The arithmetic
You are not buying a tool.
You are renting permission.
A subscription is not the expensive part. The expensive part is that the meter runs while you experiment, the policy decides what you may deliver, and at the end of the year you own nothing you can point at. Run the numbers on your own output.
RentedOwned
Cost of one more imageAnother credit off the balanceNothing
Monthly feeRequired, foreverNone
Who decides what you may makeTheir content policyYou, within the law
Where your prompts and images goTheir servers, loggedYour hard drive, never sent
Working offlineNot possibleAlways
The same face in every shotApproximate at bestLocked, by design
A model trained on your subjectNot offeredYours, and portable
Queue at peak hoursShared with everyoneYour GPU, your queue
If the company changes its termsYou adaptNothing changes
What a year of renting costs
250
20
At that rate you are spending about GHS 740 a month to make work you never own. The bootcamp costs itself back in 4.7 months — and every image and clip after that is free.
Assuming cedis per image and cedis per five-second clip — a mid-market figure across the current paid tiers. Change both to whatever you actually pay. Running locally still costs electricity, and a GPU if you do not already own one; it does not cost you per generation.