Veo 3.1 API Cost: Get a Key in 5 Minutes and Pay Per Video, Not Per Second

Get a Veo 3.1 API key in 5 minutes

There is no application form, waitlist, or Google Cloud project setup. The whole flow is: sign in, create a key, load credits, call the endpoint.

1. 1

   Sign in with Google

   Create a VEO3 Gen account with Google OAuth — no credit card required at this step. This is the account your API keys and credit balance hang off.
2. 2

   Create an API key on the API page

   Open the API dashboard and generate a key. Copy it immediately and store it server-side — treat it like a password, never in frontend code or a public repo.
3. 3

   Add credits that match your volume

   Grab a one-time pack from the pricing page — $9.99 buys 120 credits, enough for 12 Fast videos or 40 Lite videos — or pick a monthly plan if you generate continuously (full plan table below).
4. 4

   Call the endpoint with a Bearer token

   Authentication is a plain HTTP header — no OAuth dance, no service-account JSON:

   curl -X POST https://api.veo3gen.app/v1/generate \
     -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{"prompt": "A cat playing piano, close-up shot"}'

5. 5

   Pick a model per request and watch your credit spend

   Choose Lite for cheap drafts, Fast for production volume, Quality for hero shots. For the full onboarding walkthrough — endpoints, model names, request parameters, and code in more languages — see the companion guide, Veo 3.1 API access for developers, and the API docs.

Veo 3.1 API cost per video: the full credit table

Every generation is priced in credits, and a credit costs between $0.055 (Basic monthly plan) and $0.083 (smallest one-time pack). Here is what an 8-second video with audio costs on each Veo 3.1 model and resolution:

Veo 3.1 API cost vs Google's per-second pricing

Google sells Veo 3.1 through the Gemini API and Vertex AI at $0.75 per second of output as of 2026 — the same rate on both surfaces, with default limits around 10 requests per minute and a Google Cloud project to configure. Per-video credit pricing changes the math substantially:

At production volume the gap compounds: a thousand 8-second Fast videos costs roughly $550–$830 in credits versus about $6,000 at $0.75/second — around 85–90% less for the same Veo 3.1 model family. And because failed generations refund automatically, retries do not silently pad the bill.

Which credit plan fits your API volume

One-time packs suit testing and bursty workloads; monthly plans lower the per-credit price for steady pipelines. All credits are valid for at least 30 days from purchase (see Terms).

A practical pattern for keeping API costs down: iterate on prompts with 4-second Lite drafts (about ten cents each), then spend Fast or Quality credits only on the final render. Teams that adopt draft-then-upgrade typically cut generation spend by more than half compared to rendering everything at final quality.

Keep your key safe and your costs predictable

Because the key is a plain Bearer token, anyone who has it can spend your credits. Keep it in server-side environment variables, never in client bundles or repositories, and rotate it from the API dashboard if it ever leaks. On the cost side, deductions happen per generation and failures refund automatically, so your balance maps one-to-one to delivered videos — no per-second meter running during retries.