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The numbers behind AI-model businesses.

For people running, or deciding whether to run, an AI creator account. What the work costs, what Fanvue and the platforms around it require this month, and which workflows survive contact with volume. Every figure carries its grade.

The market, as reported
Fanvue ARR, May 2026
$200MEstimate
Monthly active users
17MEstimate
Share of revenue from AI creators
~15%Estimate

Sacra, retrieved Aug 2026

02

Where to start

AnalysisMethod, not benchmark
Economics
EconomicsAnalysisEditor's pick

Chat labour: the cost that decides whether this business works

Messaging is where a large share of creator revenue is generated, which means someone has to be in the conversation. That person is the largest controllable cost in this business and the one almost nobody models before they hit it.

  • Why chat cost scales with success, and arrives exactly when you conclude the model works
  • The three staffing models, and the constraint each one trades away
  • Cost per dollar of chat-attributable revenue: how to calculate it and why nobody publishes it

Read the guide →

03

Decide, build, run

Starting from nothing, this is the order we would take it in.

  1. 01

    Decide

    Whether the numbers work, before you spend three months finding out.

  2. 02

    Build

    Getting a character to hold its face across a whole library, on a pipeline you control.

  3. 03

    Run

    Channels that survive moderation, and messaging that pays for the hours it eats.

The Professor · Creator Playbook

Your AI model, from zero to paid.

One page per step, in order, with a checklist at the foot of each. Setup runs to about an afternoon, then twenty minutes a day. You need an email, a phone, one face you never change, and roughly $20 of credits.

7 steps · 9 pages · PDF

Open the playbook

The short way in

OnlyNudesHosted AI character studio

A browser-based AI character studio. No GPU to rent, no ComfyUI graph to debug, no adapter to train before you have anything to publish. It is the shortest route from an idea for a character to a set of images you could actually post.

Free · no signup · runs in your browser

Cost per usable image

Nearly everyone measures cost per generated image, which is the wrong denominator. What decides your content economics is what you pay for the images you can actually publish. The calculator applies your own keeper rate to both the rented-GPU and the per-image-API side, which is the comparison most write-ups skip.

Worked example

$0.0082

per publishable image

Keeper rate
70%
Images / hour
120
GPU rate
$0.69/hr
Cost per generated
$0.0058
04

Recently published

  • 01

    OnlyNudes quick start

    What a hosted AI studio costs per render, the sequence to follow, and the three signals that mean you have outgrown it. Worked from published credit prices.

    ProductionTutorial6 min
  • 02

    Chat labour economics

    The three ways to staff creator messaging, what each one really costs, and the single metric that tells you whether a chatter is worth keeping.

    EconomicsAnalysis5 min
  • 03

    X as the funnel

    Why X is the most workable open acquisition channel for AI creator accounts, how the funnel is structured, and where it breaks.

    TrafficAnalysis4 min
  • 04

    Fanvue AI account setup

    The full Fanvue onboarding sequence for an AI-model account: the AI declaration, identity verification, disclosure requirements and the settings that matter.

    PlatformsTutorial6 min
  • 05

    The real cost structure

    A full cost breakdown for an AI-model creator business: generation, labour, platform fees and the line items that quietly destroy margin.

    EconomicsAnalysis9 min
  • 06

    Fanvue vs OnlyFans

    A policy-first comparison of Fanvue and OnlyFans for AI-model accounts, including why OnlyFans is not a real option for synthetic personas.

    ComparisonsComparison5 min
  • 07

    Take rates compared

    Published commission rates across the main creator subscription platforms, plus the fees that sit underneath the headline percentage.

    EconomicsAnalysis5 min
  • 08

    Fanvue payouts and fees

    A reference page for Fanvue's commission, payout timing, referral terms and affiliate programme, with the primary sources for each.

    PlatformsReference4 min
05

How to check us

Publishing standards are worth nothing if a reader cannot check them. These three are meant to be used.

Every figure carries a grade

Sourced figures link to the source. Modelled figures say they are modelled. Where we have not measured something, the page says so instead of printing a plausible number.

The methodology
Claims trace back to a primary document

Platform terms, vendor pricing pages and published company data, read and dated rather than repeated from other write-ups. Every claim on a page traces to the list at the foot of it.

How this works
Corrections are dated and kept in place

Platform terms move constantly. Pages carry the date their facts were last checked, and every edit lands in a dated revision history on the page itself.

Recent corrections