I don’t pay Venice AI a monthly fee. I stake 100 VVV and Pro comes with it, and that’s how I ended up using this thing every day. I run chat constantly, I point coding agents and Open WebUI at the API, and I add about five dollars a month of my own cash on top when a project needs more than the subscription credits cover.
The reason I stayed has nothing to do with benchmarks. I want to lock the door and talk to something that isn’t talking to somebody else about me. That’s the product.
Disclosure: this post contains a referral link. If you sign up through it I earn a commission, at no cost to you. I also hold VVV, which is the token I’m recommending here — treat my bull case accordingly. Nothing in this post is financial advice.
My verdict on Venice AI
It’s worth it if you’ll use chat heavily and you care who’s reading it. The unlimited prompts, the extended context, and the fact that self-hosted open-weight models come with zero retention are the parts I actually touch. If you want a chatbot a few times a week, the free tier is genuinely fine — 10 text prompts and 15 images a day — and you can skip everything below.
Would I buy it again today? Yes, and I effectively do, because I’ve had the option to unstake the whole time and I haven’t taken it. That’s the most honest endorsement I can give a subscription.
Try Venice AI free — no card required
What held up
- Unlimited text prompts. No daily ceiling to plan around.
- DeepSeek V4.1 Flash at $0.30 in / $1.20 out per million tokens, with the uncensored build at $0.33 / $1.32. Cents apart for more latitude.
- Private-tier models: zero retention, no prompt logging, no training on your input.
- The 100 monthly credits work as API credit, not just video coins.
What annoyed me
- It rejects requests from my VPN’s IPs. Hit that on Surfshark and it’s a strange policy for a privacy product.
- 100 credits is exactly $1. One Veo 3.1 Full Quality clip is $1.76. The monthly allowance is not a video budget.
Why I stake 100 VVV instead of paying $18 a month
Venice Pro is $18 a month, or $216 a year. Staking 100 VVV grants Pro for as long as you stay staked, and the tokens stay yours the entire time.
That’s the difference that got me. A subscription is gone the day you pay it. Staked VVV is an asset you’re holding that happens to unlock the product — it earns staking yield while it sits there, currently quoted around 6%, and if you want out you unstake and you’re done. There’s a seven-day queue on the unstake, which is the closest thing to a lock-in.
At today’s price of about $20.26, 100 VVV is roughly $2,026 of capital to avoid a $216 annual bill. That’s nine years of fees, parked in something you can cash out of. Here’s what that looks like next to just paying:
The right way to read that chart is not “free AI.” It’s “the fee became a position.”
My bull case for VVV, and where it goes wrong
I think this is cheap and I think it keeps getting more expensive. Three reasons, and then the part nobody wants to write.
The burn is real and it’s monthly. Since November 2025 a portion of Venice’s platform revenue buys VVV on the open market, and since December 2025 those tokens get burned every month — permanently out of circulation. That’s not a roadmap or a promise, it’s a live mechanism tied to revenue. As usage grows, the buy pressure grows with it.
The gate is fixed at 100 VVV. Pro costs 100 tokens whether VVV is $2 or $200. Every person who decides they’d rather stake than subscribe has to buy 100 of them. That’s demand created by the product itself, not by speculation.
The supply keeps tightening. Venice launched in January 2025 with 100 million tokens and has been cutting emissions. Fewer new tokens against steady or rising demand from people who want Pro without a card.
Here’s where I have to be straight with you, because most write-ups on this token won’t be. VVV is down about 10.5% over the last 30 days as I write this, and it’s roughly 41% below its all-time high of $34.53. The burn is a mechanism, not a floor. If Venice’s revenue stalls, the buy pressure stalls with it. If you stake to save $216 and the token halves, you didn’t save anything — you lost a thousand dollars to avoid a subscription.
So my position is: I hold it because I’d hold it anyway and Pro is a bonus. If you’d be sick to your stomach watching the position drop 40%, pay the $18 a month and sleep. That’s not a cop-out, it’s the correct answer for most people.
