Research
What we measured, and what it means for the desk.
Studies on recorded runs, and essays on how the desk works. Each has an instrument you can use on the page, and says its limits.
- Why every paid button carries its priceAn estimate you only see after you press is one you never agreed to. How the desk prices a button, why it rounds up, and why the ceiling refuses instead of warning.Finding: The chip rounds up to the cent. Past the ceiling, nothing is sent.
- How a video take is pricedThe desk’s own formulas, live — by the second, by the token, per image, per character — and the frame a bill taught us to count.Finding: Twelve seconds of Seedance, billed by the token, are 289 frames, not 288.
- The cost of a kept shotSeven video models, one anime frame, two takes each, judged blind. What a shot costs once you count only the ones a person kept.Finding: Five of seven models had no shot kept. The spend still counted.
- Agents propose. A person keeps.Why nothing an agent writes in Kiju becomes canon until a person approves it — and how the desk keeps a draft, a kept version and an approved one apart.Finding: No agent has a Keep button, or an Approve one.
- A channel is a folderWhat stays on your Mac, what leaves it and where it goes — the project folder, the keychain, the providers you chose. There is no Kiju server.Finding: Nothing goes to a Kiju server. There is none.
Every amount on these pages is a bill the studio recorded or the output of the desk’s own price functions.