What Actually Happens When You Press Generate

From the outside, the studio is one button. You type something, you pick a shape, you press generate, and a picture appears. That simplicity is deliberate, but it can also make the wait feel opaque: is it working? did it take my coins? what if I close the laptop? This post opens the box and walks the whole path, in order.

Step 1: your prompt is read before anything is charged

The first thing that happens is a check on what you asked for. If a prompt crosses a line we do not cross, it is refused there and then, before your wallet is touched. That ordering is the point. A refusal that happens after the charge leaves a refund to be issued, and a refund is one more thing that can be lost, duplicated or missed. A refusal that happens before the charge has nothing to go wrong with.

So a declined prompt costs you nothing, and there is no pending balance to chase. You get a clear message, your coins are still where they were, and you can rewrite and try again.

Step 2: the coins leave your wallet exactly once

Once the request is accepted, the price is taken in a single operation that only succeeds if the balance is actually there. Every coin movement carries an identifier unique to that generation, which means a double click, a flaky connection or a retry from our own side cannot charge you twice for the same picture. The same rule runs in reverse for credits, which matters in a moment.

The price itself depends on what you asked for: quality, whether you attached reference photos, the length of a clip, whether you want sound. We keep every current figure on one page rather than retyping them into articles that then go stale, so the live numbers are on the product facts page. If you want the reasoning behind them rather than the figures, we wrote that up in what AI image generation actually costs and, for clips, how much AI video costs.

Step 3: you can close the tab

This is the part most people do not expect. The moment the job is accepted it becomes a saved record on our side, holding everything needed to run it: the prompt, the shape, the quality, any reference images you attached. The worker that talks to the generation service rebuilds the request from that record, not from your browser.

Practically, that means your session is not load bearing. Close the tab, lose signal on a train, pick your phone up instead: the job carries on and the result is waiting in your gallery. It also means a picture cannot be half generated because your laptop went to sleep.

Step 4: if it fails, you get everything back

Generation services fail sometimes. A model can be busy, a request can time out, an attachment can go missing. When that happens the job is marked failed and the full amount goes back to your wallet automatically, under an identifier tied to that one generation, so two recovery paths arriving at the same time still produce exactly one refund.

What is not refunded is a generation that worked and that you simply did not like. That is a real cost on our side and a judgement call on yours, so it is charged like any other picture. We would rather say that plainly here than let you discover it at the wrong moment.

Step 5: how long it actually takes

Here are real numbers rather than a marketing adjective. Measured across seven days of production traffic up to 22 September 2026, over 1148 finished pictures and 190 finished clips:

• Pictures: half finished within about a minute, nine in ten within two minutes. The fastest in that window came back in roughly 26 seconds.
• Clips: half finished within about six minutes, nine in ten within twelve.

That is fast enough to stay in the flow of an idea and slow enough that you should not stare at the progress ring. Higher quality settings and longer clips sit at the slower end, which is the honest trade rather than a defect. If somebody promises you instant video, ask what they are measuring.

Why we built it this way

Every one of these steps exists because the alternative went wrong for somebody. Charging before checking creates refunds to lose. Tying a job to a browser session loses work when a phone locks. A credit without an identifier eventually pays twice or not at all. None of it is visible when things go well, which is rather the point.

If you want to see the whole thing take about a minute, the picture studio is at Fellowi Images and the clip studio at Fellowi Video. And if you are wondering what you are allowed to do with what comes out, that question has its own article: who owns AI generated images.