What a Team Actually Spends on AI Images: Reading the Bulk Coin Packages

Somebody on the team will eventually ask the budget question, usually in a meeting and usually as “how much does one image cost”. It is the wrong question, and answering it with a coin price is how teams end up either overspending or buying the smallest package three times a week. This is a short memo on the right question and how to answer it in a week.

Step 1: plan in finished assets, not coins

A finished asset is a picture that leaves the building: it goes into the deck, the post or the client folder. Its cost has three parts, multiplied together: what one coin costs you in the package you buy, how many coins one attempt takes with the settings you actually use (quality, references and the prompt enhancer each change it), and how many attempts it takes to get one picture you keep. The first two are on the product page, which is generated from the code that charges, so it is never out of date. The third exists only in your team.

Step 2: measure your keeper rate for one week

Buy one of the small packages and use it for real work for a week. Count two things: the coins spent and the pictures kept. Failures do not count against you, because a generation that fails on our side refunds its coins automatically; what counts is the pictures your own eye rejects. Loose concept work for a moodboard keeps a large share of what it makes; a brief with a fixed product and a fixed face needs many more attempts per keeper. Your number is the one that matters, and it is usually not the one anybody guessed. Drafting cheaply first and only finishing the winners lowers it, as the draft-first post shows.

Step 3: read the ladder

The packages run from Starter to Scale, and the bonus share grows with size: the bigger the package, the larger the part of it that is bonus rather than paid coins. The top four, Business, Agency, Enterprise and Scale, were built for teams. With your keeper rate and your monthly volume of finished assets, the arithmetic is simple: multiply, compare against the ladder, and pick the package that covers a month or two of real work. Coins do not expire, so buying ahead is not money lost; it is money tied up, which a finance team will care about more than the bonus. For the per-package comparison, read which package is the best value.

Step 4: one account, one wallet

Coins live in one account and cannot be moved to another one. A team therefore buys into a single account. People who generate by hand share that studio; production work goes through the API, where you can create several named keys that all spend the same balance and revoke one without touching the others. How agencies wire that up is in the agency API post. Checkout is by PayPal or crypto; if your accounts department needs particular paperwork for a purchase, ask support before you buy rather than after.

What a budget does not buy

A bigger package buys coins, nothing more. It does not buy a service level, a dedicated contact or priority in the queue. It does not buy exclusivity: another customer with a similar prompt can get a similar picture. It does not buy copyright, which machine-made images may not carry at all in many countries, as who owns AI images explains, although commercial use is allowed and we take no share. And it does not buy storage: files are deleted after the retention window shown on the product page, so archive what you keep on your own side.

When the week of measuring is done, the order goes through Fellowi Images, and the commercial terms are summarised in the commercial use post.