What using it actually looks like
Chat is the bulk of it. I reach for the open-weight models most — DeepSeek for nearly anything if the instructions are good, plus Qwen and GLM depending on the task. Uncensored matters more than it sounds. A model that won’t refuse gives you an actual answer instead of a hedge, and the answer is more useful even when the question is boring.
The API is where the subscription earns its place for me. Pro’s 100 credits carry over to API usage, so a Pro subscription quietly doubles as a small API budget. My coding agents and low-code setups point at https://api.venice.ai/api/v1, and because it’s OpenAI-compatible, migrating meant changing base_url and a model id. Nothing else. That’s how you get a private backend into an existing stack without rewriting it.
The part I care about most: the models I use are open-weight and self-hosted, which means zero retention. I’m not handing a prompt to a company that logs it, analyzes it, and feeds it back into training. Nothing about my habits gets built into a profile. It’s the bare minimum of privacy and most AI products don’t clear that bar.
I don’t use the character system at all, and I have no opinion worth reading on it — it’s clearly what a lot of people come for. Images I only use for memes, and Venice is fine at that.
What I’d change
The VPN block. I was on Surfshark, tried to use a model, and got rejected. A privacy-first product turning away privacy-conscious users at the door is a bad look and a worse first impression.
The credit math is the other one. 100 credits is a dollar, and video models run from about two cents a clip at the cheap end to past a dollar seventy at the top. Here’s the whole story in one chart:
If video is your reason for subscribing, skip Pro and go straight to Pro Plus at $68 with 7,500 credits. Pro is for text and images.
Key specs
| Spec | Detail |
|---|---|
| Pro price | $18/mo or $216/yr. Free tier: 10 text and 15 image prompts per day |
| Pro access | All Pro and frontier models, unlimited text prompts, 1,000 images/day, extended context |
| Monthly credits | 100 on Pro. Credits are $1 = 100 and carry over to API usage |
| Stake requirement | 100 VVV for Pro, held while staked. Seven-day unstake queue |
| API | OpenAI-compatible at api.venice.ai/api/v1, standard rate limits on Pro |
| Privacy tiers | Anonymized, Private (zero retention), TEE, and end-to-end encrypted |
See current pricing and the model list on Venice
Who should skip it
If you’re not willing to hold a crypto token, don’t stake — pay the monthly and treat it like any other subscription. If you’re a heavy video user, Pro’s 100 credits will frustrate you within a week. And if you need a signed enterprise agreement, a BAA, or a guaranteed-moderated output stream for compliance, this isn’t the vendor for that; it’s built around retention-free inference instead of contractual carve-outs.
FAQ
How much does Venice AI cost per month?
Free is $0 with 10 text and 15 image prompts a day. Pro is $18 monthly or $216 annually, Pro Plus is $68 with 7,500 credits, and Max is $200 with 22,500. API usage beyond your included credits bills separately at published per-model rates, so a heavy agent workflow can exceed the subscription.
Can I trust Venice AI with private data?
That depends on the model you pick, not the app. Models marked Private run self-hosted with zero retention, TEE models run inside hardware enclaves Venice can’t read, and E2EE encrypts prompts client-side before they leave your device. Third-party models are proxied with identifying metadata stripped — anonymized, which is not the same as zero-retention.
Is there an AI that isn’t censored?
Yes. Venice runs open-weight models with no content filter or refusal layer, including abliterated builds where the refusal behavior is removed at the weight level. Be an adult about it — an uncensored model will confidently produce wrong or unpleasant output, and nothing here replaces your own judgment. It also isn’t a substitute for common sense.
The bottom line
Venice AI is the first AI product I’ve kept because of how it handles my data rather than how clever it is. The models are good, the API is OpenAI-shaped enough to drop into anything, and staking turned an $18 subscription into a position I still own. Start on the free tier, use it for a week, then decide whether Pro or 100 VVV is the right door in.