Apple's AI is now pay-as-you-go. The subscription is just the base fee

Picture this. Monday you build the pitch deck. Tuesday Keynote tells you your AI allowance for the month is used up. Until now that meant waiting for the first of the month. From now on it means paying.

What Apple launched

• The pack: an Intelligence usage pack as a one-time purchase, $49.99 according to 9to5Mac. It's sold first in Logic Pro, with other Creator Studio apps expected to follow.
• How it works: the pack is only drawn down once you hit your monthly limit. Leftovers roll over and expire 12 months after purchase. No Family Sharing, and all sales are final except where the law says otherwise.
• Where: according to Apple, for subscribers in Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Mexico, the UK and the US.
• The monthly limit: at least 50 images, 250 shapes, 50 presentations of roughly 8 to 10 slides, or presenter notes for 700 slides, each if you use only that one feature.

Under the apple, OpenAI and Google do the math

What I find interesting sits in small print on the same support page: Generate Presentation runs on OpenAI, while images, shapes and presenter notes run on Google Cloud. Apple is reselling other companies' model compute under its own brand. And because every request costs money there, there's a meter.

This isn't an Apple quirk. It's the whole industry's business model arriving in its tidiest ecosystem. Just days ago, Apple was reported to be cutting its own developers' AI budgets. Now customers pay for the top-ups themselves.

The subscription price is the wrong number

My rule of thumb from AI video applies here too: allowance and follow-on price matter, not the sticker. Anyone buying Kling or Runway credits knows that. With Apple, plenty of people still budget the monthly fee and call it done.

How fast a limit can go: AppleInsider reported in February that a single Keynote presentation used 47% of one developer's monthly allowance. Apple itself says actual numbers depend on how complex the request is.

The catch

$49.99 is no drama for a creative team. The problem is visibility. Packs are tied to one Apple Account, not to a team, and they can't be shared. Give five people Creator Studio and you have five meters nobody sees in one place.

What I'd do now

• Measure before you buy. Check the usage status under Intelligence Features weekly for a month. Then you'll know whether you even hit the limit.
• Set an AI budget per head. Subscription plus expected top-ups, across all AI tools, not per app.
• Batch the expensive jobs. Generate decks from one clean brief in one pass, not in ten attempts.

Bottom line: Apple's AI has a meter now too. If all you know is the subscription price, you don't know your costs.