Veo 3 cost calculator

How to price a Veo shot list

Four boxes, all of them on this page. Nothing is uploaded and no API key is involved — the rates are constants published below, each with the page it came from and the date it was read.

1. Pick the tier before you count anything. Standard, Fast and Lite are the same model family at $0.40, $0.10 and $0.05 a second at 720p. Nothing else on this page moves the invoice as far, so decide the delivery format first and the shot count second.
2. Count shots, then set the bin rate. Six shots at a 40% bin rate is ten takes, and takes are what you pay for. Continuity between shots is the usual reason a take is binned, which is why the reference-image box sits next to it.
3. Read the per-shot column, not the total. Cost per finished shot is the number you can carry into the next project. The total only tells you about this shot list; the per-shot figure tells you whether the tier is affordable at all.

What Veo costs per second, tier by tier

Google bills Veo 3.1 by the second, with audio included, on three tiers: Standard at $0.40 (720p and 1080p) and $0.60 (4K), Fast at $0.10 (720p), $0.12 (1080p) and $0.30 (4K), Lite at $0.05 (720p) and $0.08 (1080p) with no 4K output. There is no free allowance for Veo — the model is on the paid tier only. Read from Google's own pricing page on 4 September 2026.

Multiply by eight and the spread is the whole story of a Veo invoice:

Twelve times between the cheapest and the dearest second, for one model family. That ratio is why a Veo estimate that starts from the shot count is guesswork: the tier decides the invoice and the shot count only scales it. Replicate publishes no Veo rate at all as of the same date, so it is not in the table — an absence worth stating rather than filling in with someone's blog post.

Nobody publishes a price for "Veo 3" any more — here is what to quote instead

Worth being precise about, because it changes what you are allowed to quote. Google's model documentation still lists Veo 3 under stable status, so the name is not retired. But Google's pricing page carries no line item called Veo 3: the priced entries are Veo 3.1 Standard, Fast and Lite. Ask for "the Veo 3 per-second price" today and there are exactly three defensible answers, so this page prints all three rather than picking one and hoping:

• Google, by tier. $0.05 to $0.60 a second on Veo 3.1, depending on tier and resolution. This is the number to put in a budget if you are calling the Gemini API directly.
• A reseller, under the old name. fal.ai lists Veo 3 at $0.40 per second, one rate with no resolution tiers published. It is the only per-second figure we could verify that is still attached to the words "Veo 3".
• A hosted flat price. On Clize the model alias veo resolves to the upstream slug veo-3, and one clip is $0.48 whatever comes back.

Most of what else is in circulation traces back to the launch. Google's own announcement post, dated 17 July 2025, said Veo 3 would be priced at $0.75 per second for video and audio output — nearly double what the Standard tier charges today, and still quoted in roundups. Rate cards for this family have moved more than once, so check the date on any Veo figure before it reaches a budget. Every number on this page carries the page it came from and the day it was read.

Per second or per clip: which meter you are standing on

Per-second billing means length is a straight multiplier and the tier is a step function. Per-clip billing means neither one moves. Clize's hosted video is the second kind: $0.48 a clip, unchanged by the length that comes back, by the aspect ratio, and by how many reference images you attached. Six shots is $2.88 whether they land at three seconds or eight.

$ clize gen video "slow dolly across the workbench, morning light" --aspect 16:9
      📋 Quote about $0.48 (video). Add --confirm to generate.
      
      $ clize gen video "slow dolly across the workbench, morning light" --confirm --async
      # returns a job id straight away
      $ clize gen jobs          # what is still running
      $ clize gen status <id>   # picks a finished job up later and writes the file

Two things that flat price does not buy, written down here rather than left to be inferred. You cannot pin a resolution tier — hosted video goes through a provider, so $0.48 is a fixed price, not Standard-at-4K for a fraction of the money. And you cannot pre-approve a batch: there is no allowance that lets a run skip the flag. Every single render is quoted first and charged only when --confirm is present, which is exactly the property you want when the thing working through a shot list unattended is an agent rather than a person.

One honest correction while we are here, because it is the claim this page could have made and should not. Refunding a failed render is not a Clize differentiator against Google: Google's own pricing page says you are charged only when a video is successfully generated. Clize refunds at all three points where a job can die — the submission is refused, the submission comes back failed, or the background job is later polled and reports failure — and that matters for reconciliation, not for the comparison. What no vendor refunds, anywhere, is a take that renders perfectly and still does not make the cut. That is what the bin-rate box is for, and on a real shoot it is most of the money. The whole-shoot calculator works the same arithmetic across models other than Veo.

The limits that decide the bill before the rate card does

Eight seconds, maximum. Veo 3.1 returns at most eight seconds in one operation, so anything longer is several clips cut together and priced as several clips. Google lists 1080p and 4K as available at the eight-second length only, which quietly removes the obvious saving — you cannot buy a cheap four-second 4K take.

Two aspect ratios. 16:9 and 9:16. Decide which one the finished piece needs before the shot list is rendered; there is no crop that gets you the other for free, only a re-render at full price.

Three reference images. That is the model's own reference cap, not a plan limit, which is why it is the same number on Clize. Spend them on the things that break continuity: the first frame, the character, the location. On the CLI, --from-image and --ref land in one list, so a first frame is one of the three rather than a free extra. None of them change the quote. Stills work differently — the image models behind Nano Banana Pro pricing take far more.

Two days of hosting on Google's side, then it is gone. Google removes a generated video from its servers after two days, so whatever calls the API has to persist the file itself. Video is also a long-running operation on both sides: Google returns an operation you poll until done, and Clize returns a job id you pick up with clize gen status, which is the call that writes the file to disk. If you are driving this from an editor session that might not survive the render, running Veo from Claude Code walks through the reconnect path. Everything charged is on the record: clize gen list per asset, clize balance for the balance and its ledger, clize status for what the month has cost so far.

A watermark you do not get to turn off. Google states that videos created by Veo are watermarked with SynthID. That is a property of the model, not of the route you buy it through, so it applies to a $0.05 Lite second and a $0.48 hosted clip alike. Whether the output may be used commercially, and whether a credit is required, is set by the terms of whoever you buy from — read them; Agent Media is a delivery route, not a licence.

$ npm i -g @clize/clize && clize install
$ clize gen video "slow dolly across the workbench" --from-image frame1.png