Why Isn’t AI Usage Included in the RhinoArtisan License?

It is a fair question and it deserves a real answer rather than a line in a settings dialog.

The models are not ours to give

Every model behind the AI features is a frontier model that cannot be downloaded, packaged or resold as a file, by us or by anyone. It exists only as a service running on hardware no desktop has, and every request to it costs the provider real money.

Any software that offers you one is passing your request through to somebody else’s model. The only question is who pays, and whether a margin is added.

We could have bundled a weaker model. We chose not to.

There is a whole family of open models we could have packaged inside RhinoArtisan and run on your machine for nothing. “AI included” would have looked good on the feature list.

We tried it, and the gap is not subtle. Jewelers ask the Assistant real questions about real work: whether a wall survives casting, how a seat should sit for a given stone, what a piece weighs in 18k. A smaller model answers those fluently and wrongly, which is the worst failure mode there is on a shop floor.

Bundling would have meant a worse tool sold as a better deal.

What a flat price would actually mean

If AI were folded into the license, every user would pay for it in the price , including the ones who never open the panel. The designer generating a handful of images a year would be subsidizing the studio running hundreds a month.

Usage-based billing puts the cost where the usage is. The heavy user pays for being a heavy user; everybody else keeps their money.

RhinoArtisan takes no margin

This is the part worth reading twice. You open an account with the provider, paste the key once into Options → Integrations, and from then on you pay them directly for exactly what you use. Not a cent of it reaches us. We do not resell credits, we do not mark anything up, and we do not receive a share.

And it leaves the dial in your hands

Because the billing is yours, so is the choice. You decide which model each feature uses, and you can move it up or down whenever you like: a cheap fast one for everyday questions, a stronger one when the job earns it. Bundle a single model into the license and that choice disappears along with the invoice.

See Quality, speed and cost for how to make that trade well.