How AI Pricing Works

Both providers work the same way at the top level: you put money in, and it is drawn down as you use it. There is no subscription, no monthly minimum, and nothing is charged if you do not use the tools.

What differs is how each kind of job is measured.

Language: priced per token

The Assistant and Flow Studio AI are billed by the token, a chunk of text roughly the size of a short word or part of one.

Two things follow from that. First, you pay for the answer as well as the question, and a long answer costs more than a short one. Second, a conversation is charged cumulatively: each new message carries the earlier turns along as context, so a long thread costs more per message than a fresh one. Starting a new conversation when you change subject is the cheapest habit there is.

Prices vary enormously between models: the range between a small open model and a frontier one is not a few percent, it is orders of magnitude.

Images, video and 3D: priced per generation

Generative AI is billed per output. An image has a fixed price for a given model and resolution; video is more expensive and usually scales with duration; 3D reconstruction is its own rate.

Here the number of attempts is what drives the bill. Refining a prompt through ten variations costs ten generations, so it pays to be specific in the prompt rather than to iterate blindly.

Where to see the actual prices

Both providers publish a full price list per model, and it is the authoritative source, rates change as models are released and retired:

• OpenRouter: openrouter.ai/models shows the per-token price of every model alongside its capabilities.
• fal.ai: fal.ai/models lists each image, video and 3D model with its per-generation cost.

Nothing is spent in the background

RhinoArtisan does not make AI calls on its own. Every charge corresponds to something you asked for: a message sent, a script generated, an image produced. Closing the panel spends nothing, and leaving RhinoArtisan open overnight spends nothing.