ShotProbe

What AI-generated ad creative actually costs, how often it comes back usable, and how it performs once it is spent — measured inside a production team, not from a review desk.

ShotProbe is written from inside a 50-person creative production teamwith 15 years in internet advertising. We generate ad creative with AI models because that is the job, and we keep the numbers: what a run cost, how many attempts it took to get something usable, and what the result did when it was bought against. This site is that record.

What you will find here

Cost per finished item. Billed totals from work we ran, shown with the arithmetic and the exclusions — not a price list copied from a vendor page.
Whether the output was usable. Approval rates, how many creatives never received any spend, and where the pipeline actually failed.
How it performed. AI creative against human-made creative on cost per conversion, over twelve weeks in one live account.

Every number here comes from work we did ourselves. Where a figure belongs to someone else, or is recalled from production rather than read off a ledger, the article says which — look for the tag next to the date.

Articles

What 9× the price buys in AI image generation
High quality cost 8.96× more per image and we could not reliably tell its renders from the cheap tier. The endpoint bills high by default.
2026-10-28 · original measurements
What one rejected AI shot costs
A single rejected shot added ¥0.45 to a ¥1.80 job. The retry is cheap, but knowing when to retry is not, and that is where the real cost sits.
2026-10-21 · original measurements
Why AI video is a slot machine
A video model fills in whatever you leave out. Give it five open slots and you get five coin flips. A start frame closes three of them.
2026-10-08
Why AI images get the text wrong
540 cells, two pipelines, the same reference images. The one difference we can attribute is a design choice: whether the model renders text at all.
2026-09-30 · original measurements
The same AI video model at 7.5× the price
One model, three channels, ¥0.11 to ¥0.83 per second. What changes is everything except the generated pixels: price, terms, and what you do yourself.
2026-09-23 · measured and recalled figures

All articles →

Free tool

The five-slot video prompt checklist — the structure we use before submitting any generation job. Available as a page you can keep open while writing prompts.

Following along

New measurements go up on Wednesdays. There are two ways to hear about them, and neither involves an account:

RSS — every article as it lands, in any reader.
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