Scenario AI pricing explained: A complete 2024 guide

Picking the right AI tool is a bit like buying a car. You care about what it can do, of course, but the price tag is a huge part of the decision. Scenario AI is a popular platform for creative teams, especially in gaming, for churning out high-quality visuals. But when you look at its pricing, things can get a little fuzzy.

This guide is here to give you a clear, no-nonsense breakdown of the Scenario AI pricing model. We’ll dig into the different plans, explain their credit-based "Compute Unit" system, and help you figure out if it actually makes sense for your budget. For a lot of teams, trying to budget with a credit system is a headache, so let’s get a handle on the true cost before you pull out your credit card.

What is Scenario AI?

Scenario is a generative AI engine designed to help creative teams produce visual assets that all share a consistent style. Think of it as an AI assistant that can whip up new images, videos, and 3D models for your project, ensuring they all look like they belong in the same universe. It’s a favorite among game developers, art directors, and marketing teams who need a ton of on-brand visuals without starting from scratch every time.

The platform’s real magic is its ability to train custom AI models on your own art. You can feed it your existing character designs, environments, and props, and Scenario learns to generate brand-new assets that match that unique look and feel. This helps teams ramp up production without losing the artistic consistency that defines their brand.

This video provides a powerful overview of Scenario's suite of AI tools, which are designed to help you create consistent, high-quality AI-generated visuals with unparalleled control.

A deep dive into the Scenario AI pricing plans

Scenario runs on a hybrid pricing model. You pay a monthly subscription fee, which gets you a bucket of "Compute Units" (CUs). These are basically credits you spend to get the AI to do things. Let’s break down what you get with each plan.

The Free Plan

• Cost: $0

• Credits: 50 daily credits.

• Best for: Anyone who just wants to kick the tires and see what the platform is all about without any financial commitment.

• Limitations: The daily credit limit is pretty tight for any serious work. It’s enough to experiment, but you’ll run out quickly if you’re trying to build a real project. You also miss out on the more advanced stuff like training your own models.

The Starter Plan

• Cost: $15 per month, or $10 per month if you pay for the year.

• Credits: 1,500 monthly Compute Units.

• Key features: This plan gets you access to the core AI models, lets you make your generations private (so they aren’t public), gives you access to community support on Discord, and includes 50 GB of storage.

• Best for: Casual creators, hobbyists, and freelancers who need a bit more runway than the free plan offers.

The Pro Plan

• Cost: $45 per month, or $30 per month if billed annually.

• Credits: 5,000 monthly Compute Units.

• Key features: This is where things get interesting for professionals. The Pro plan is what unlocks the ability to train your own custom models. You also get access to more advanced generation and editing tools, a priority queue so your jobs run faster, and unlimited "relaxed" generations (which are slower but don’t cost CUs). Storage also gets a nice bump to 500 GB.

• Best for: Professional artists and designers who need to generate assets in their own unique style and can’t afford to wait in line.

The Max Plan

• Cost: $75 per month (or $50 per month annually), plus a fee for each additional user.

• Credits: 10,000 monthly Compute Units, which are pooled for the whole team.

• Key features: This plan is all about teamwork. It adds multi-user workspaces, team management features, activity dashboards, a high-priority queue for processing, and 1 TB of starting storage.

• Best for: Small to mid-sized creative studios where multiple people need to collaborate on projects and share a pool of credits.

The Enterprise Plan

• Cost: Custom pricing, starting around $125 per user per month (billed annually).

• Credits: A flexible, pay-as-you-go model for compute power.

• Key features: The Enterprise plan is the full package for big operations. It includes security features like SSO and SOC 2 compliance, a dedicated account team with Slack support, custom integrations, advanced dashboards, and better rates on compute usage.

• Best for: Large game studios and companies generating assets at a massive scale who need top-tier security and support.

Feature	Starter	Pro	Max	Enterprise
Price (Annual)	$10/mo	$30/mo	$50/mo	Custom
Monthly CUs	1,500	5,000	10,000 (Pooled)	Flexible
Train Custom Models	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Target User	Casual Creators	Professionals	Small Teams	Large Organizations
Support	Community	Ticket	Priority Ticket	Dedicated Account Team

Understanding Compute Units

Compute Units are the currency you use inside Scenario. Every time you generate an image, upscale a design, or train a model, it costs you a certain number of CUs. This system gives you flexibility, but it can also make it tough to predict your monthly spending.

