Google Cloud Video Intelligence
Per-minute video annotation from Google Cloud — labels, objects, speech and explicit content
Overview
Google Cloud's Video Intelligence API annotates video for labels, objects, faces, speech and explicit content, billed per minute of footage analysed. A free monthly allowance covers small workloads, with label detection at $0.10 per minute and explicit-content detection at $0.12 beyond it.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 4 Sep 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
- 1,000 units of rich video metadata a month
- New customers also get Google Cloud trial credits
- Label detection $0.10/min
- Explicit content detection $0.12/min
- No commitment
- Negotiated discount pricing
- Sales-led
Use cases
What you can produce with Google Cloud Video Intelligence
- Extract labels, objects, faces and speech from video without training a model yourself
- Flag explicit content automatically as a moderation gate ahead of human review
- Generate searchable metadata for an existing video catalogue at a published per-minute rate
- Analyse a first tranche of footage each month inside the free allowance before committing spend
- Call the service from an existing Google Cloud project with the billing and IAM you already run
- Negotiate volume pricing directly once monthly analysis passes roughly 100,000 minutes
The dependable default. Published per-minute pricing, a free monthly allowance and no sales call means you can cost and prototype a video annotation pipeline in an afternoon — which quote-only competitors cannot offer.
Its limit is vocabulary: it knows the categories it was trained on, not yours. If you need to find domain-specific things a general model has never heard of, or you want semantic search across an archive rather than metadata extraction, this is the wrong starting point. It also assumes you are willing to run a Google Cloud project.
What people say
This is the boring, dependable option, and in video understanding boring is worth a lot. Google Cloud's Video Intelligence API takes footage and returns annotations — labels, objects, faces, speech, explicit content — at a rate published on a public pricing page, with no sales call between you and a working prototype. That last point is the practical difference between this and most of the platforms competing for the same work.
Pricing rewards small starts. A monthly free allowance covers evaluation and light workloads, after which label detection runs $0.10 a minute and explicit-content detection $0.12, with discounts negotiable once you pass roughly 100,000 minutes a month. You can therefore cost a pipeline before building it, which is not true of quote-only competitors, and the bill scales with footage rather than with seats.
The ceiling is the model's vocabulary. It knows the categories it was trained on and it knows them well; it does not know your categories. If you need to find every frame containing a specific product configuration your company invented, a general annotation service will not get you there, and that is precisely the gap platforms built around custom concept definition exist to fill. Nor is this semantic search over an archive — it produces metadata, and what you do with that metadata is your problem to solve.
The other consideration is the ordinary cloud one. It assumes a Google Cloud project, its billing and its IAM, which is friction if you are not already there and nothing at all if you are.
For turning a video library into searchable metadata at a known price, it is the sensible default. For questions that need domain-specific concepts, start elsewhere.
Summary of public user & expert reviews, compiled by RECATOOLS.
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Google Cloud Video Intelligence's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Google Cloud Video Intelligence unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
For the latest details, please refer to Google Cloud Video Intelligence directly →
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