Business model
Free to try. Paid for more.
DanceGAI is in public beta. This page explains how it works today, what it costs us, and how we intend to make it sustainable — because a tool people rely on has to be able to pay for itself. In one sentence: we use fast, low-cost AI generation to make the core experience free, and plan to charge for additional capacity, priority, creative tools and API access.
Today: free to start, paid for more
- A free account is all it takes. Sign in with osu! or email and you're on the Free plan — no payment details, no subscription standing between you and your first chart.
- Free credits that refill. Every account is on the Free plan: if your balance is below 5 on your monthly refill date, it's topped back up to 5. Credits never expire — unused ones stay yours.
- 1 credit = 1 generation — a whole mapset, every difficulty you picked, not a single chart. The same whether you upload a song or import it from an osu! beatmap link.
- Failures are on us. If a generation fails or gets stuck, it is stopped automatically and its credit is returned.
- Paid plans for more. Basic adds 30 generations a month and Premium removes the count for personal use. Downloads are free on every plan.
What a generation costs
Every mapset is generated on a cloud GPU. With version 2, a full mapset takes about 20 seconds of GPU time (typically 13–25 s, depending on the song and difficulties) — well under a cent at our provider's list price. That is GPU time, not the time you wait: uploading, preparing the audio and packaging the .osz come on top.
GPU workers scale to zero when nobody is generating, so there is no idle cost, and they start from a snapshot in about a second when someone does. A hard monthly spending cap and daily generation limits protect the service from runaway costs and abuse; if the beta ever reaches its limit, you see a clear message rather than a broken page.
This is why the speed of version 2 matters beyond convenience: when serving a mapset is fast, cheap and predictable, a generous free tier stops being a marketing expense and becomes part of the product.
Next: paying for more, not for the basics
These are plans, not features you can use yet. Prices and plan details are not final, and we will announce them here before anything changes.
- More capacity — coin top-ups and plans for players who generate more than the free monthly coins cover.
- Priority — a faster queue when the service is busy.
- Editing tools — regenerate just one section of a chart while keeping the rest, instead of starting over.
- An API for rhythm-game developers, communities and mapping tools that want to generate playable charts inside their own products.
- More games. The system is designed to extend to other vertical scrolling rhythm games and other rhythm-game modes — see our mission.
Our principles
- Trying DanceGAI stays free. Free generation is part of the mission — every song deserves a beatmap — not just a trial.
- Paid options add; they don't take away. What we charge for is more capacity, priority, convenience and new tools — not the ability to generate a chart at all.
- Build once, serve many. DanceGAI is a product, not a custom-development studio: one system, improving for every player.
- Honest about AI. We never present our charts as human-made, and uploaded songs are only used to generate your chart and are deleted after 7 days — see our privacy policy.
Business, API or partnership enquiries: founder@dancegai.com