How to estimate the cost of an AI image project before you render

The question arrives before the first render: what will this cost? A client wants twelve product scenes, a friend wants a book cover, you want to know whether a side project is affordable. The honest answer is never the price of twelve stills, because nobody gets twelve usable stills from twelve renders. This is a method for working the number out in a few minutes, with the parts most estimates forget. It uses the rates the studio prints next to the Generate button, so the figures are the ones you will actually be charged.

Step 1: count the finals

Start with the deliverables, not the attempts. Write down how many finished pictures the job needs and at what size. A web banner and a print poster are different line items: the poster wants the top quality setting on Still, up to 2K, while a banner is fine one step down. If the brief has not decided the sizes yet, decide them now, because quality is the single biggest lever on the price.

Step 2: add the drafts

Before a final there are drafts: the renders you make to find the composition, the palette and the angle. On a job with a clear brief, three to five drafts per final is normal. On an open brief, where the client will recognise the right picture when they see it, plan for ten. Drafts belong on Still Lite, from €0.30 each, where a miss costs little and a hit can be re-rendered on the better model.

Step 3: add the re-rolls

This is the part people leave out and then feel cheated by. Even a good prompt on a good model produces a share of renders you will not use: a hand with six fingers, a label spelled wrong, a shadow going the wrong way. Call it the re-roll rate. For clean product and landscape work it is low; for scenes with people, text or many small objects it is high. A practical rule: budget one and a half renders for every final you keep, and two for the difficult subjects the hands and text guide describes.

Step 4: write the quote sheet

Now the arithmetic is small enough to do on paper. For each final: the number of drafts times the draft rate, plus the number of final attempts times the final rate. Add the lines up. A worked example for a twelve-scene catalogue, clean brief, no people:

1. 01Drafts: twelve scenes, four drafts each, forty-eight renders on Still Lite at €0.30.
2. 02Finals: twelve scenes, one and a half attempts each, eighteen renders on Still at €0.40.
3. 03Margin: add a fifth on top. The client will ask for one more angle. They always do.

Multiply each line out at the rates the composer shows you, add the margin, and you have a number you can put in a message to the client with a straight face. It will usually be a small one next to the quote a photographer would have sent, which is the point of the pay-per-render model.

Step 5: check the number while you work

Estimating is only useful if you can see when you drift from it. In the studio every render shows its price before you confirm it, the balance in the sidebar updates after each one, and a render that fails is returned to the balance, so an error never counts against the budget. If you are halfway through the finals and have spent two thirds of the quote, you know in time to simplify the remaining scenes rather than after the invoice.

Where estimates go wrong

• Quoting at the draft rate. Drafts are cheap; finals are not. The final rate on the top quality setting, €0.60, is what the deliverable actually costs.
• Forgetting the second round. A client who sees twelve pictures will want to change three. Put the margin in before you need it.
• Pricing people like products. Faces, hands and groups re-roll far more often than a bottle on a table. Double the attempt count for them.
• Treating every scene as new. Once one scene lands, the next ones can start from it as a reference, which brings the draft count down for the rest of the set.

What the method cannot tell you

It cannot predict a brief that changes halfway. It cannot promise that a specific logo or a long line of text will come out letter-perfect, so set those in your own editor and do not budget renders for them. And it is a quote for pictures, not for video: a clip is priced per second and resolution, which the video model guide covers separately. Check the current rates, fill in your own counts, and the number is yours.