VEED API in 2026: Setup, Prepaid Credits and Per-Second Rates

What the VEED API does, and what it leaves out

The VEED API is a pay-as-you-go service for four AI models, not a remote control for the VEED editor. Since 30 September 2026 anyone can sign up at api.veed.io, prepay credits and run jobs without a sales call. $1 buys 100 credits, top-ups run from $10 to $1,000, and the flagship Fabric 1.0 talking-video model costs $0.15 per second at 720p ^[1]. It suits developers who want lip-synced avatars, background cutouts or cleaner audio inside their own product. No editor API exists, so timeline edits cannot be scripted.

Fabric 1.0 turns a face image plus an audio track into a talking video of up to one minute per call. Lipsync 2.0 re-syncs an existing video to new audio, keeping the source resolution. Video Background Removal comes in Standard, Fast and green-screen variants. Clean Audio strips noise from speech in any language through two endpoints: one returns cleaned audio only, for files of up to 30 minutes and 512 MB, and Clean Audio Video returns your video with the cleaned track, for files of up to 30 minutes and 2 GB. Dubbing is in early access, a Live Avatar API sits on a waitlist, and the Subtitles API lives on fal.ai.

Each model has limits worth knowing before you build. Fabric takes speech, not text, so a script must go through a text-to-speech tool first and arrive as an audio URL. Lipsync 2.0 handles one speaker per video and gets worse when the face turns away or moves quickly. Background removal returns only the cutout on a transparent background, works on video rather than still images, and leaves placing it over a new scene to you. Clean Audio treats music and sound effects as noise, so tracks with music lose it.

From sign-up to a first job in five steps

The API account is separate from any VEED editor account, with its own workspace and balance, so an editor plan neither is needed nor helps. The service is meant for business and professional use, including individual developers, and you must be 18 or over. The path from an empty account to a running job takes five steps, all inside the API dashboard:

1. Create an API account at api.veed.io.
2. Open Billing and add credits, at least $10.
3. Create an API key in the workspace dashboard.
4. Send the key as a Bearer token in the Authorization header, or set VEED_API_KEY for the official SDKs.
5. Submit a job and keep the job_id that comes back.

Every model page has a playground for testing inputs before you write code, plus a cost estimator for the job you have in mind. The official SDKs cover Node (the npm package @veedstudio/sdk) and Go, and both poll for you; any other language works with plain REST against an OpenAPI 3.1 spec. Inputs must be public http or https URLs, so a file on localhost will fail. A leaked key can be revoked and recreated from the dashboard.

What each job costs

Every model is priced in US dollars per second, per block of 30 frames or per minute of media. You pay only when a job completes: an estimate is held when it starts, failed jobs are refunded automatically, and a rejected submission bills nothing. There is no subscription layer. The table lists the self-serve rates on api.veed.io as of October 2026.

Rounding is where small jobs cost more than they look. Background removal bills in whole blocks of 30 frames, and Clean Audio rounds up to the next whole minute. VEED's own examples put a 10-second, 30 fps cutout at $0.225 with refined edges and a 10-second 720p Fabric clip at $1.50. By our arithmetic, one minute of 30 fps footage is 60 blocks, or $1.35 with refined edges, and a one-minute talking clip at 720p comes to $9.00. A $10 top-up covers about 66 seconds of 720p Fabric, 142 seconds of lip sync or 800 minutes of audio cleanup.

Prepaid credits are non-refundable, expire two years after purchase, and prices exclude tax ^[2]. To start a job you need at least $1 of credit or enough to cover it; if the balance goes negative mid-job, running jobs finish and are charged, with no overage beyond that. Higher volumes, higher concurrency and invoicing in arrears against a commitment come through Enterprise API access via sales. Separately, VEED's Fabric page asks fal.ai users above 1,000 minutes of generation to contact it.

Polling, errors and how long your files live

Jobs are asynchronous. A POST returns 202 Accepted with a job_id, and you poll a GET endpoint until the status reads COMPLETED, FAILED or CANCELLED. There are no webhooks, whatever older copy on the /api page suggested. For Fabric, the docs suggest polling every 10 seconds, and a render usually takes a minute or two; Clean Audio runs at roughly 0.2 to 0.5 times the audio length. Rate limits apply per class of request, and going over returns a 429 error with retry timing in the headers.

