Google has stopped charging for its AI video maker. The company announced on September 23 that anyone holding a Google account, personal or Workspace, can now generate high-definition video for free inside Google Vids, its video editor that runs in a browser. Type the address vids.new, sign in, and the machine makes footage for you at no cost.
The tool runs on a model called Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash, which turns a written prompt, a photograph, a sound file or an existing clip into new video, and outputs at 1080p, the resolution used by most streaming services. Google also handed free users a set of controls that used to sit behind a paywall. One lengthens a scene without the lighting, characters or setting changing halfway through. Another fixes a clip’s exact duration, so the footage can be matched to a script or a recorded voice. A third upscales older, fuzzier AI clips to 1080p instead of making the user start again.
Decrypt, which reported the change, tried the tool itself. Its testers managed a short clip in under 30 seconds, faster than they were used to with Google’s Flow generator, though they could only coax it to produce 720p resolution, in horizontal and vertical formats both. Whether the full 1080p works for everyone straight away is a question the company has not answered.
Every clip carries a watermark called SynthID, built by Google DeepMind. It is invisible to the eye and readable by a machine, embedded in the video frames themselves. A separate Google tool, the SynthID Detector, exists to check whether a piece of footage was machine-made. This matters more than any of the editing features. A free generator in every browser is also a free forgery kit in every browser, and the watermark is the one thing Google is offering on the other side of the ledger.
The grant is not quite equal for everyone. Personal accounts get a standard ration. Paid Google AI plans unlock more, and Workspace Business and Enterprise subscribers get larger pools of generation, plus the admin tools to manage them across a company.
The road here is worth a glance. Gemini Omni first appeared in May 2026 as a paid perk for Google AI Plus, Pro and Ultra subscribers, with free use confined to YouTube Shorts and YouTube Create. The Vids free tier is the widest release of that technology so far. And the timing is neat enough to be planned: OpenAI closed its consumer Sora 2 app and website back in April 2026, and the developer API, the last piece still breathing, went dark for good the very day Google’s giveaway began. Google has also been cutting at the price it charges other businesses, dropping its Veo 3.1 Lite API rate to $0.05 per second, undercutting developer-facing rivals while Chinese competitors such as Kling and Hunyuan Video press down on price from the other side.
Until recently, making a watchable HD video meant paying for editing software, hiring an editor, subscribing to stock footage or owning a machine heavy enough to run open-source models. It is now a free tab in a browser. That widens who can produce video, and it widens who can pass machine footage off as real. Google says a companion tool is coming next: Gemini 3.8 Flash-Lite text-to-speech, to turn a written script into voiceover in more than 100 languages.