What This Actually Costs Me, With the Receipts
By The Fellowi Team · · 7 min read
A pricing page will tell you that a Standard image costs 40 coins and 500 coins costs €2.99. Both true, and neither answers the question people actually have, which is what it costs to end up with a picture you would show someone.
So here are the numbers from the other side, with the wasted attempts counted in, because the wasted attempts are the actual price.
The sticker price
- Standard image: 40 coins. High quality: 60.
- Smallest pack: 500 coins for €2.99, which is about 12 Standard images.
- Roughly 24 cents per Standard image, 36 at High.
- New accounts start with 40 coins, so exactly one free image.
- Failed generations refund automatically.
That last line matters more than it looks. It means the cost of an experiment is not the coins, it is the waiting. Experiments that might fail are free; it is the confident attempts that come back technically fine and creatively useless which actually cost you.
The real price: attempts per keeper
When I started, my ratio was terrible. I would make ten or twelve images to get one I liked, which is around €1.90 per keeper, and I was not even learning from the ten because I rewrote the whole prompt each time.
After the habit changed to editing one clause per attempt, it settled at three or four. Call it 50 to 65 cents for a picture I would actually use. On a hard subject with hands or a specific pose it is still six or eight, and I have had days where a single stubborn idea ate a whole pack.
The interesting part is that the improvement had nothing to do with getting better at writing prompts in some artistic sense. It was entirely about making each attempt informative. Three attempts that each isolate one variable teach you more, and cost less, than twelve that vary everything.
Where I lost money without noticing
Generating at High quality while still deciding. This is a 50% surcharge on every attempt in a phase where most attempts get discarded. High quality renders bigger; it does not render better-composed. I now draft everything at Standard and only re-run the final one at High if the size matters, which for anything that lives on a screen it usually does not. There is a proper comparison in the post on quality and formats.
Chasing a bad idea. Some concepts are just difficult, and after four attempts you are no longer iterating, you are hoping. The cheapest thing I ever learned to do was abandon a prompt and come back to it having decided what was actually wrong.
Not downloading things. Generated files are kept for thirty days and then the bytes are destroyed. I have re-generated an image I had already made and already paid for, because I did not save it. That is the stupidest possible way to spend coins.
Video is a different order of magnitude
This surprises people, so it is worth stating plainly: a four-second clip at 720p on a turbo model is 500 coins. That is the entire starter pack, in four seconds.
The reason is simply that video is priced per second of render, and every second is a great many frames. It scales exactly the way you would fear:
- 4 seconds, 720p, turbo: 500 coins
- 4 seconds, 720p, full model: 900 coins
- 10 seconds, 1080p, turbo: 1,500 coins
- 4 seconds, 4K, full model: 4,400 coins
- 30 seconds, 4K, full model: 33,000 coins
Which is why the advice for video is stricter than for images. Get the motion and framing right in a four-second turbo clip, then commit to length or resolution once, at the end. Sound comes free either way and does not enter the calculation at all, which the post on generated audio covers.
What I would budget
If you are trying it out: the €2.99 pack is genuinely enough to find out whether you enjoy this, provided you spend it on twelve deliberate attempts rather than twelve wishes. If you are working on something specific, expect a handful of euros for a set of images you are happy with, and expect video to be the line item that surprises you.
And a small thing that changes the arithmetic more than any of the above: coins do not expire. There is no monthly reset punishing you for a quiet fortnight, so buying the small pack and using it slowly costs exactly the same per image as buying a big one.
Prices and packages live in the studio itself, and the coins explainer has the full catalogue. What neither will tell you is the attempts-per-keeper number, and that is the one that decides what this really costs.