A failed job reports its error code on the poll response, not as an HTTP error. The common ones are input_validation, invalid_file, transload_failed, audio_too_long, content_moderation and insufficient_credits; retry generation_failed and timeout. Moderation exists because you may only send images, videos and voices you own or have permission to use. A Clean Audio charge can also differ from the credits_estimated figure quoted at submission.

Result URLs expire after one day by default; the X-Veed-Media-Expiration-Seconds header stretches that to 30 days at most, and an expired link returns 410 Gone with no renewal, so download results rather than linking to them. Request and response bodies are stored for 7 days unless you send X-Veed-Store-IO: 0 on each call, and basic metadata such as model, status and cost is always kept. API inputs and outputs are not used for model training unless you agree, and outputs can be used commercially.

VEED direct, fal.ai or the editor: picking the route

Direct at api.veed.io uses the prepaid credits above and covers Fabric, Lipsync, background removal and Clean Audio. fal.ai hosts Fabric 1.0, Lipsync 2.0 and the Subtitles API; it needs a fal account and key, and fal bills those jobs separately from any VEED balance ^[3]. The editor at veed.io runs the same Fabric model on a seat subscription's AI credits, capped at 30 seconds per clip against one minute per API call. Editor credits never pay for API jobs, and API credits never reach the editor.

The Subtitles API is still listed as coming soon on api.veed.io, while on fal.ai it burns captions into an MP4 at $0.10 per minute for basic styles up to 1080p, $0.20 for dynamic styles or output above 1080p, and $0.40 for dynamic styles above 1080p, with a one-minute minimum. It offers 28 styles and a bring-your-own SRT option, but no translation and no transcript file. For captions made in the editor, see our VEED subtitles guide.

Non-developers can skip REST entirely. VEED runs an MCP server for AI assistants and agents, a ChatGPT app that turns a prompt into a finished video, and a Make.com connection for automations, all three added between April and May 2026. OpenEdit, a free agent-driven pipeline in beta for Apple Silicon Macs with macOS 26, calls Fabric, background removal and Lipsync on your behalf, spending your editor AI credits.

When the API beats an editor seat on price

Fabric is the model where the two routes compare credit for dollar. Clean Audio in the editor uses the same model as the API, and the background remover and Clean Audio inside the editor spend no AI credits (OpenEdit's calls do): unlimited on paid seats, one try on Free. For manual cutouts without automation, a seat can be cheaper: at 30 frames a second the API's Standard background removal costs about $0.90 a minute of footage, so a Creator seat billed annually wins above roughly 14 minutes of footage a month. For audio cleanup alone the API stays cheaper unless you clean more than about 16 hours of audio a month, by our arithmetic.

Every editor user also gets 3 free Fabric tries of up to 10 seconds, except in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Beyond that, the editor charges 8 credits a second for Fabric at 720p, so Creator's 500 monthly credits cover about 62 seconds: near $0.40 a second at $25 billed monthly, or near $0.20 at $147 billed annually, against $0.15 on the API.

Higher up the picture flips, but only if every credit goes to Fabric before it expires at renewal. Pro (2,500 credits) works out near $0.14 a second at $45 billed monthly and near $0.07 at $265 billed annually; base Studio (15,000 credits, $79 billed monthly) comes to about $0.04. On monthly billing a seat beats the API per second from the 2,500-credit level; on annual billing it already does from Creator's 1,500-credit variant ($267 a year, about $0.12 a second). Our VEED pricing guide lists every variant, and VEED AI explains the credit system.

The bottom line

The VEED API is a straightforward way to add talking avatars, lip sync, video cutouts and noise removal to your own software, as long as you accept its shape: you prepay, you poll, and you download results within a day unless you extend the link. Start with the minimum top-up and the model playgrounds, then buy only what you will spend within two years. For a few Fabric clips a month, the API costs less in total: three 30-second clips come to $13.50, against $45 for a Pro seat billed monthly, by our arithmetic. A seat wins only when Fabric uses a large share of its credits: about 300 seconds a month on Pro billed monthly, or about 150 seconds a month (five 30-second clips) on Pro or Creator's 1,500-credit variant billed annually.