Three ways these products charge
- One-off credit packs — pay once, spend over time, sometimes with an expiry date.
- Subscriptions with an allowance — a monthly fee plus a monthly credit balance.
- Free tier into paid tier — a capped free generation that demonstrates the pipeline before purchase.
Size the pack to your real volume
Count how many clips you kept last month, not how many you wish you had made. Packs are priced to reward volume you may never reach. The cheapest pack and the largest pack are both wrong for a casual user.
Watch the retry multiplier
If your keep rate is one in three, a pack of thirty generations produces roughly ten clips. Plan against the output you need, then multiply by your actual keep rate — not by the optimistic one.
Subscriptions suit steady use
A monthly allowance is good value only if you would otherwise buy packs every month. If your usage is spiky, one-off packs usually win despite the higher unit price.
Reassess after any model change
Your keep rate is a property of a specific model version. When the backend changes, the arithmetic changes with it. Re-measure for a week before renewing anything.