Each second of Google’s Veo 2 AI video footage will cost 50 cents

Google's Veo 2 model was announced last December, and now we have an idea of what using it will cost. According to its pricing page: 50 cents per second of footage.

Veo 2 is presently limited to two-minute clips in up to 4K resolution — a fair sight more than the 20-second, 1080p clips generated by ChatGPT's Sora model. It's somewhat more difficult to compare the two on pricing as Sora uses a subscription-based approach. The staggering $200 ChatGPT Pro plan entitles a user to 500 videos per month, while the Plus plan caps things at 50 videos and hobbles the maximum quality and length to 720p and five seconds, respectively. Veo 2 users, meanwhile, just pay piecemeal whenever they choose.

Big-budget feature films cost many multiples of Veo's pricing per second to produce, but that's not really what the model is currently seeking or able to compete with. Google is already testing Veo 2 as a means to quickly generate backgrounds for YouTube Shorts through its Dream Screen feature. It (and Sora) are also likely to take a bite out of the stock footage industry, where high-quality clips can cost 100 times what a Veo 2 clip would. Of course, those clips are typically free of weird artifacts and mangled hands.