Veo / Flow

Only one thing matters: whether you have a foreign Google account; the rest is solved with credits.

Of six common requests, two get a "no" - the country and the puppy homonym - while the app, free trial, Russian language, and Veo 3.1 are available.

Search volume — Wordstat, Russia region, 07.09.2026

Who it is for. For people making short videos with speech and sound for ads, social media, and presentations who do not want to assemble them from three services: Flow creates the frames, voices the lines, extends the clip, and stitches the scene together itself. And for people editing with words: the agent in the window recolors sixteen videos from day to night with one phrase, while every edit is saved as a separate version.

Who else. For people who already have a Google AI subscription for Gemini: Flow credits are included at no extra charge, 1,000 per month on Pro. And for people who need a model from the top five arenas: in September 2026, Gemini Omni Flash ranks in the top 5 of all four Artificial Analysis tables.

Who it is not for. For people in Russia without a foreign Google account: Russia is not on the list of 152 countries, the vendor redirects Russian addresses to a placeholder page, and it has not accepted Russian cards since 2022. And for people who need text in the frame or a long movie at one click: the model does not render text, clips last up to 10 seconds, and longer videos are assembled by extending them in parts.

A fit: section 3 will take you from entry to your first video. Choosing between Flow and Kling? The decision point is in section 7.

What vibecoding isStarting from scratch: how to set tasks for agents with no coding experience

Three steps: describe the scene, get a video with sound, edit it with words, and credits are charged for every step at the selected model's price.

Two models in one window. According to Help as of 09.07.2026, Flow has four video models: Veo 3.1 Lite, Veo 3.1 Fast, Veo 3.1 Quality, and Gemini Omni Flash 1.1. Omni is enabled by default; Google calls it "our newest video model" and compares it to Nano Banana, only for video: 4, 6, 8, and 10-second clips, 360p drafts at half price, and word-based editing of uploaded video for up to three consecutive turns. Veo 3.1 retains what Omni does not yet have: only it can extend an eight-second clip, and the vendor itself points to "Veo 3.1 lite" when you need a first and last frame.

How to order a video. Four inputs: text, first and last frame, references ("ingredients" in the vendor's terms: up to three images of a character, object, or style), and your own video for editing. Sound comes with the image: scene noise, music, and character lines written directly in the description. Finished clips go into the scene builder, where they are trimmed with handles, reordered, and downloaded as one track.

Agent and tools. Since 05.19.2026, everyone has an agent: it suggests a plot, selects a model, creates five lighting options with one request, and organizes results into collections, while its requests cost no credits. You can also build your own tools from a description: "make a filter with a gray slider," and Flow writes the code and interface itself. Everyone can use other people's tools; only subscribers can create their own.

Images and avatar. Nano Banana Pro, Nano Banana 2, and Lite create video frames; images have been free since 02.25.2026, and a lasso selects an area and changes it with words. An avatar is made from your own face and voice on a phone via QR code and invoked in a prompt with "@me"; avatars and uploaded-video editing are unavailable in the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the UK.

Russian language. Russian is on Flow's list of 37 languages, but Google recommends English prompts and warns that quality in other languages "may vary." According to practitioner reports from 2026, Russian speech in the frame works, with a recognizable accent, while in summer 2025 Flow replied that it supported English only. The model does not render text in the frame in any alphabet, and a long Russian line in a prompt sometimes produces a silent video.

What the vendor itself shows. The header video comes from Google's 05.19.2026 Omni post: the agent recolors sixteen videos from day to night with one phrase, and the line "Using the Omni Flash Model" is visible on screen. The frames above were taken from the vendor's landing page on 09.07.2026; their selectors show Omni Flash, while Veo 3.1 does not appear once. We did not run Flow for this task ourselves; the figures come from Help, the storefront, terms, and other people's tests.

You can start in a browser or on Android without installing, but from Russia the first step is changing your country: Google itself has blocked Flow for Russian addresses.

Not directly from Russia. A test on 09.07.2026 from Moscow and St. Petersburg nodes returned a 307 code to the "Flow is not available in your country yet" placeholder page, while Germany, the US, and Kazakhstan got 200 that same minute; the Kazakhstan and St. Petersburg nodes reached the same Google address. Google's addresses are absent from the blocked domain registry, so this is the vendor's decision: its list has 152 countries, and neither Russia nor Belarus is among them. What works without workarounds: the Flow TV showcase with other people's videos and prompts, plus free Russian alternatives, Kandinsky Video in GigaChat and video in Shedevrum.

Step 1. Change your Russian IP address to a foreign one - American, Dutch, or Kazakh - and create a Google account with a country from the Flow list. Google itself warns that changing the address alone does not grant access, while a practitioner restored access on 09.06.2026 specifically by changing the country in the account. The service is officially unavailable in Russia, so without this step only the placeholder page will open.

