Veo 3 API key: what it takes to call Veo 3 programmatically

Published 2026-09-16

Veo 3 is Google’s model, so a direct key comes from Google. The alternative is an aggregator key that reaches Veo 3 alongside other models through one interface. This page covers what changes after you have either one.

The constraint nobody mentions until you hit it

Veo 3 renders exactly 8 seconds. Duration is not a range you tune — it is a fixed literal in the schema:

durationSec: z.literal(8).default(8)

Pass anything else and the request fails validation before it leaves your process. There is no three-second option and therefore no cheaper short clip. If your pipeline needs variable lengths, that decision has to happen before you pick Veo 3, not after.

What a call costs

Through Genace: 100 credits at 1080p, 50 credits at 720p. That is $1.00 and $0.50 at the Enterprise pack rate, working out to $0.125 per second of finished 1080p video. Full breakdown in Veo 3 API pricing.

Google sets its own direct pricing, which we do not reproduce here — it is theirs to change and a stale figure would be worse than none.

Using the key

export GENACE_API_KEY=sk_xxx

curl -X POST https://genace.ai/api/v1/video/generations \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $GENACE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"veo3","prompt":"a corgi astronaut drifting past a station window"}'

Note "veo3" — no hyphen. veo-3 is the single most common typo and returns 400 UNKNOWN_MODEL.

The response is 202 Accepted with a job id, not a video. Renders take minutes; see calling a video generation API without blocking your agent for the four ways to collect the result.

Verifying the key costs nothing

curl https://genace.ai/api/v1/models -H "Authorization: Bearer $GENACE_API_KEY"

Authenticated, but free and outside quota. A 200 means the key is live.

Which path

Direct from Google gives you their full surface and support. One key across models makes sense when you expect to compare Veo 3 against Kling or Seedance, or when something autonomous holds the key and you want a balance that can reach zero. The tradeoffs are laid out in how to get an AI video API key.