Video generation APIs price out by the second: Veo 3.1 and Sora 2 Pro compared
Video generation APIs bill by the second of generated footage, not by the request, and the price gap between tiers is wide. Google publishes Veo 3.1 at $0.40 per second, Veo 3.1 Fast at $0.10 or $0.12, and Veo 3.1 Lite at $0.05. A one-minute 1080p clip on the standard tier costs $24, while the Lite tier costs $3 - the same clip, eight times cheaper.
OpenAI's Sora 2 Pro lists $0.30 per second at 720p, $0.50 at 1024p, and $0.70 at 1080p, with batch pricing at 50 percent off. The Sora consumer site closed in April 2026 and OpenAI plans to discontinue the Sora API on September 24 2026, so any long-lived product built on it has a hard migration deadline.
The practical calculation for a real workload: decide the target resolution, multiply seconds by the tier price, then apply batch discounts when latency allows. Iterative workflows that generate many short candidates are far more expensive per usable minute than one carefully prompted take, because rejected candidates still bill.
Limitations: these are list prices collected on 2026-08-05 from provider API pages, per-second rates can change, and audio-included or higher-resolution variants may add cost. Verify the current page before budgeting a pipeline.
| Provider | Model | 720p | 1080p | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Veo 3.1 | $0.40 | $0.40 | Audio included; up to 4K | |
| Veo 3.1 Fast | $0.10 | $0.12 | Faster preview tier | |
| Veo 3.1 Lite | $0.05 | n/a | 720p only | |
| OpenAI | Sora 2 Pro | $0.30 | $0.70 | 1024p $0.50; batch 50% off |
Official per-second list prices from provider API pricing pages on 2026-08-05. OpenAI plans to discontinue the Sora API on 2026-09-24 and closed the consumer site in April 2026.