A failed render puts the credits back by itself

Generative rendering fails sometimes. A provider times out, a model refuses a script, a set comes back four photos short. The interesting question is not whether that happens — it does, to everyone, on every tool of this kind — but what it costs you when it does, and that is a question most tools answer in a support article rather than in the product.

There is nothing to file

The first thing to know is that no action is required of you. When a render is marked failed, the credits it cost are added back to your balance inside the same database transaction that writes the failure. Not after a review, not after a ticket, not after somebody reads your note. The row that says the render failed and the row that says your balance went up are written together or not at all.

This is worth saying plainly because the site also describes a process where you DO have to ask — an earlier post, "report the object, not the picture", covers reporting a render whose product drifted. The two are easy to confuse and they apply to opposite cases. A claim is for a render that arrived and is wrong about your product. This is for a render that never arrived at all, and it needs no claim because there is nothing to adjudicate.

A film returns all of it, even the part that worked

A longer film is rendered in segments, one after another, and it can die on any of them. A forty-second film that produced three segments and failed on the fourth has genuinely cost real money to produce — and you are refunded the whole thing anyway. The refund is the amount the job was charged, read back off the job itself, not a share of it calculated from how far it got.

That is a deliberate asymmetry and it is worth understanding rather than just enjoying, because it explains the shape of everything else here. A film is one deliverable. Three quarters of a film is not three quarters of a thing you can publish; it is nothing you can publish. So the unit of refund is the unit of delivery, and for a film that unit is the whole film.

A photo set returns by the photo

A marketing photo set is the opposite case, because it is genuinely divisible. Six photos is six independently rendered pictures, charged per picture, and four of them arriving is four usable pictures. So a set that comes back short returns one photo's worth of credits for every shot that did not arrive, and keeps charging for the ones that did.

The part that surprises people is what such a set is called afterwards. It is not filed as a failure. A set that rendered four of six is recorded as succeeded, the shoot is marked completed, and the notification says four of six are ready. Nothing in your library is coloured red. The only trace of the shortfall is the number of photos you got and a balance two photos higher than you expected.

The rule underneath is simpler than the arithmetic: a set is charged per photo up front, so whatever happens, you end up having paid for exactly the photos you received. A set that produces nothing renderable at all is the degenerate case of the same rule, and returns everything.

A free preview returns the preview

The first film on an account is a free watermarked preview, and no credit is spent on it — so when a preview fails there is no credit to return. What comes back instead is the preview entitlement itself: the counter that says you have used your free one is decremented, and you can ask for another. An earlier post, "the free preview answers one question", argues what that preview is for; this is only the footnote about what happens when it does not arrive.

A refusal is not a fault, and retrying it is the wrong move

There is one failure that behaves differently from all the others, and it is the one most likely to be mistaken for a bug. The video model has a safety filter, and it can decline a script. When that happens the render stops on the first attempt rather than being tried again, you get the credits back, and the message says the filter declined the script — not your photograph, and not anything you typed.

Stopping immediately is the whole point of treating it separately. A refusal is deterministic: the same script and the same reference photo will be refused in exactly the same way, every time. Retrying it only spends more of the provider's time to arrive at the same wall, while you sit watching a progress bar. So the remedy is not the retry button. It is asking for the film again, which produces a new script, phrased more conservatively.

In the studio the script is written for you, which is why the message is careful to say that nothing you supplied was refused — the thing that was declined is a sentence the product wrote on your behalf. If you are writing the prompt yourself, the same stop applies and the advice is the obvious one: reword it.

What is still not refundable

None of this touches taste. A render that arrives, looks like your product and is simply not the shot you hoped for has been delivered, and regenerating it is a new render at the usual price. That line — between a thing that did not arrive and a thing that arrived and disappointed you — is the one worth holding on to, because it is the line everything above is drawn around.

And one practical consequence. If a render fails and you immediately press the button again, you are not spending twice: the first attempt has already given its credits back by the time you can click anything. The common worry, that a flaky render quietly eats a balance, is the one thing that cannot happen here.