The glass box, in writing.
Nobody makes us publish this page. We publish it because a studio that spends your money per render should be easy to check up on. Here is how Saga treats your balance, your renders, and your work — as implemented, not as aspiration.
Written like ledger entries, because they are enforced like them.
You see the dollar price before every render. The composer quotes each job at your exact settings before a cent leaves your balance. Not enough balance? Nothing renders, nothing is charged.
Your balance has no clock. No credit packs, no monthly plan quietly set to annual, no "use it by Friday". Money you top up stays on your account until you spend it — it never expires, and it is not refundable.
Failed renders refund themselves. If a job errors, everything charged for it returns to your balance without a support ticket — the refund is a code path, and it appears as its own line in your ledger.
Your renders are yours, not ours. Everything you make stays private to your account. Saga-owned demonstration assets are stored separately; customer work can appear publicly only through a separate, explicit submission licence.
Quote, charge, reconcile, refund.
Every render follows the same four-step path. The composer quotes the job live at your settings. Starting the render charges exactly that quote. When the provider reports the true final figure, your charge reconciles to it — up or down, to the micro-cent, as its own ledger line. And if the render fails, the full outstanding charge refunds automatically.
Top-ups run on Stripe; we never see your card. Daily spending caps are built in as a circuit-breaker, so a runaway loop — ours or yours — cannot drain an account. Every movement on your balance is a line you can read on your billing page.
Live rates plus one flat margin. That's the business.
Prices on the board are the model providers' own current rates plus a single flat service margin — the entire way Saga makes money. There are no other fees. When a provider reprices, our board moves with it; a render you already started keeps its quote.
When we run a promotion, it is a real discount off the same live math — the old price shows struck through next to the new one, computed from the same engine, not a marked-up "was" price invented for the sale.
Private by default, published by choice.
Renders live in your gallery behind your login and an owner-matching media session. Another user or routine administrator cannot open them, even with the file id. Nothing you make appears on the landing page, the showcase, or anywhere else public unless you separately and explicitly submit that work for publication. Ownership and licensing are spelled out in the terms of use.
The dark-pattern checklist, left blank.
- No annual-billing default. There are no subscriptions at all, so there is nothing to "accidentally" sign you up for.
- No expiring credits. We don't sell credits, and dollar balances don't have expiry dates.
- No billed failures. A render that errors is a render you didn't pay for.
- No countdown timers, no fake scarcity. If something is discounted, the board says so and shows both numbers.
- No "unlimited" with invisible throttles. Every job is metered and priced in the open instead.
Asked plainly, answered plainly.
What's the catch?
The margin. Saga charges the providers' live rates plus one flat service margin, and tries to earn it with the composer, the prompt-perfection layer, and pricing you can check. If that stops being worth it to you, your remaining balance is still yours to spend down.
Can a render cost more than the quote?
No. The quote is charged up front and reconciliation only settles to the provider's actual figure — which for estimated models can come in under the quote as easily as over. Your quote is your ceiling for that render's start price; adjustments are micro-cent settlements, shown on the ledger.
Can I check your prices without an account?
Yes. The live board is public, and so is the machine-readable meter behind it: GET https://sagastudio.app/api/pricing returns every current rate in dollars — the same call the studio makes before it charges you. Script it, audit it, quote it back at us.
What if a render succeeds but looks bad?
Model output quality varies — that's the honest reality of frontier models, and it's why prices per attempt are small and shown up front. Automatic refunds cover technical failures. We'd rather tell you that plainly than promise magic.
Who runs Saga?
A small independent studio — the composer, the pricing engine and this page are built and run by the same hands. That's why the promises here are written as code paths rather than policies: at this size, they have to be.