I Compared the Free Tiers of Google Flow, Kling AI, and Hailuo So You Don't Have To

Just a Side Project — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:28:21 +0000

In my last post, I mentioned pivoting away from AI-generated video after digging into the free tiers of the big three tools. Here's the actual digging — what each one gives you for free, and where the fine print gets in the way.

I'm not affiliated with any of these tools. I just wanted a straight answer to "can I use this for a monetized channel without paying," and it took longer to find than it should have.

The short version

Tool	Free credits	Renewal	Max clip length (free)	Watermark	Commercial use on free tier
Google Flow (Veo 3.1)	~50	Daily	8 seconds	"Made with Veo" visible	Unclear — see below
Kling AI	~66	Daily	~5 seconds per generation	Visible	Explicitly excluded
Hailuo / MiniMax	200	One-time (new account bonus)	~6 seconds (768p)	Visible	Explicitly excluded

Google Flow (Veo 3.1)

Flow bundles Veo 3.1 (video), an image model, and a music model into one workspace. The free allotment is roughly 50 credits a day, non-cumulative — use them or lose them. At the cheaper "Lite" quality setting that's enough for a handful of generations; the higher "Quality" tier alone can cost more credits than the entire daily allowance.

The catch that matters most: I could not find a clear statement, in Google's own terms, that free-tier Veo output is cleared for monetized YouTube use. Some third-party writeups say yes, some say no, and they contradict each other on basic facts like whether the watermark is even there. If you're planning to monetize, this is worth confirming directly with Google support before you build anything on top of it — not something I'd take on a blog's word, including this one.

Kling AI

Kling's free daily credit count is the most generous of the three, and the motion quality on character animation is genuinely good. But its free-tier terms are the most explicit of the group: no commercial use. That's a documented limitation, not a gray area, which actually makes it the easiest of the three to plan around — you know where you stand.

Hailuo / MiniMax

Hailuo front-loads new accounts with a decent one-time credit bonus rather than a strong daily refresh, which makes it better suited to a short burst of experimentation than ongoing daily production. Same commercial-use restriction as Kling on the free tier.

What I'd actually check before committing

Read the tool's current terms of service yourself — not a summary of it, the actual page, dated to when you read it. These change.
Search specifically for "commercial use" or "monetization" in the terms, not just "free" or "credits."
If a paid tier removes the watermark and adds commercial rights, price that in before assuming the free tier is a real substitute.
Treat any blog post claiming "unlimited free generation," including ones with big view counts, as marketing until you've verified it against the source.

None of this means these tools are bad — the free tiers are still useful for experimenting and learning the workflow. It just means "free" and "free to monetize" aren't the same claim, and only one of them was easy to find a straight answer to.

I Tried to Build a Free AI Shorts Channel. Here's Why I Pivoted to Writing Instead.

Just a Side Project — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:28:04 +0000

I wanted one thing: a fully automated, zero-cost pipeline that could turn an idea into a YouTube Short, start to finish, using nothing but free tools and an AI coding assistant. No stock footage subscriptions, no editing software, no manual screen recording. Just a script in, a video out.

I got closer than I expected. Then I hit a wall that had nothing to do with code.

What actually got built

Over one long session, the pipeline came together piece by piece:

Text-to-speech via Google Cloud's free tier (WaveNet/Neural2 voices, a few million free characters a month — far more than a couple of Shorts a week would ever use)
Visuals generated entirely in code (Python + Pillow): chat-bubble mockups, file-browser mockups, "results" grids, all procedurally drawn, no stock assets
Assembly via ffmpeg, stitching narration, captions, and generated slides into a finished vertical video
One orchestration script tying it all together, so a new video was just: drop in a script file, run one command

Along the way there were real, unglamorous obstacles — a newly-split Korean administrative district that Google's billing system didn't recognize yet, a service-account-key policy that blocked the "obvious" authentication path (fixed by switching to OAuth-based application-default credentials instead). Nothing fatal, just the normal texture of actually shipping something.

Where it got interesting

The slideshow-style visuals worked, but they looked exactly like what they were: slides. Meanwhile, a very different kind of AI content was clearly having a moment — short, photorealistic AI-generated video clips (animals doing improbable things, mostly) racking up millions of views. The tools behind them — Google's Veo (via Flow), Kling AI, Hailuo/MiniMax — all advertise usable free tiers.

So the obvious next move was: swap the static slides for actual AI-generated video clips.

Where it stalled

Checking the free tiers properly turned up real limits, not just marketing copy:

Free-tier clips capped at around 8 seconds
A visible "Made with Veo" watermark on free exports
Kling and Hailuo's free tiers explicitly exclude commercial use in their terms

The commercial-use question mattered most, since the whole point was a monetized channel. I went looking for a clear answer in the actual terms of service rather than trusting summary blog posts (several of which flatly contradicted each other on the watermark question alone). I couldn't find an unambiguous yes. Google's own policy pages didn't spell out whether free-tier output could be used in monetized YouTube content; third-party writeups disagreed with each other.

That's not a legal opinion, and I'm not a lawyer — it's just an observation: when the terms are that unclear, building a monetization plan on top of them felt like the wrong foundation, however good the free credits looked on paper.

So, this instead

Rather than keep gambling on shifting terms of service, I pivoted to writing about the build itself — which sidesteps the whole problem. It's fully original, the "content" is just documenting what actually happened, and there's no ambiguity about whether I'm allowed to publish it.

The pipeline still exists and still works, free-tier TTS and all. It's just B-roll for a different kind of project now.

If you're building something similar: check the actual terms before you build a business plan on a "free" AI tool, not just the blog posts telling you it's free. The credits are real. The fine print sometimes isn't what you'd hope.

DEV Community: Just a Side Project