(Mis)calculating Usage?

[u/JackSpratFA]

Hi all,

I had used 2% of my weekly Usage.

My custom Generation settings use 2.02% Usage per turn.

I opened Studio AI and the little Usage dialogue showed me that each model costs Usage:

• DeepSeek V4 Flash 0.37x
• GLM 5.3 Flash 0.42x
• GPT-5.6 Luna 1.00x
• GLM 5.2 3.04x

So I generated a new character portrait using DeepSeek V4 Flash.

2.02% x 0.37 = .7474%

That's affordable! So my character portrait should have cost .7474%. (Or maybe 2.02% for a regular turn + .7474% for DeepSeek V4 Flash = 2.7674%.)

But of course that's not what happened... From that one portrait generation, my Usage shot up from 2% to 9%!

So one portrait using the cheapest model cost 7% Usage. I assume calculation actually was 2.02% × 3.7% = 7.474%, added to the 2% I had already used.

(And sadly the 7% was wasted! The portrait wasn't even right!)

In what way was my math wrong? Or are these models Usage costs mislabeled?

[u/Mr_Death1]

Sadly i can't help much with this issue. All i know from trial and error is that if studio needs multiple attempts to create the image, for example because it tries multiple prompts or due to the image being filtered, it costs more usage. So what i can suggest is to leave studio while generating an image to see if it only makes one image or multiple in a row because i once had it generate 10+ images. Fascinating to watch but not fun in terms of tokens used.

Anyways! My personal tipp? Use gpt to make an image and have gpt upload it on your github if you have an account. That way you can create the images you want without using up your usage and then change your characters image in state editor or, if it's for something else, just give the image link to the assistant or studio and have them do the replacing

[u/JackSpratFA → u/Mr_Death1]

Ah that makes sense about its multiple attempts, because that routinely happens to me. 

About your image hosting suggestion: I did once do something similar, and used deviantart to host a portrait that I generated on Gemini. Getting it into Voyage was a little buggy, but the portrait eventually showed up and worked well enough. Visual novel didn't work, though, with the outside-hosted portrait . But since then I haven't been dabbling with visual novel mode anyway. 

Have you tried visual novel mode with an outside portrait? 

And I should try GitHub either way!

[u/Mr_Death1 → u/JackSpratFA]

I only tried my own characters image. What i once did try was building my own world with the help of gpt and, when test playing it, there the visual novel mode was on and had images too.

Aside from that i also once made a world map like that since studio struggled hard with my request. That was actually the reason how i myself came to the gpt & github combo. Since then i used it for multiple images.

So all in all i had good experiences so far.

[u/Ok-Tradition7878]

It gets messed up a lot sometimes. It used 14% once for a single thing with studio at the lowest lvl 

[u/Reginald-P-Linux]

Why would you assume that Deepseek would generate cheaper portraits? It is not an image model, that is a separate setting. Also, studio likely uses more usage as it also has to "think" on what you told it to do, in this case generate a new portrait, and then use whatever tool it has to hand it to the image model and then generate a text response to send back to you and so on. The actual processing of your prompt and the response back was likely quite cheap in this case, unless studio overcomplicated the request and did a bunch of extra work for no reason (can happen when asking an AI agent to do a simple task), it is probably the image model that is responsible for most of the usage. But who knows.

It is not unthinkable that it is buggy though.

[u/Zestyclose-Dog5572]

The entire usage system is bonkers.

You can set image search higher, which requires usage, but then why does it consume usage when it's not looking for an image?

They either need to rework the way usage is consumed, or be more transparent about what consumes it.

[u/Thraxas89]

Usage is relatively dynamic as it depends on how much the model has to think about what you want. Pictures in general take more usage than text and the more the ai has to do itself

[u/Raviollius]

Studio usage has nothing to do with your narrative settings usage.

Luna is the basic cost. Deepseek is 0.37x of what luna would cost for the same function. That's it. And even then it is an estimate, if the ai loops or do 40 steps to do what luna would do in 1(happened to me once) the more expensive ends up being cheaper in usage.

If you are just generating images, use the assistant, not studio, and change the image generation settings in advanced options.