Step 2. Open labs.google/fx/tools/flow or the short address flow.google, sign in with a Google account, and confirm your age: access starts at 18. Without a subscription, you get 50 credits per day; they do not accumulate, and without a subscription videos are not generated during peak hours from 2:00 to 5:00 UTC.

Step 3. Click Video, describe the scene, and choose the model and length: Omni Flash is selected by default, while Veo 3.1 is selected in the same panel. The credit price is visible in the prompt-field settings; one request can produce two videos and charge twice as much. For a Google AI subscription from Russia international payment required: the vendor does not accept Russian cards.

Surfaces. A computer with a Chromium-based browser, as the vendor itself recommends, and the Google Flow Android app, listed in the storefront as Google Labs: the package was inherited from Whisk along with its 5M installs, updated 09.01.2026, beta status according to the vendor, requiring Android 12 and 2 GB of memory. There is no iPhone app as of 09.07.2026, and "Google Flow Music" in the App Store is a separate music product. The agent and tools work on the web only.

The same models outside. Omni Flash and Veo 3.1 also live in the app Gemini, in Google AI Studio, and in the API for dollars per second, while Omni is also in YouTube Shorts. From Russia, the Gemini app faces the same country wall as Flow. Veo 3.1 is also sold inside third-party card-based storefronts, for example in Higgsfield from the Plus plan.

Steps checked on 07.09.2026 against Flow Help, the storefront configuration, Google Play, HTTP probes from Russian and control nodes, and practitioner videos

Google has two different positions in the arenas: the new Omni Flash is in the top five, while Veo 3.1 has dropped out of the top ten, so the word "best" means nothing here without a model name.

Arenas. In Artificial Analysis on 07.09.2026, Gemini Omni Flash ranks second in both "text to video" tables, fourth in "image to video with audio," and first without audio. Veo 3.1 ranks 16th, 27th, 10th, and 32nd in the same tables, below Wan 3.0, MiniMax H3, Seedance 2.0 and Kling 3.0. In Arena, formerly LMArena, Omni 1.1 Flash is first in "text to video" and second in "image to video," while Veo is absent from all three top 10 lists.

Artificial Analysis Video Arena and Arena, blind user votes, captured on 07.09.2026; the Veo 3.1 row was captured with all models displayed, while the default view shows 14th, 24th, 10th, and 26th places; Omni 1.1's first place in Arena is based on 1 777 votes, with rank uncertainty from 1 to 5

Vendor measurements. Google compares models using its own evaluators: Veo 3.1 charts are "updated in October 2025," Omni has no date, and the vendor gives both the conclusion of "best performance" on the MovieGenBench dataset. The scale is self-reported too: more than 275 million videos in five months (15.10.2025, together with Veo 2), more than 1,5 billion images and videos since launch (25.02.2026), and "millions of creators" without a number (19.05.2026). Google does not publish Flow's user count; the Android app uses the package of the former Whisk, which has more than 5 million installs.

Demand. "Google flow" gets 51 thousand searches per month, "veo 3.1" 6,6 thousand, and "veo 3" 6,3 thousand (Wordstat, 07.09.2026), while the word "omni" appears once and only in Google's suggestions: the market searches for the old name. Habr has 299 posts mentioning Veo, almost all of them roundups of "top AI tools for video." Its place among video tools is shown under the card title; the full tool ranking is on the general page.

Free access includes 50 credits a day, while a Google AI subscription from $4,99 adds monthly credits and removes caps.

Credits. One currency covers all models, and the rate is listed in Help: Omni Flash 720p costs 7, 10, 12, and 15 credits for 4, 6, 8, and 10 seconds, 360p draft is half the price, editing an uploaded video costs 40, Veo 3.1 Lite 10, Fast 20, and Quality 100 per video. Upscaling, meaning increasing a finished video's resolution, to 1080p is free for subscribers; 4K costs 50 credits and is available only on Ultra. One request can produce two videos, in which case twice as many credits are charged. Between 3 and 7 September 2026, Omni dropped from 25 to 12 credits for 8 seconds, and a 360p draft mode appeared.

Plans. In the US storefront on 07.09.2026: Plus is $4,99 for 200 monthly credits, Pro $19,99 for 1 000, Ultra $99,99 for 10 000, and Ultra $199,99 for 25 000, all in addition to the daily 50. There is no annual payment, the grid has not changed since 28.07.2026, and before 19.05.2026 Ultra cost $249,99. On Pro, monthly credits cover 10 Veo 3.1 Quality videos or 83 Omni Flash 720p videos, meaning a Quality second costs $0,25 and an Omni second $0,03. On Ultra, Veo Lite and Fast are half the price, while Quality still costs 100.

