Premium pricing protects the people who pay

We chose not to have a free tier

This is a deliberate decision, not an oversight. Here's the math:

A free tier on an AI product-photography tool attracts three populations:

1. **Tire-kickers** — generating 50 free credits, never converting. 2. **Bulk-scrape operators** — using N free accounts to extract training data or to resell our generations. 3. **Real founders** — the people we actually want.

Population 3 is roughly 5% of free signups. Populations 1 and 2 are 95%. Free credits cost us real Gemini API calls (~$0.01-0.04 per generation depending on engine). At 95% wastage, every free credit is a tax on the founders who pay us seriously.

So we picked the other model: **paid pilot, premium tiers, no free credits.**

The pricing ladder

• **Atelier** — ₹14,999/mo. 120 verified generations. Solo founders shipping their first hero.
• **Studio** — ₹54,999/mo. 600 verified generations. 5 brand vaults. Most D2C teams pick this.
• **House** — ₹1,29,999/mo. 1,800 verified generations. Unlimited vaults. Agencies running multi-brand portfolios.
• **Enterprise** — ₹2,49,999+/mo. Custom credits, SSO, on-prem verifier option, BYOK envelope encryption.

The cheapest plan is ₹14,999. That's ~$179/mo. By Indian D2C founder standards that's already premium. By Silicon Valley SaaS standards that's a Friday lunch.

Founding-member pricing

We capped founding-member pricing at 100 brands. Whoever signs up before we hit 100 locks in the v1 prices for life. After we cross 100, prices increase by ~30%.

This isn't a fake scarcity tactic. We literally don't have the operational capacity to onboard more than 100 customers personally in the first 60 days. The cap is real.

Why this protects you

The customers who pay us seriously get the rate-limit headroom they paid for.

If we had a free tier, the Gemini pool would be perpetually saturated by free users. Your generations would queue behind theirs. The judge's response time would degrade. The fidelity verifier would back up.

By keeping the user base small and the price high, we keep the system fast for the people who depend on it. Premium pricing on purpose.

What you get in return

• **Rate-limit headroom** — Atelier gets 60 requests/min on generate_image. Studio 600. House 6,000. Enterprise unbounded.
• **Priority Gemini pool** — House and Enterprise jump the queue during peak hours.
• **24-hour support SLA** — every paid tier. We respond personally for now.
• **The fidelity guarantee** — sub-75 outputs refund automatically. Your credit count only goes down when something ships.

If you ship a brand seriously, this math works for you. If you're tire-kicking, please use Pebblely — they're better at that.