Google has dropped the price of Veo 3.1 Fast in the Gemini API today — between 14 and 33 percent, depending on resolution and length. The move comes a week after Google introduced Veo 3.1 Lite as the cheapest model in its video family, and it lands at an interesting moment: OpenAI is shutting Sora down this very week.
What changes
Veo 3.1 Fast stays Google’s workhorse model for fast video generation. With today’s pricing update, the per-second cost of 720p video drops noticeably, with 1080p savings slightly smaller but still double-digit. For teams building high-throughput video pipelines, the economics shift meaningfully — an 8-second clip now costs less than the proverbial cup of coffee people keep reaching for in these pricing debates.
The cut stacks on top of the Veo 3.1 Lite launch from March 31. Lite starts at $0.05 per second for 720p and $0.08 for 1080p — less than half of what Fast cost before today. With Fast now cheaper and Lite already on the shelf, Google has a proper two-tier setup for the first time: Lite for volume, Fast for quality at a reduced price.
Why today, not next week
The timing is no accident. OpenAI announced in late March that Sora is getting shut down — the WSJ cited roughly a million dollars a day in infrastructure costs and a troubled Disney deal. Google is now stepping into the vacuum with a very clean message: ‘Our video models don’t get turned off, they get cheaper.’ For developers who had built workflows around Sora, that’s a direct offer to switch.
It’s also notable that Google is pushing Veo primarily through the Gemini API rather than a standalone consumer product. That model is harder to unwind because every API customer creates a dependency — unlike Sora, whose users mostly came in through the web interface and where a shutdown was ‘easy’.
Takeaway
Two video pricing rounds inside ten days isn’t coincidence, it’s strategy: Google wants to build the same momentum in video that OpenAI held in text models for a long time. If you’re currently picking a video architecture, today is a good day to redo the math — at current prices, Veo 3.1 Fast is close enough to batch-job economics that you can run workloads you previously would have reserved for lite models only.
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