AI photos cost cents to render. What are you paying an agency for?

Sources: Google's Gemini API pricing and OpenAI's image generation guide. If you buy model credits through OpenRouter, it passes those prices through without markup and charges 5.5% ($0.80 minimum) when you pay by card.

Here is a 30-photo set as a worked example, not a quote. At 8 renders a keeper that is 240 renders: about $16 on Nano Banana 2, or about $51 on GPT Image 2 at high quality. Even a slow job, 14 renders a keeper on GPT Image 2, stays under $89 in model fees.

A price list counts renders, and most renders get thrown away. In four campaigns we built by hand in 2026, 361 renders produced 45 photos we kept:

• Gummy supplement ads: 38 renders, 12 kept, 3.2 per keeper.
• Men's trousers on a model: 40 renders, 11 kept, 3.6 per keeper.
• Brownie food ads with motion: 120 renders, 10 kept, 12.0 per keeper.
• Surf apparel on one model across studio, cliff and ocean scenes: 163 renders, 12 kept, 13.6 per keeper.

Somebody compared all 361 against the product and the brand and threw away 316. On the surf job, the character sheet alone took 20 attempts before one was right. That looking is the first thing an agency fee pays for. The full story is in our case study of how that process became Overs.

An agency quote for AI creative covers the work around the render. At 100 Creatives that means:

• Brand intake before production: visual language, model preferences, colorways and export specs.
• Art direction. Turning your brief into shots, light, lens and palette that an image model follows.
• Casting. An approved character sheet, so the same person carries through the set.
• Selection and fixes. The tries above, plus remakes when a label, a hand or a seam drifts.
• The ads. Headlines, layouts and each placement size for Meta, TikTok and Google.
• Video. AI video ads, made with AI video tools and art-directed by our team.
• Revisions, back within 48 hours.
• A fixed total. A written quote before work starts, valid for 30 days and invoiced in advance.

Ad creative is quoted in ranges of $4,000 to $10,000, $10,000 to $25,000, $25,000 to $50,000 and $50,000+. Product photography starts at $5,000 per project, and 100-SKU apparel programmes start at $10,000. Each quote is one total for the agreed scope.

Running AI photos in-house has three cost lines:

1. A tool plan. Overs is free for 40 photos a month, $29 a month on Pro and $99 a month on Team, with unlimited photos on both paid plans (Overs pricing page, checked September 2026).
2. Model fees. $0.27 to $1.69 per usable photo at 8 tries a keeper, paid to OpenRouter on your own key. Overs adds no markup.
3. Your time. At 8 tries a keeper, 30 keepers means looking at about 240 renders, each one next to the real product.

Put together, a 30-photo set runs about $36 to $118 on Overs. That assumes the Pro plan, 3 to 14 tries per photo on Nano Banana 2 or GPT Image 2 at high quality, and about $0.20 of planning for each of three runs. The same set costs $2,026 at soona's published studio prices and $13,790 with a hired crew for one day, per Overs' guide to what a product photo shoot costs.

Overs does part of the looking for you. It plans the shots, picks the references for each photo and shows the cost before anything renders. On Pro and Team, a reviewer checks each photo against the references before you see it and retries on its own up to a limit you set. The final yes is still yours.

We make our own images in Overs, so it is the same tool behind our work. Overs is our sister product, made by 100 Creatives' founder. Try Overs free at www.overs.studio.

Worth it when you need finished ads and video every month, nobody in-house can direct and review renders, a launch date is fixed, or you run many placements that each need their own size and layout.

Not worth it when you need a handful of store-page photos a month, you have a designer who can learn a tool, or your whole budget is under $4,000. In those cases, run the photos yourself and put the difference into media.