Here’s the catch, and it’s a big one: your CUs don’t roll over. If you don’t use up your credits by the end of the month, they disappear. This is a really important detail, because it means you have to get pretty good at estimating your usage to get your money’s worth.

To give you a rough idea, here’s what things might cost:

• Generating a standard image: Around 5 CUs

• Upscaling an image: Roughly 15 CUs

• Training a custom model: Anywhere from 100 to 500+ CUs

Scenario offers a couple of tools to help you keep costs in check. If you’re using the API, you can add a "?dryRun=true" parameter](https://docs.scenario.com/page/api-pricing) to a request to see how many CUs it would cost without actually spending them. Inside the web app, there’s also a "Cost Calculator" in the settings to help you estimate your monthly spend.

While this pay-as-you-go model can work for creative projects with fluctuating needs, it can also lead to some bill shock. For other parts of a business, like customer support or IT, where you absolutely need predictable costs, this kind of model is usually not the best fit.

Is the Scenario AI pricing model the right fit for your business?

So, the big question: is Scenario’s platform and pricing the right choice for you? It really boils down to the problem you’re trying to solve.

Who is the Scenario AI platform built for?

Scenario is laser-focused on creative professionals. If you’re an art director, game developer, or marketer who needs to produce a lot of visuals that all look like they came from the same artist, it’s a seriously powerful tool. Its main strengths are the fine-tuned control it gives you over visual style and the variety of models available for creative work.

Limitations to think about

• Unpredictable costs: The Compute Unit system is the biggest hurdle for businesses. It’s tough to forecast your expenses accurately. A busy month with a looming deadline could lead to a spike in asset creation, and you could find yourself with a surprisingly high bill or needing to buy more credits at a premium.

• It’s a specialist: Scenario is fantastic at what it does, but what it does is very specific: generate creative assets. It’s not designed to automate other business tasks, like answering customer support tickets, fielding internal questions from your team, or routing service requests.

An alternative to Scenario AI pricing: A look at eesel AI

While Scenario is great at creating what your customers see, other AI platforms are built to automate how you support them. For day-to-day operations like customer service, IT support, and internal help desks, the priorities are totally different. You need predictability, efficiency, and something that works with the tools you already have. This is where a platform like eesel AI comes into the picture.

Unlike the variable, credit-based Scenario AI pricing, eesel AI offers straightforward plans based on a set number of AI interactions each month. You know exactly what you’re paying, and you don’t have to worry that a busy support week will send your budget into a tailspin.

A screenshot of eesel AI's straightforward pricing plans, which offer a predictable alternative to the variable Scenario AI pricing model.::

Here are a few other ways they differ:

• Go live in minutes, not months: eesel AI is completely self-serve. You can sign up and connect it to your help desk with a single click. There are no mandatory sales demos or complicated setup projects, which is a big change from the time it takes to properly train and test a custom creative model.

• It learns from all your knowledge: While Scenario trains on your art, eesel AI learns from your team’s collective knowledge. It connects to your past support tickets, internal wikis in Confluence or Google Docs, and your public help center to solve real customer and employee problems.

• Try it risk-free: Before you even switch it on for real users, eesel AI can run a simulation using your past support tickets. This shows you exactly how it would have performed and what your potential savings look like, so you can move forward with confidence.

The eesel AI simulation feature, which shows how the AI would have resolved past support tickets, providing a risk-free performance preview.::

	Scenario AI	eesel AI
Primary Use Case	Creative asset generation (images, video)	Customer service & IT support automation
Pricing Model	Subscription + Variable Compute Units	Fixed monthly fee for a set # of interactions
Key Strength	Style consistency & creative control	Predictable costs & rapid, self-serve setup
Best For	Art Directors, Game Devs	Support, IT, and Operations Leaders

Scenario AI pricing: Choosing the right tool for the job

Scenario AI is a powerful, specialized tool for creative teams. If your job is to produce beautiful, on-brand visuals at scale, it’s one of the best options available. That said, its Scenario AI pricing model, which is based on credits you have to use or lose, requires you to keep a close eye on your spending.

At the end of the day, the "best" AI platform is the one that’s built for the job you need it to do. For creating visual assets, Scenario is a top contender. But for automating the operational side of your business, like customer support or internal IT, a platform with transparent pricing and a focus on business workflows is a much safer bet.

If your goal is to cut down on support tickets, give your agents the right answers instantly, and automate repetitive tasks with a predictable return on investment, then it makes sense to use a tool designed for exactly that. You can see how eesel AI can transform your support workflows with a free trial.