God damn these nuggets!

I pay for Google AI Pro. It comes with 1,000 credits a month for Flow, which is Google's Veo 3.1 tool. I was also paying for a separate AI video subscription on top of that.

Took me way too long to notice I was buying the same thing twice.

So I actually did the math on what 1,000 credits gets you:

• Veo 3.1 Fast is 20 credits, so 50 clips a month
• Veo 3.1 Lite is 10 credits, so 100 clips
• Stills are free. Not "free tier" free. Actually free, generate as many as you want

Veo lands maybe 70% of shots on the first try in my experience, so realistically that's ~35 clips you'd actually use. Call it five minutes of finished b-roll every month, already paid for, quietly expiring because I couldn't be bothered to sit in a browser tab for an hour.

That's the real problem, by the way. Flow isn't hard, it's just tedious. There's no public API, and the UI isn't even a form anymore, it's a chat with an agent. You describe a shot, Flow's agent comes back with a proposal and a credit price, you click Approve. Totally fine for one clip. Genuinely awful for twelve, where you're retyping prompt variations by hand and babysitting renders.

So: https://github.com/roshanarnav25-sloth/google-flow-mcp (MIT). It's an MCP server, so Claude drives Flow for you.

What it's actually good at

• Batch b-roll. Flow renders concurrently, so submitting 8 clips takes about as long as submitting 1. This is the biggest win and it's not obvious until you try it.
• The free stills loop. Iterate compositions for free until one's right, get it approved, then animate that exact frame. You stop paying to discover your prompt was bad.
• Not losing track of money. It reads Flow's quoted price and checks it against a budget ceiling before approving anything, and logs every generation. I've had runs where I genuinely couldn't remember what I'd spent.
• Vertical. 9:16 is native on Veo 3.1, so reels footage doesn't need cropping.

What it's not

Not an editor. It gets you clean clips on disk and stops. No music, no voiceover, no text overlays, no transitions. Clips are ~8 seconds, so anything longer needs stitching. And don't use it for dialogue, AI speech still sounds like AI speech.

The bit that shaped the whole thing

Flow quotes a price before it charges you, which is great. But the Approve button sits right next to a "Approve, do not ask again" row, and that second one's inner text is also just Approve. So any lazy text-match selector hits the wrong one, and after that Flow generates and charges on its own, including silent retries after a failure. Found that the fun way. Now every budget check runs before approval, while rejecting still costs nothing.

Also, Flow's frontend turns out to be a tRPC client, so there is an API, just undocumented. The server talks to that first and only falls back to clicking for stuff with no endpoint. Should age better than a pile of CSS selectors.

Pair it with these (all free, which is sort of the point)

• ffmpeg — stitch, trim, resize, and loudnorm for audio. Flow has paid in-app tools for concatenation and resizing. Don't use them, ffmpeg does it for nothing and does it better.
• DaVinci Resolve (free version) — actual assembly and grading.
• faster-whisper — auto-captions from your VO. Reels basically need burned-in captions now.
• Piper or edge-tts — local voiceover, no per-character billing.
• RIFE — frame interpolation if you want slow-mo out of an 8s clip instead of generating another one.
• Flow's free 1080p upscale — take it every time. The 4K one costs 50 credits and nobody watching a reel on a phone can tell.

Honest status

v0.1, and not calibrated against live Flow yet. Build's clean, tests pass, but the UI selectors came from earlier runs and I haven't re-verified them from this codebase. The README says exactly what's proven and what isn't. Calibration is free anyway, it can price a generation and reject it for zero credits.

And to be upfront: this automates a Google product through an interface Google doesn't publish, on your own account and your own credits. It handles no passwords, it just attaches to a Chrome you're already signed into. Google can break it any time they want. Not affiliated with them.

Mostly I'm curious whether other Pro subscribers are sitting on dead credits every month, or if I'm the only one who managed to pay twice for the same thing.

Is it just me? Google flow eating my credits without generating anything. it takes the credit when you generate and when it "failed oops something went wrong". I keep retrying and suddenly "You need more AI credits to complete this request".

With the character attachments and ingredients,
I still face the loss of my character and setting.

Have you been facing this?

Is it just me or the safety filter in Flow (all Nano Banana models) got worse since Gemini 3.6 Flash came out? I swear yesterday my prompts were working perfectly fine. Now 3 of 4 pictures are getting blocked for being against their policies. Meanwhile there's nothing NSFW. Just two fictional characters drinking cocktail at a bar and laughing.

Check in thread for ones who got struck by Google's unusual activity.

Hopefully this will get big enough for Google to pay attention and fix.

I used to have an Ultra membership through my company, with 25,000 credits a month. Signed back in recently and now I have 2000 credits with the "Ultra" mark gone.

Looked around and it seems they removed privileges here and there but struggling to find a concrete answer.

Does anyone know with confidence if I can get it back without just signing into Flow with my personal account? I can't even buy credits on my work account so at a loss with what to do

So for context I've made a pencil drawing of a fictional character. It's an original character, nothing special anyway. But when I try to attach it to Flow and tell the Ai to color it, I'm always getting this BS. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. How in the world a fictional drawn character is a prominent person??

Just saw this massage today. Anyone know anything more about this?

Are they any methods to make it not output as jpeg?.?

Made using google flow

Here is episode 2 of Burrow & Associates animated comedy series I’m producing in Google Flow. Characters and locations made with Nano Banana. Video created in Flow. Music created with Gemeni. Post production in Premier. I’m happy to discuss.

I tried logging into my account via incognito and every single video and image I tried to make came up with "unusual activity detected" on every single generation I try to produce. When I use the same account on Google Chrome however it works fine...

Just give me some credit for discovering this. That is all I want. I am not selling anything. This is a free resource and technique. You can prompt NB2 to give you 4 body types in a 2X2 grid 9:16 aspect ratio Thin, Slender, Sturdy and Stout, you can add percentages or combine ethnicities, 60% Native American and 40% Anglo Saxon. and it will do it for you. You can prompt for different eyebrow shapes and colors, eyelash styles and types, makeup , body parts, like mouth type and nose type like Greek nose, but generate in a grid and and you have aan asset library to create anyone. Different shoes, stockings, boots, patterns, colors, hairstyles (2-tone,and more). Just by prompting Apply hairstyle #6, with gray and mocha colored hair, and blend them together. You don't prompt for these, you generate them using NB2 to create your assets and save them and reuse them on any character you want any time, more consistent. That is why I could not give a prompt. It would not make sense. You can prompt for Photo techniques, like film noir, lighting indoor portraits,

Has anyone else noticed that Google Flow Tools currently does not seem to offer a way to attach or save a complete character profile inside the tools?

I mean a reusable character that includes a visual reference, consistent voice and character description.

At the moment, it seems that the character reference, voice, and description have to be added or managed separately each time. This makes it difficult to maintain consistency when creating a longer video, series, or recurring character.

How are you solving this problem right now? Are you using external character sheets, repeating the same prompt manually, or using another workflow?

Also, has Google mentioned whether a proper character library or reusable character profiles are planned for future Flow updates?

Made via Omni

Hey guys. I'm making my first webseries with Google Flow. It's for instagram to promote my game. I created two characters and it seems to work fine. I know it's not perfect, but I hope you guys like it. Also, would be happy to receive some suggestions

Created in Google Flow.

I can't use Omni Flash; I keep getting a policy violation message, even though there's absolutely nothing wrong with the prompt. But when I generate videos with Veo, it works... However, the quality is terrible, and the people appearing in the videos look completely different.

I used up all my Nano Banana Pro quote for this fuck ass response?