Who pays when a generation is blocked

A generation can be refused by a vendor's own moderation after the request is accepted. Whether that costs money is published by some vendors and not others, and the three published positions do not agree. As of 2026-09-12.

Inclusion rule. Vendors publishing a moderation-billing position on a documentation or pricing page. A vendor silent on the point is recorded as silent rather than assumed to refund. Order. Alphabetical by vendor name.

1The rejection rate is somebody's cost

Every production generating dramatic material sees refusals. Where refusals are billed, the effective rate is the published rate divided by the acceptance rate, and no pricing page shows that number.

A five per cent refusal rate on a billed-refusal vendor is a five per cent price increase that will never appear in a comparison.

2Silence is the common case

Most vendors publish nothing about this. That is recorded as silence rather than as a refund policy, because assuming a refund and being wrong is the expensive direction of the error.

3Moderation is not the same as failure

A technical failure and a policy refusal are different events, and a vendor refunding one may not refund the other. Where a policy mentions only failure, it is recorded as covering failure, not as covering moderation.

4Refusals cluster, they do not spread evenly

Dramatic material concentrates refusals in particular scenes rather than distributing them across a season. A production can generate forty episodes without an issue and then lose a day on one confrontation, which makes a season-average rejection rate a poor planning number.

Where refusals are billed, that concentration also concentrates the cost.

5Published policy and observed behaviour are different things

This record holds what vendors publish. What a moderation system actually refuses is not published by anyone and cannot be recorded from documentation, so nothing here describes how strict a vendor is — only who pays when it says no.

That limit is worth stating because the two get discussed together. A vendor that refuses a great deal and refunds every refusal may cost less in practice than one that refuses rarely and bills for it, and neither half of that comparison can be read off a documentation page.

6Published material behind this entry

• Gemini API documentation
• Runway API reference

A term in this record: what it means, and what the published material says about it, each figure read on 2026-09-12. Related: AIGC label, Machine-readable.