How AI product photography cost actually works

You do not need a studio to get a studio photo: a phone picture of your product taken at home is enough to start. Introductory prices make trying it cheap, and you always see the price before you confirm.

How the cost is built

With Aaina, every finished product image costs 5 credits, shown before you press create. Nothing is charged until then, and if an image fails, its credits are returned automatically. That's the whole formula: credits used = 5 × images, where a retry counts as an image, at the same 5 credits.

One seller can buy credits in one-time packs that never expire while the account is open, so there's no monthly bill to track:

Teams can instead choose a monthly plan: Pro, ₹1,199US$35 a month for 500 credits, or Business, ₹4,799US$140 a month for 2,000 credits. Monthly credits never expire either, and the price per photo is lower. See the plans.

New accounts start with 25 free credits after verifying their email, enough for 5 photos, no card needed.

A worked example

Say you need 20 finished photos for a new SKU range, and past experience says you'll want to retry a handful, call it 4, to fix a pose or a detail.

• Images needed: 20 + 4 retries = 24
• Credits: 24 × 5 = 120
• Pack: the Seller pack, ₹399US$12 for 150 credits, covers it with 30 credits left over
• Paid now: ₹399US$12, with 30 credits left for later
• Cost per photo made: about ₹13US$0.40 (5 credits each)
• Cost per usable photo, retries included: ₹16US$0.48 (the credits used, 120, divided by the 20 photos you keep)
• Use the trial worksheet to apply the same calculation to your own attempts. This assumes each retry replaces one rejected first attempt.

If a photo fails outright rather than just looking wrong, its credits are returned, so a bad generation doesn't cost you anything; only a retry to improve a technically successful image does.

What costs nothing extra

• Downloading images, in any of Aaina's 5 shapes, alone or as a whole shoot (up to 24 at once), and the 2× upscale applied on download.
• Extra product photos: a back view or a close-up detail shot, on top of the main product photo.
• Describing a pose or scene in words inside a shoot ("Use as instruction"), rather than picking one from the catalogue.
• Sharing a shoot with a client or colleague for approval, with no account needed on their side.
• Up to 2 shared (community) pose or scene photos a day; a private one instead is 5 credits.

What a traditional shoot costs

We don't publish figures for traditional photoshoots. Rates for photographers, models, studios and stylists vary enormously by city, season and the calibre of talent you book, and we have no verified numbers to hand you. What we can do is list the components a traditional shoot's cost is usually built from, so you can price your own:

• Photographer, usually a day rate or a per-shot rate.
• Model or talent, per shoot or per garment change, plus agency fees if applicable.
• Studio or location hire, including any props and set dressing.
• Styling, hair and makeup for the model.
• Retouching, usually priced per image.
• Reshoots, when a shot doesn't work and the whole crew has to be booked again.
• Your own time coordinating the day, which has a cost even when nothing goes wrong.

Work out your own traditional cost

Get quotes for the line items below, fill in your own numbers, and divide the total by the number of usable photos the shoot will produce.

Putting the two side by side

Once you have a cost-per-photo figure for a traditional shoot from your own quotes, compare it with Aaina's, worked out the same way: total credits spent (including retries) × the price per credit for the pack you'd buy, divided by usable photos. Neither number is right for every situation; a traditional shoot can capture things AI can't (see where each one wins), and it makes sense for hero campaign imagery even where AI handles the rest of the catalogue.