Free. The daily 50 credits do not roll over: they cover four Omni 720p videos or five Veo Lite videos, while Veo 3.1 Quality at 100 can never be accumulated. Upscaling is unavailable on the free plan, videos cannot be made without a subscription during peak hours from 2:00 to 5:00 UTC, and remaining free credits expire when a subscription is purchased.

Paying from Russia. A ruble Google One storefront exists and on 07.09.2026 shows Plus at 445 ₽, Pro at 1 790 ₽, Ultra at 6 990 ₽ and 17 490 ₽ per month, but this is the price for a product not sold in the country: Google has not accepted Russian cards, including Mir, since 2022. A foreign account and foreign payment are required; options are collected on the "How to pay for AI from Russia" page. Yandex ads for "veo 3" promise ruble access from intermediaries; this is resale of the same Google service.

API. A second of Veo 3.1 with audio costs $0,40 at 720p and 1080p and $0,60 at 4K; Fast costs $0,10 and Lite $0,05 only at 720p, and without audio they cost half as much. Omni Flash is priced in tokens: 5 792 tokens per second of 720p at $17,50 per million, or about $0,10 per second. A subscription is cheaper than the API almost everywhere: a Quality second on Pro costs $0,25 versus $0,40.

Three questions: who owns these videos, what Google does with your data, and what scandals have already happened.

Whose videos. Flow has no separate terms; Google's general terms apply: "your content remains yours," and Google's license is non-exclusive and needed to store and display what is made. Neither the terms nor Help has a direct statement on commercial use of generated video. The terms prohibit presenting a video as filmed by a person and training your own models on it.

Watermarks. An invisible SynthID mark is present in every Flow video and image; Omni also claims C2PA provenance metadata, through which software can recognize that a video was made by AI. The visible mark is the "Visible watermarking" toggle in the profile menu, and it is mandatory for residents of India, South Korea, and Vietnam. The vendor introduced it on 30.05.2025 for everyone except Ultra subscribers in Flow after TIME asked about deepfakes of riots and ballot damage; according to the same article, the visible mark can be removed with a regular editor.

Your data. With “Help improve Google Flow” enabled, Google uses prompts, uploads, and generated videos to improve products and train models; selected interactions are reviewed by trained reviewers and stored separately from the account for up to 18 months. The setting can be turned off in the menu, and the vendor does not state the default. Projects are deleted all at once; tool and agent data is deleted permanently without confirmation; exports use Google Takeout.

Restrictions. Videos of prominent people and editing videos featuring identifiable minors are prohibited in all regions; avatars and editing uploaded videos are unavailable in the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the UK; access is 18+. In summer 2025, Media Matters found racist videos labeled Veo on TikTok, one reaching 14.2 million views; attribution is indirect, based on the label and clip length.

Disney. On 11.12.2025, the studio sent Google a claim alleging infringement “on a massive scale”; according to Engadget’s account, the letter names Veo and Nano Banana as trained on protected works. Within a week, Google removed dozens of Disney-character videos from YouTube. As of 07.09.2026, there is no lawsuit against Google over the video model: rightsholder cases are proceeding against Midjourney and MiniMax, while cases against Google concern books and Gemini.

The choice is not about which one makes prettier images, but what you pay with: a foreign Google account for speech and edits in words, or a ruble-based workaround for cheap motion.

Kling. A Chinese video model with its own website: $10 a month for 660 credits, daily free credits, the site opens from Russia, and payment goes through an intermediary. Kling wins on motion and price; Flow responds with on-screen speech, word-based editing of finished video, and a scene builder. In the September 2026 arenas, Kling 3.0 ranks above Veo 3.1 but below Omni Flash. Choose Kling for cheap, energetic videos without a foreign account; choose Flow if you have an account and need character dialogue.

Higgsfield. A storefront for other companies’ models, where Veo 3.1 sits alongside Kling and Seedance from the $59 Plus plan: a path to Veo for those with a foreign card but no foreign Google account. Omni is not available there, while Veo audio and speech are. Runway, Luma, and Hailuo also resell Veo 3.1, and nearly all are pricier than Google itself: at Luma, a second with audio costs twice as much as the API.

From Russia without workarounds. Kandinsky Video from Sber is available in GigaChat since 20.10.2025: 10 videos per day free after sign-in, from text and images; the vendor does not state length or audio. Shedevrum offers 10 4-second videos per day without audio. The closed Sora is listed in the catalog as an obituary, and its card itself calls it the closest alternative to Veo 3.1 with audio.

In two years, Google’s lab model gained its own studio, audio, a summer deepfake scandal, a Disney claim, and a new neighbor, Gemini Omni, which became the face of Flow in May 2026.