Veo 3.1

What Veo 3.1 costs

Veo 3.1 runs from $0.05 to $0.60 per second of video across three tiers. Lite is $0.05 at 720p and $0.08 at 1080p. Fast is $0.10 at 720p, $0.12 at 1080p and $0.30 at 4K. Standard is $0.40 at both 720p and 1080p, rising to $0.60 at 4K. Audio is included in the default price at every tier.

That is a twelve-fold spread between the cheapest and dearest price point within a single model family – the widest of any model in this database, and the reason Veo pricing confuses people. There is no single Veo price; there are seven, and which one you land on is a configuration choice rather than a vendor choice.

The tier choice matters more than the vendor choice

It is worth sitting with the arithmetic. Veo 3.1 Lite at 720p costs $0.05 per second. Veo 3.1 Standard at 4K costs $0.60. Same family, same provider, same API, twelve times apart.

Compare that with the gap between providers: Wan 2.5 at $0.05, Kling 2.5 Turbo Pro at $0.07, Sora 2 at $0.10. The entire competitive spread across vendors at the cheap end is 2x. The spread inside Veo alone is 12x. Teams routinely run vendor bake-offs to shave 30% off a rate and then default to Standard when Lite would have done, giving back ten times what the bake-off saved.

The discipline that follows is simple: pick the tier from the deliverable, not from the model list. Standard is not the real Veo and Lite is not a trial – they are three products at three prices, and most output does not need the top one.

Audio is included, which changes the comparison

Veo 3.1 prices video with audio as the default. That is not universal, and it matters when comparing rate cards, because a silent clip is not a finished deliverable. If a competing model produces video only, the honest comparison adds whatever your audio pass costs – a separate generation, a library licence, or someone time – to that model per-second rate before setting it beside Veo.

For dialogue and ambient-sound work in particular this can invert a comparison that looked settled on the headline number. It does not make Veo cheaper in the abstract; it makes the cheaper-looking alternatives less cheap than their rate card implies, and only for work that actually needs sound.

The only model here that reaches 4K

Veo 3.1 is the sole model in this database that generates 4K, at $0.30 per second on Fast and $0.60 on Standard. Sora 2 Pro stops at 1080p and charges $0.70 per second for it – more than Veo 4K Standard rate.

That makes the 4K decision unusually simple, because there is no second option to weigh. If the deliverable is 4K and upscaling is not acceptable, Veo 3.1 is the model. The remaining choice is Fast at $0.30 against Standard at $0.60, which is a 2x decision inside one family rather than a cross-vendor evaluation.

Veo 3 and Veo 2 have already been shut down

Google documentation lists both Veo 3 (veo-3.0-generate-001) and Veo 2 (veo-2.0-generate-001) as deprecated, with a shutdown date of 30 June 2026 – a date that has already passed. Anything still pointing at those model IDs is calling an endpoint that no longer serves.

This is the practical reason to care about model strings in a codebase. Veo 2 was $0.35 per second flat and Veo 3 Standard was $0.40, so moving to Veo 3.1 Standard at $0.40 is cost-neutral from Veo 3 and a modest increase from Veo 2 – but the migration is not optional and the deadline is behind us. If you inherited a pipeline written against Veo 3, that is the first thing to check.

A note on the preview model IDs

The current Veo 3.1 model strings – veo-3.1-generate-preview, veo-3.1-fast-generate-preview and veo-3.1-lite-generate-preview – all carry a preview suffix. Preview endpoints are conventionally subject to change on shorter notice than generally available ones, and the Veo 3 shutdown above is a live demonstration that Google does retire video model IDs on a schedule. Pin the model string in configuration rather than scattering it through your code, and treat the endpoint as something you will have to change again.

What a project costs in practice

The clip table above prices one successful generation, which is the optimistic case. Three to ten attempts per usable shot is the normal range for generative video, so multiply by your real acceptance rate before budgeting.

At Lite 720p and five attempts per keeper, an accepted ten-second shot costs $2.50. The same shot generated end to end on Standard 4K costs $30. Both numbers are real; which one you pay is decided by the tier field in your request, not by anything about the footage.