1,500-SKU catalog: cutouts $33.75, plus $15 to $60 for hero upscales
For 1,500 SKUs, cutouts cost $33.75. Upscaling 5, 10 or 20 percent as heroes adds $15, $30 or $60. Totals $48.75, $63.75, $93.75; upscaling all is $333.75.
A 1,500-SKU catalog costs $33.75 to cut out (1,500 x $0.0225). Whether it costs $48.75, $63.75 or $93.75 depends on the share of SKUs you upscale as heroes: 5, 10 or 20 percent at $0.20 each. Upscaling every SKU adds $300 and brings the total to $333.75.
The sensitivity table
The cutout price is fixed per image and the upscale is fixed per image, so the only variable is the hero share. Fix the share in your plan before you start, because it controls 31 to 90 percent of the bill.
| Hero share | Upscales | Upscale cost | Cutouts | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0% | 0 | $0 | $33.75 | $33.75 |
| 5% | 75 | $15.00 | $33.75 | $48.75 |
| 10% | 150 | $30.00 | $33.75 | $63.75 |
| 20% | 300 | $60.00 | $33.75 | $93.75 |
| 100% | 1,500 | $300.00 | $33.75 | $333.75 |
How to pick the share
Rank SKUs by what they earn, and upscale down the list until the next product's gross margin is less than the cost of its upscale. At $0.20, the upscale pays for itself on a product that sells a single extra unit at a few dollars margin, so the real constraint is review time and not money.
A cleaner rule is placement. A product that appears in a hero banner, a category tile or a paid ad gets the upscale. Everything else stays at its cutout resolution. For most catalogs this is under 10 percent.
Running 1,500 jobs safely
Break the run into queues of about 100 SKUs and keep a ledger with SKU, step, job id and status. Use an idempotency key like sku-01234-rmbg-v1, where the version suffix lets you intentionally redo a step after you change a source photo.
Watch the first 100 results before you launch the rest. A bad batch of source photos, such as ones with a color-matched backdrop, can waste a good share of $33.75 if you never look. After the run, add up usage.cost and compare with the table. Pricing for other sizes is in the 10, 100 and 1,000 file sheet.
A note on the 100 percent row
The last row exists to show the ceiling, not to suggest a plan. Upscaling 1,500 images at $0.20 is $300, nine times the price of the cutouts. If you find yourself planning for it, check whether a regeneration at a larger size from the image API is cheaper for those SKUs. At the GPT Image 2.5 4K row of $0.2225, it is not, but at the Nano Banana 2.1 2K price of $0.15 it is, and you get a new image, not the same photo made larger.
Photos of real products usually need the upscale, since a regeneration is a different object. That is why a hero share, and not a blanket rule, is the right way to plan.
Sources
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