Magic Hour Alternatives for Face and Character Swap

A 10-second video face swap on Magic Hour costs $0.60 from a credit pack, or $0.24 on the Creator plan billed yearly. Akool does the same swap for $0.35 on its Pro plan, and FaceFusion does it for nothing on your own Mac. For replacing the whole person rather than the face, Viggle’s API ($0.10), Wan 2.2 Animate and Swapjutsu are the alternatives to Magic Hour’s Character Replace.

Magic Hour sells two different swaps, and the alternatives differ for each. Face swap puts a new face on the person in a video and keeps their body, hair and clothes. Character Replace swaps the whole person for a character image and keeps the motion. Prices below are each vendor’s published rates, checked on October 25, 2026, for a 10-second clip. If you’re not sure which you need, start with face swap vs character swap.

What Magic Hour charges

Magic Hour bills everything in credits. Plans in US dollars:

Plan	Monthly	Billed yearly	Credits a month	Longest edge
Free	$0	$0	400 at sign-up, then 100 a day for up to 7 claims	576 px
Creator	$19	$12 a month	12,000	1024 px
Pro	$39	$25 a month	25,000	1472 px
Business	$99	$66 a month	70,000	4096 px

Credit packs run from $10 for 4,000 credits to $160 for 64,000. They never expire and remove the watermark.

• Video face swap costs 24 credits a second at 24 fps. Ten seconds is 240 credits: $0.60 from a $10 pack, $0.24 on Creator billed yearly, about $0.29 on the usage-based API. The free tool makes 3 swaps a day of clips up to 10 seconds at 480p, with a watermark.
• Character Replace costs 48 credits a second at 480p and 96 at 720p: $1.20 or $2.40 for 10 seconds from a pack. It can run on Wan Animate, Kling 3.0 or MiniMax H3; only MiniMax H3 takes clips up to 60 seconds, and Kling 3.0 replaces 3–10 seconds. Failed jobs are refunded.

One inconsistency to know about: the pricing page says Creator covers 1.7 hours of Character Replace a month, which matches 24 credits a second, not the 48 in Magic Hour’s API documentation.

Face swap alternatives

Tool	10-second face swap	Free tier	Where it runs
Magic Hour	$0.60 from a pack, $0.24 on Creator yearly	3 a day, 10 s, 480p, watermark	Browser, API
Akool	$0.35 on Pro yearly, $0.60 on Starter	30 s at 720p, full-screen watermark	Browser, API
Vidnoz	Not published	Daily free use, watermark until paid	Browser
FaceFusion	$0, your hardware	Free, OpenRAIL-AS licence	Mac (Core ML), Windows, Linux
Deep-Live-Cam	$0, your hardware	Free, AGPL-3.0	Mac (Core ML), Windows, Linux

Akool

Akool charges 10 credits per 10 seconds of video face swap. On Pro, $21 a month billed yearly for 600 credits, that is $0.35 for 10 seconds; on Starter, $12 a month billed yearly for 200 credits, $0.60. Paid plans take uploads of 5–15 minutes depending on the plan. The free plan allows 30 seconds at 720p with a full-screen watermark. It runs in the browser.

Vidnoz

Vidnoz’s face swap takes videos up to 50 minutes and offers free daily use, with “no watermarks” listed as a paid benefit. It doesn’t publish a rate per second, so it can’t be priced here.

FaceFusion

FaceFusion is the open-source face swapper most others are measured against. Version 3.9.1 came out on September 30, 2026. It installs on a Mac with Python through conda and runs on Apple silicon with its Core ML execution provider, so a swap costs nothing but your Mac’s time. Its licence is OpenRAIL-AS, which allows use with behavioural restrictions rather than being fully permissive.

Deep-Live-Cam

Deep-Live-Cam swaps a face in real time from a webcam or a video, from one source image. It supports Apple silicon through Core ML and is licensed AGPL-3.0. A paid prebuilt version with a Mac build was released on October 22, 2026; the open-source one stays free.

Whatever tool you use, swap faces only with the consent of the people involved; most of these services forbid swapping someone without it in their terms.

Character swap alternatives

Replacing the whole person is a heavier job, and the tools are different.

• Viggle charges $0.01 per second of driving video through its API, $0.10 for 10 seconds, the cheapest rate published. Its app plans start at $7.99 a month billed yearly; free videos carry a watermark. See Viggle alternatives.
• Higgsfield Recast does a full-body character swap in the browser but publishes no price per clip and has no API. See Higgsfield Recast alternatives.
• Wan 2.2 Animate (Apache 2.0) is the open model behind several of these tools. Its replace mode is free on your own NVIDIA GPU and $0.50 for 10 seconds at 720p on Replicate.
• Swapjutsu, below, does the work on a Mac.

Swapjutsu, on a Mac

Swapjutsu is a free, open-source (MIT) Mac app from the makers of this site for Character Replace’s job: the whole person, not only the face. The analysis runs on the Mac and costs nothing: cuts, a mask per person, tracking, pose, depth and the control video. The render goes either to Seedance 2.5 through Comfy, about $1.71 for a 10-second 480p draft without a watermark, or to Wan 2.2 Animate on your own ComfyUI, for nothing. Files stay on your disk, and an MCP server lets Claude Code or another agent run swaps within a daily budget. The walkthrough is in how to swap a character in a video.

What Swapjutsu does not do

• It doesn’t do face-only swaps. For a face, FaceFusion or Magic Hour’s face swap is cheaper and quicker.
• It runs only on Apple silicon Macs with macOS 15 or later; there is no web or Windows version.
• Rendering needs a Comfy account with credits or your own ComfyUI machine with a capable GPU.
• A 480p Seedance draft costs more than Magic Hour’s 480p Character Replace ($1.71 against $1.20 for 10 seconds).
• Preparing a clip takes about 3–5 seconds per second of video on an idle M4.

Which to pick

• Cheapest hosted face swap: Magic Hour on Creator billed yearly, or Akool Pro.
• Free face swap on a Mac: FaceFusion, or Deep-Live-Cam for live video.
• Whole-character swap with a published price: Magic Hour Character Replace, or Viggle’s API for the lowest rate.
• Whole-character swap on a Mac, with files on your disk: Swapjutsu.