Gemini Omni API first-day checklist: billing, $10 window, $250 cap

Before the first Omni call on the Gemini API, link a billing account (that is Tier 1), note the $10 spend window per 10 minutes and the $250 monthly cap, and use the model id gemini-omni-1.1-flash through the Interactions API. Start with a 3 second, 360p clip. Output is billed at about $0.10 per second of 720p video, and the free tier is not a safe assumption, so check the pricing page for your project.

The checklist

Each line below is drawn from a Google page I read on 2026-10-04: billing, rate limits, the Omni guide and pricing.

Mistakes to avoid

• Do not send temperature, top_p, stop sequences, system instructions or negative prompts; the guide lists them as unsupported.
• Do not pass a YouTube link as the source video; use a direct file.
• Do not trim your first edit test to more than 10 seconds; uploaded edit or extend clips must be 10 seconds or less.
• Do not assume the default delivery is a URL; base64 is the default, with about a 4 MB maximum, so request uri for longer clips.
• Do not rely on editing uploaded video in the EEA, Switzerland or the UK; Google lists it as unavailable there.

If you would rather not manage tiers

Sume's Video Router takes the same job with gemini-omni-flash-1.1, a different word order for the id, at provider list times 1.25 per second, with 3 to 10 second clips from 360p to 4K. Limits come from your plan's concurrency in Generation admission rather than from spend windows. Either way, run the cheap clip first.