tl:dr; We’ve been making photo apps for iOS for long enough that we have gray hairs now, and using our experience we ran over 600 image generations to compare which AI models work best for which image edits. If you want, you can jump right to the image comparisons, or the conclusion, but promise us you won’t presumptuous comments on Hacker News until you’ve also read the background!
Background
Hi! We’re LateNiteSoft, and we’ve been working on photography-related iOS apps for 15 years now. Working on market-leading apps such as Camera+, Photon and REC, we’ve always had our finger on the pulse on what users want out of their mobile photography.
With the ground-breaking release of OpenAI’s gpt-image-1 image generation model earlier this year, we started investigating all the interesting use cases we could think of for AI image editing.
But as a company that has never taken any venture capital investment, all our products have to pay for themselves. We’re in it to delight our users, not just capture market share and sell them out. When considering AI projects, one thing has been clear – we can’t take the AI startup road where you have a generous free tier, charge an unreasonably small monthly fee for “unlimited”, and hope you’re going to make it up on scale (code for “someone please acquire us”).
All the AI-focused billing systems we could find out there were based on this. Assuming you want to claim unlimited access, and then sandbag users with “fair use” clauses and prevent them from any actual unlimited usage (which is, obviously, untenable, since you’ll end up with one $20/mo user reselling to everyone else).
Since we want to fairly charge our customers for what they actually use, we’ve built a credit-based “pay per generation”-style billing system (that internally we’ve been calling CreditProxy). We’ve also been planning on providing this as a service, since nobody else seems to be doing it, so if you’re interested in being a trial user, get in touch!
We released our app MorphAI as a public proof of concept to give CreditProxy a proper real world-test, and have marketed it to the users of Camera+, which includes traditional photo-editing functionality, including a whole host of popular photo filters, giving us a built-in audience of customers ready for the next step in image editing.
With the release of newer models like nanoBanana and Seedream, we’ve had to consider which models make sense to support. We need to explore the trade-offs between quality, prompt complexity, and pricing.
A couple of hastily-hacked together scripts, and many, many AI generation credits later, we have some results! So that everyone else also doesn’t have to waste their money, we figured we’d share what we found:
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