Veo 3.1 (Quality) vs Veo 3.1 Fast

What each one accepts

Rates and clip costs

Charged from a prepaid USD balance, no taxes added. A failed generation is $0.

Quality and Fast belong to one Google model family. In Kadraris each returns 8 seconds of video, horizontal or vertical, at 720p, 1080p or 4K. Quality is tuned for the best picture, Fast for price and speed, and at 720p or 1080p one Quality clip costs about as much as seven from Fast. My routine: work out the prompt in Fast, then send only the final version to Quality.

When to pick Veo 3.1 (Quality)

• Ad finals that the public will actually see.
• Scenes carried by light and texture, such as music video shots.
• Opening on a still from your shoot, when that clip is the centrepiece.
• Single hero shots, where the price gap hardly matters.

When to pick Veo 3.1 Fast

• Rough passes over a prompt while the idea is still moving.
• 9:16 Reels and Shorts that people watch on a phone anyway.
• Product clips where a packshot tells the model what the item looks like.
• Cheaper 4K: even at that size Fast undercuts Quality's 1080p clip.

Differences you will notice

• Price. Veo 3.1 (Quality) costs from $2.53 per video and Veo 3.1 Fast from $0.354 per video; neither bills per second. At 720p and 1080p Quality is about 7.1x Fast.
• 4K step. Going to 4K multiplies Quality's rate by about 1.5 and Fast's by about 4.6, so at 4K the tiers are only about 2.3x apart.
• Images. Both accept up to 3. Quality reads them as frames; Fast can read them as frames or as a guide to how a person or product should look.
• Shared. 8 s, 16:9 and 9:16, 4,000-character prompts, the same price at 720p and 1080p, no audio switch or audio surcharge in the form.

How to decide

• Still testing, or watched on phones: Fast.
• Going out to the public and the picture is the point: Quality.

Pick 1080p over 720p in both, since it costs the same. Fast 4K is what I use when footage will be cropped later or projected large. In my tests through another API with shorter 4-second clips, Fast scored 8.0/10 (coffee 8.5, tram 7.5, 52-54 s per clip) and Quality 8.0/10 (coffee 8.0, Polish sentence 8.0, 59-68 s). Each prompt got a single take, which is too little to call Fast the better-looking tier; it only suggests that simple shots do not lose as much quality as the price gap implies. All three Veo tiers are covered in the Veo 3.1 pricing guide.

Questions

Will a Fast prompt look the same in Quality?

The fields are the same, so the prompt transfers directly. If Fast used your images as appearance references, check the result, because Quality reads images as frames.

Is Fast 4K worth it over Quality 1080p?

If you need the pixels, yes: it is the cheaper of the two and gives the higher resolution.

What is the longest single clip?

Eight seconds in both tiers. For a longer take, cut several clips together or use Seedance 2.5, which goes up to 30 s.

Samples from the makers

These clips and images come from the vendors, not from my runs.