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I tried Veo 3 with mulmocast-cli — the price made me laugh

Since I started writing in Markdown, I’ve wanted auto-generated “cats chatting” healing shorts — I call that md2cat in my head.

There wasn’t a perfect tool yet, but I remembered mulmocast-cli and tried Veo 3 end to end.

Short version:

Veo is expensive — hard to justify for casual use (lol)

Still, I got from setup to output working; here are the steps.

Setup

Clone

Cloning the repo helps for samples and internals.

git clone https://github.com/receptron/mulmocast-cli.git

Install the CLI

Follow the project README for installation:

mulmocast-cli/README.md at main · receptron/mulmocast-cli
AI-powered podcast & video generator. Contribute to receptron/mulmocast-cli development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com 
npm install -g mulmocast

# macOS with Homebrew
brew install ffmpeg

# Other platforms: https://ffmpeg.org/download.html

1) API keys

cd into the cloned repo. Configuration:

mulmocast-cli/README.md at main · receptron/mulmocast-cli
AI-powered podcast & video generator. Contribute to receptron/mulmocast-cli development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com

Create .env with at least:

OPENAI_API_KEY=your_openai_api_key
GEMINI_API_KEY=your_google_gemini_api_key

For this experiment those two were enough.
Note: I had to add a payment method to the Gemini / Google Cloud billing account or Veo wouldn’t run. Pricing on the official post is still steep — roughly ~$4 USD for ~10 seconds, so one run can burn on the order of ¥500 depending on FX.

Set billing limits. Seriously.

Pricing

2) Script JSON

The script I ran:

Veo 3.1 errored for me; 3.0 worked.

Run (mulmo movie)

mulmo movie scripts/test/test_genai_movie.json

Output

Here’s what came back. (Sorry — the video output was choppy on my run.)

What did it cost?

I blew through my test billing cap on Google almost immediately.
(Hit ¥1,002 on a ¥1,000 cap and got the “raise your limit” message.)

Gemini API usage cap

I’d accidentally run the command twice — ¥1,000 gone in seconds. Probably ¥500+ per invocation (I didn’t nail exact per-call math — sorry.)

Takeaways

  • Don’t underestimate API pricing
  • mulmocast-cli looks fun for the right workflows

Next step: actually get md2cat working and iterate with mulmocast.