Apple Now Charges $49.99 When Its SI Helper Runs Out. The Plan Itself Is $12.99.

Apple has started charging extra when you burn through its SI help. With the latest update to Logic Pro, its music-making app for the Mac, there’s now a “Buy More Usage” button, and the only thing behind it is a $49.99 one-time “intelligence usage pack,” 9to5Mac first reported. That’s on top of the $12.99 a month people already pay for Apple Creator Studio, the subscription bundle the feature comes with.

It’s a small button with a big meaning. For years Apple sold you a phone or a computer and the smart features came along for free. This is the first time the company has put a price tag on running out of SI, and it won’t be the last app to get one.

The button inside the music app

Logic Pro picked up a built-in assistant last month. Apple says it can help “start a new song, set up a vocal track from a single prompt, or refine an active project,” as Engadget noted. To see how much of it you’ve used, you go to the Logic Pro menu, then Intelligence Features, then Show Usage. A tracker pops up, and so does the button to buy more.

How much do you get before you hit the wall? For the Logic assistant, Apple won’t give a hard number. Its support page says the limit is “impacted by the complexity of conversations you have with the assistant.” In plain English, a long back-and-forth about a tricky mix eats more than a quick question. The limit resets every month.

For the other Creator Studio tools, Apple does publish a floor. At a minimum, a subscriber can make 50 images a month, or 250 shapes, or 50 slide decks of about 8 to 10 slides each, or speaker notes for 700 slides, if they use the allowance on just one of those things. Apple adds that the real number “varies based on the complexity of the queries, server availability, and network availability.”

Fine print on the $49.99 refill

Apple’s rules on the packs are short and strict. They’re a one-time purchase, not another subscription. They don’t work with Family Sharing, so a pack belongs only to the Apple Account that was signed into iCloud when it was bought. Mom can’t buy one and let the kids use it.

The extra usage only kicks in after you’ve used up your monthly allowance. Whatever you don’t use rolls over to the next month, but it all expires 12 months after you buy it. And “all sales of intelligence usage packs are final,” Apple says, with no refunds except where the law requires them.

The packs are sold to active Creator Studio subscribers in eight countries: the U.S., Canada, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Mexico and the U.K. Apple’s support page doesn’t spell out exactly how many extra images or assistant conversations one $49.99 pack buys.

Why Apple is rationing it at all

Here’s the part most people don’t realize. A lot of this “Apple” SI isn’t running on Apple’s own brains. According to the support page, the Logic Pro assistant, image making, shape making and speaker notes are powered by Google’s Gemini. The feature that builds a whole slide deck for you is powered by OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. The Verge reported that those cloud services are exactly why the features have limits in the first place.

That makes sense when you think about it. Every time the assistant answers, somebody’s data center does the work, and that costs real money. Apple already published usage limits for some of these features in early September, The Verge said. Now it has a way to pass the bill along to the heaviest users instead of everybody.

There are hardware strings too. The Logic Pro assistant needs a Mac with Apple’s own chips running macOS 27 or later, an active iCloud account, and it works in U.S. English only.

Pixelmator, Final Cut and Pages are next

Logic Pro is only the first. The Verge reported that the “Buy More Usage” option is expected to reach other Creator Studio apps this month, including Pixelmator Pro, Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Pages, Keynote and Numbers. 9to5Mac went a step further and predicted a similar setup will likely show up for other server-based Apple features like Siri, Image Playground and photo editing tools. Apple hasn’t announced that, so treat it as a guess for now.

If you’re a regular Apple user, nothing changes tonight. Creator Studio is a paid add-on aimed at people who make music, video and presentations, and most iPhone owners have never touched it. Students and teachers get it for $2.99 a month, per Apple’s pricing page.

But the direction is clear. The free-ride era of SI features is ending, one app at a time. The good news is Apple chose a refill instead of a pricier tier, and the leftovers carry over. The bad news is that $49.99 is almost four months of the plan, and nobody has told customers exactly how much help that buys. Before you click that button, it’s worth asking.