Flow's 50 daily credits don't roll over: plan a production week

Google Flow gives free accounts 50 credits a day, they refresh after your first use, and unused credits do not carry over. So seven days gives seven separate 50-credit allowances, not a 350-credit week. A balance on Sume works the other way: dollars stay in the workspace until a job spends them.

The rules are from Google's Manage your Google Flow credits page, read 2026-10-02. Sume's balance rules are in its generation admission docs.

What exactly does Google say expires?

Three rules appear on the credits page. Daily credits refresh after first use and do not roll over. Monthly subscription credits refresh at the start of your billing cycle. And the page contrasts monthly Flow credits with separate AI credits, which may expire after a certain period. The page does not give a date for that period, so do not plan around any specific length.

Top-ups are offered to Plus, Pro and Ultra subscribers, except in Japan. That is the only way the page describes adding credits beyond the plan.

How far do 50 credits go in a day?

Using the per-generation prices on the same page, 50 credits covers five Veo 3.1 Lite clips at 10 credits, two Veo 3.1 Fast clips at 20, or half of one Veo Quality clip, which costs 100 and is therefore out of reach in a single free day. For Gemini Omni Flash at 360p, 4 to 7 credits per clip means roughly 7 to 12 clips. The page does not say which of these models a free account can select, so check your own model picker before planning around it.

How do you plan a week around expiring credits?

Put the cheap, exploratory work on days when credits would otherwise lapse, and keep the expensive step for a day you can afford. Draft prompts at 360p on Omni Flash, shortlist, then spend a day on a Lite or Fast render. Because nothing carries over, there is no benefit to saving, so use each day's 50 credits for drafts and treat them as free exploration.

For anything you must finish by a deadline, do not depend on free daily credits. Their ceiling is 50 a day and a single Quality clip costs 100.

What changes with a Sume balance?

A Sume workspace balance is USD. Jobs reserve their estimated cost on submit, and an unaffordable request fails with 402 insufficient_credits before work starts. The unspent part of a balance stays available to the next job.

The tradeoff is that Sume has no daily free pool of this kind. If your need is occasional hand-made clips and you like free drafts, Flow's daily credits are a real advantage. If your need is a repeatable job queue, a persistent balance and an idempotency key matter more.

What about the 4K and edit prices?

Two lines on the credits page sit outside the daily budget. A video edit is 40 credits, so one edit uses most of a day's 50. A 4K upscale is 50 credits and Ultra only, so it is not available from free daily credits at all. 1080p upscaling is free for Plus, Pro and Ultra subscribers.

If edits are your main use, a free day gives you one edit and ten credits left over, which is a good argument for batching your changes into a single prompt rather than editing step by step.

What would a scripted draft loop look like?

This request produces a 360p draft of an Omni Flash clip, which reserves $0.1125 for 3 seconds at Sume's catalog rate, so you can run several variants before committing a larger resolution.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-router/generate \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: draft-360p-001" \
  -d '{
    "model": "gemini-omni-flash-1.1",
    "prompt": "Handheld shot walking into a bright bakery, warm light",
    "duration": 3,
    "resolution": "360p",
    "aspect_ratio": "9:16",
    "mode": "async"
  }'