teamToken vs kie.ai: is the best-known media API also the cheapest
kie.ai is the most visible brand in this niche, with an estimated 86,000 visits a month and a page for every model. It is also one of the few platforms priced aggressively enough to compare with us directly. On some models we are clearly cheaper. On others their floor is below ours. Both tables are below.
Start with where they beat us
Seedance. Their cheapest tier runs $0.034 a second against our $0.075, which is less than half. If your workload is lightweight Seedance at volume and you are optimising for the lowest possible rate, that is a real reason to use them instead of us.
Their ceiling tells the opposite story: $1.04 a second on high-resolution tiers against our $0.18. So the honest summary is not "cheaper" or "dearer" but "depends on the tier", and the tier is something only you know.
The second thing they have and we do not is a free tier. Their pricing page offers one; our first request requires a top-up, from $1, with no exceptions. For anyone who wants to test before paying anything, that difference decides it.
Where we are cheaper
| Model | teamToken | kie.ai |
|---|---|---|
| Nano Banana Pro, per image | $0.027 | $0.09–0.12 |
| Nano Banana 2, per image | $0.027 | $0.04–0.09 |
| Veo 3.1, per second | $0.0067–0.1667 | ≈$0.019–0.231 |
| Seedance 2, per second | $0.075–0.18 | $0.034–1.04 |
kie.ai prices read from kie.ai/pricing on 22.08.2026; their Veo figure is recalculated from a per-clip rate. Ours come from the live catalog.
Nano Banana Pro is the clearest of these. A flat $0.027 against $0.09–0.12 is three to four times, and it holds at every resolution because our price does not move with resolution at all.
On Veo 3.1 we are cheaper across the range, though not dramatically. kie.ai is one of the few platforms priced close enough to us that the comparison stays interesting instead of being a formality.
The part that is not about price
Text models. Ours answer on the same key as media, on an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and the catalog is a proper lineup rather than a side feature. kie.ai's text access is described as partial. Whether that matters depends entirely on whether your product needs an LLM gateway at all.
Switching is the usual: point base_url at our host and reuse the key across text and media. No separate media account.
Questions we get
When kie.ai is the better call
Three cases, and they are concrete. If you are chasing the absolute lowest per-second rate on lightweight Seedance, their floor is below ours. If you want to test before paying, they have a free tier and we do not. And if you would rather work with the established name in the space, 86,000 monthly visits and 255 indexed pages are a distribution lead that took years to build and says something real about how many people already rely on them.
Their content operation deserves the credit too: a page per model, a blog that reacts to new releases within days. That is why you found them first and us second, and it is a fair reason to trust a vendor.