Mac: Apple is now selling $50 AI top-ups, but how much AI is in them?

Apple is now selling AI top-ups. Since Tuesday, November 10, subscribers to Creator Studio, the plan that brings together Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro and Pixelmator Pro, can buy “Intelligence Usage Packs” for $49.99 each when they have used up their monthly AI quota. How much AI is in a pack? Apple doesn't say. You pay fifty dollars, and we'll see. And meanwhile, according to Bloomberg, Apple itself is rationing AI for its own engineers. We've gone completely mad!

Like a phone top-up card, except you don't know how many minutes are on it

What is Creator Studio again?

It's the subscription Apple launched on January 28: $12.99 a month or 129 a year, for Final Cut Pro (video editing), Logic Pro (music), Pixelmator Pro (photo editing) and a few others, plus AI features in Keynote, Pages and Numbers. Basically, you type a sentence and the AI generates an image, a shape, or even an entire presentation with your speaker notes. In Logic Pro, an assistant gives you advice on your track. It doesn't sing in your place yet, don't worry.

These features don't run on your Mac. They go to the cloud, to Google for the images, shapes, notes and Logic Pro assistant (it's Gemini doing the work), and to OpenAI for generating the presentations. Apple spells it out in its help page : your requests are sent to them, without your IP address or Apple ID, and they aren't allowed to use them to train their models. And every request costs them money, hence the quota.

The quota, and the top-up

Every month, according to Apple's help page, the subscription gives you at least, if you use only one feature: 50 images, 250 shapes, 50 presentations of 8 to 10 slides, or speaker notes for 700 slides. For the Logic Pro assistant, it depends on the complexity of the conversation. The counter resets every month.

If you go over, here's the top-up: $49.99, one-time purchase, used only once the month's quota has run out. Whatever remains carries over from one month to the next, and everything expires twelve months after purchase. No family sharing, and no refunds, unless the law requires it. To buy it in Logic Pro, go to the Intelligence Features menu, then Show Usage, then Buy More Usage. The other apps in the plan will follow within the month.

When the monthly gauge is empty, the top-up takes over

And the detail that makes me uneasy is the quantity. Apple writes that what you get “varies according to the complexity of the request, server load and the feature used”. In other words, it's impossible to know in advance how many images or presentations you are buying with your fifty dollars. To give you an idea, a top-up costs as much as almost four months of subscription. And it promises you nothing in terms of numbers.

It reminds me of a very bad experience. At the end of the 2000s, with my brand-new iPhone, my boss got a €3,000 bill for 10 KB of data, at a time when you paid for the Internet by usage and connection time. A counter ticking away without you seeing it, that's exactly the same trap.

Mobile Internet paid by usage, at the end of the 2000s: you only saw the bill at the end

And in Belgium?

For now, top-ups are sold in eight countries: United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, France, Germany, India and Mexico. Belgium isn't on the list. My French neighbors can therefore spend fifty dollars on an unknown amount of AI, and I can't yet. I don't know whether I should be offended or relieved.

Logic Pro's assistant, for its part, currently only speaks American English, and requires an Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 27. The Keynote, Pages and Numbers generation features work on an iPhone 15 Pro or later, an iPad with at least an M1 or A17 Pro chip, or an Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 26 or later.

Apple rations its engineers, and sells extra to its customers

The juiciest part is the timing. On November 4, Bloomberg revealed that Apple had cut the daily AI budget of some of its engineers by a third, from 300 to 200 dollars a day. Six days later, Apple opens the store to sell extra AI to its customers. This isn't necessarily contradictory. It's actually pretty logical: AI costs money every time it's used, at Apple as elsewhere, and someone has to pay the bill. It's just that this time, it's written in black and white on the label.

That's actually what I find most interesting about this story. For years, we were sold AI as a feature included in the price, just like the spellchecker. Quotas and top-ups are the admission that this isn't the case. It's not software you buy once, it's a service that consumes something with every click, like electricity.

So, what are you supposed to do?

If you use Keynote, Pages or Numbers without a Creator Studio subscription, nothing changes for you: these paid AI features don't concern you.

If you're a subscriber, keep an eye on your usage in the menu provided for that purpose before starting a big project. And before taking out fifty dollars, compare: a ChatGPT or Gemini subscription costs around twenty dollars a month and also generates images. For a musician who lives in Logic Pro, the built-in assistant has its uses. To make three slide illustrations, the pack is a lot to pay.

For me, the top-up itself isn't a scandal. The real problem is buying a pack whose contents you don't know. A phone top-up at least tells you how many minutes are on it, and even my boss at the time would have understood that!

Sources

• Apple, help page: Creator Studio's intelligence features, their quotas and top-ups (in English)
• MacDailyNews, November 10, 2026: Apple launches $50 AI top-ups in Creator Studio (in English)
• Bloomberg, November 4, 2026: Apple cuts its teams' internal AI budgets (in English)

Article written with the help of Claude Code, reviewed and corrected by me.