaces: the pricing page lists Free, Starter, Pro and Business, while the credits article’s allowance table lists Max, Pro, Starter and Enterprise with no Free row at all.
Adding capacity is also less flexible than it sounds. You cannot buy credits alone — Opus Clip’s answer is to buy another pack, which bundles 300 credits with 2 team seats, capped at 4 seats. Adding a pack restarts your billing cycle immediately and charges the full new amount.
How ScaleReach handles expiry differently
Since I am going to criticise a competitor’s expiry rules, here is ours, read from our own source code rather than our marketing pages.
ScaleReach minutes do not expire. There is no expiry timestamp enforced anywhere in the codebase, no cleanup job that reclaims minutes, and the monthly grant is additive: the new allowance is added to whatever is left rather than replacing it. Unused minutes accumulate indefinitely. Annual plans receive all twelve months upfront with no reset date, and since no expiry mechanism exists, that balance does not lapse. Cancelling does not touch the balance either — the plan drops to Free and accumulated minutes stay spendable under Free-plan limits, though no new minutes are granted.
Consumption works like Opus Clip’s in the parts that matter: minutes are billed on source duration, not output, and only the timeframe you select is charged. The number of clips returned and their lengths make no difference to the bill.
Where we are worse, plainly. Our rounding goes the other way — we round up to whole minutes on everything, so a 61-second video costs 2 minutes where Opus Clip’s partial-minute rule would charge 1. There is a 3-minute minimum on every upload. And the honest limitation on retention: generated clips and source media are hard-deleted 15 days after upload on Free and 180 days on paid plans, by a daily cleanup job. Opus Clip’s Pro plan gives 100GB of persistent storage with no MP4 export deadline, which is better than a 180-day clock if your archive matters. Our credits never expiring does not mean your clips never do.
On price, Starter is $10/month billed annually or $12 monthly for 200 source minutes, which works out to about $0.05 per source minute against $0.10 on Opus Clip Starter. Full breakdown in the Opus Clip alternatives comparison, and the volume maths in what it costs to clip 10 hours of podcast a month.
FAQ
Do Opus Clip credits expire?
Yes. On a monthly plan, credits expire 60 days after they are granted, which gives you one month of rollover before the oldest batch lapses. On a yearly plan, credits are valid for 12 months. Agent Opus top-up credits are separately valid for 12 months from purchase. All three figures are stated consistently across Opus Clip’s help centre and were verified on 2026-09-24. The 60-day monthly window is the one that constrains real usage, because it means unused credits cannot be banked indefinitely.
What happens to my Opus Clip credits if I cancel?
Opus Clip publishes two contradictory answers. Its “Where did my minutes go?” page says remaining credits expire at the end of your current billing cycle. Its “How Do Credits Work?” page says they expire at their original expiration date even if that is after the cycle ends, and the Agent Opus FAQ agrees with that second version. Cancelling mid-cycle with a large balance could therefore leave you days or weeks to spend it. Get confirmation from support in writing before cancelling, and screenshot your balance first.
Does Opus Clip roll over unused credits?
Effectively one month, on monthly plans. Because credits are valid for 60 days rather than 30, an unused batch survives into the following billing period and then expires. Opus Clip’s Agent Opus documentation describes yearly plan credits as rolling over for two months. This is a limited rollover, not indefinite banking: a subscriber who clips heavily one quarter and not at all the next will lose the idle quarter’s allowance rather than carry it forward.
Can I get a refund from Opus Clip?
Not for subscription fees on a prorated basis. Opus Clip’s Terms of Service state you are not eligible for a prorated refund of the current subscription period and that it will not refund fees already paid. Cancelling stops future charges only. Separately, Opus Clip does offer a project-level credit refund: Pro users who have not yet downloaded a clip can refund a project within 14 days and get the credits back. That returns credits to your balance, not money to your card.
How do I get my credits back after a bad Opus Clip run?
Use “Refund this project” from the three-dot menu on the clip preview page, not Delete. The refund option is available to Pro users within 14 days of upload, and only if you have not downloaded any clip from that project. Deleting the project instead is final: Opus Clip states that credits allocated or used on a deleted project are not refunded or added back. Starter subscribers have no project refund option, so a failed run on Starter is an unrecoverable cost.
Do ScaleReach minutes expire?
No. ScaleReach minutes have no expiry date and no reclaim job; the monthly allowance is added to your remaining balance rather than replacing it, so unused minutes accumulate. Annual plans receive twelve months of minutes upfront and they do not lapse. Cancelling leaves the accumulated balance spendable under Free-plan limits. Clips and source media are a separate matter and do expire: they are deleted 15 days after upload on Free and 180 days on paid plans.
The bottom line
The expiry rules themselves are fine. Sixty days on monthly credits is one month of rollover, which is more generous than tools that reset to zero every cycle, and rounding partial minutes down is a small quiet kindness. The problem is not the policy, it is that Opus Clip publishes more than one version of it. Cancellation gets two opposite answers, yearly credit delivery gets two opposite answers, plan names differ between the pricing page and the billing docs, and the free tier appears as 60 credits a month on one page and is absent from the allowance table on another.
That matters more than a documentation nitpick, because these are the pages an AI assistant reads when someone asks it whether Opus Clip credits expire. A tool whose own help centre argues with itself will get summarised inconsistently no matter how good the product is. It is also why this post cites a URL and a date for every claim and leaves the contradictions visible instead of resolving them.
The practical version is three lines. Screenshot your credit balance before you change anything on the subscription page. Use “Refund this project”, never Delete, when a run comes back wrong. And if you are on Pro Yearly and want to move down to Starter, get the credit-expiry answer from support in writing first, because that path forces you through the one door the documentation cannot agree about.
Last reviewed: September 2026 Next planned refresh: December 2026 Update hooks: whether Opus Clip reconciles the two cancellation statements in “Where did my minutes go?” and “How Do Credits Work?”; whether the yearly upfront-versus-monthly contradiction is resolved, which would let us correct the three ScaleReach pages carrying the 3,600-upfront claim; whether the pricing page begins rendering an annual figure; whether the plan names converge across the pricing page and the credits article; whether project refunds extend below Pro.
About the author
Hevin K runs ScaleReach, an AI clip maker that competes directly with Opus Clip. There is no affiliate relationship and no payment involved either way. Every Opus Clip claim here is quoted from a page Opus Clip controls, with the URL and the read date given, and where its pages contradict each other both versions are published rather than the one that suits us. This is a documentation audit, not a hands-on billing test: I did not purchase a yearly plan or cancel a live subscription, so I cannot report which behaviour the billing system enforces where the docs disagree.
