You are overpaying for Higgsfield. You don't have to!

Higgsfield is good. That is not the argument. The argument is that you are almost certainly buying it the expensive way, and the cheap way is now one paste and about ten minutes of answering questions.

This is written for someone who has never touched an API and does not want to start. You will not write a single file. You copy one block of text, paste it into an AI assistant, and answer it when it asks you things.

What it costs today

Here are their prices. This is the monthly view, not the yearly one, because that is what you pay if you want to stop whenever you like.

Most people end up on Plus. That is €59 a month, and it buys you 1,200 credits.

Now the bit the page does not put in big type. A credit is not a picture. On their own list, a good picture costs 2 credits and a five-second video costs about 7. So €59 works out at roughly 10 cents a picture and 34 cents a short video.

Those are fine numbers. The problem is what happens to the credits you do not spend.

To actually use up a €59 plan you need to make around 600 good pictures a month. That is twenty a day, every day, forever. Some people do. If you are one of them, stop reading, the plan is fine for you.

Everybody else is renting a bucket and filling an inch of it.

The same models, sold by the picture

Here is the thing that makes all of this possible. Higgsfield did not build most of the models it sells you.

Nano Banana is Google's. Kling belongs to Kuaishou. Veo is Google's too. Seedance is ByteDance. Higgsfield is a shop with a nice counter. The goods on the shelves are made by other people, and those people sell to anyone who asks, by the picture.

You do not have to go to Google directly either. Sites like fal.ai and Kie AI keep all of these models behind one login and one card, and they will happily tell you what a single picture costs before you make it.

Video is the same story. A five-second Kling clip is about 35 cents, and every extra second is about 7 cents on top.

So put the two side by side. Same month, same 20 pictures, same 3 videos.

Two dollars against fifty-nine euro. And in a month where you are busy with other things, the left column still charges you and the right one charges you nothing.

The whole setup is one paste

The old version of this note asked you to make folders and write files. Forget that. There is no reason for you to do any of it by hand, because the thing you are setting up is perfectly capable of setting itself up.

You need two things before you start, and one of them is free.

1. 01

   An AI assistant that lives in a terminal

   Claude Code is what I use, and it is what the prompt below is written for. Install it, open it inside any folder you want your pictures to live in, and that is the setup done. If you use a different one that can read files and reach the internet, it will cope.

2. 02

   A card, and about five dollars

   You will need an account at fal.ai. You do not have to go and make it now. The assistant will send you there at the right moment and tell you exactly which button to press. Five dollars on it lasts most people months.

That is the whole shopping list. Now copy this and paste it in.

Set up an image and video generation skill for me in this folder.

I am not technical. Do all of the work yourself. Ask me one question at a time, in plain English, and tell me exactly where to click when you need something from me.

Here is what I want when you are finished.

A skill at .claude/skills/generate/SKILL.md that wakes up when I say generate, make an image, make a video, make a thumbnail, or animate this.

It calls the models directly through fal.ai, and falls back to kie.ai when fal.ai does not carry the model. Look up the current model IDs and the current prices on their own sites before you write anything down. Do not trust what you already remember. The names change every few weeks.

One small file per model under .claude/skills/generate/models/, with the model ID, the price per run, the address to call, and whether it answers straight away or hands back a job you have to check on later. Start with one cheap picture model and one video model. That is enough for now.

Then these rules, written into the skill so you read them before every single job:

- Always use the cheapest provider that carries the model.
- Before any video, tell me the model, the length and the price, then stop and wait for me to say yes. One yes is one video.
- Draft on the cheap model. Only redo my favourite on the good one.
- Never describe my logo or my face in words. Use the real file from generations/refs/. If it is missing, stop and ask me for it.
- Save everything flat into generations/, no subfolders, and save a small .json next to each file holding the prompt, the model, the reference files used and the date.
- Tell me what each job cost.

Also a .env file with my keys in it and a .gitignore line that keeps it off the internet. Ask me for each key when you need it, and tell me where on the site to find it.

When it is all built, run one cheap test picture so we both know it works, and tell me what it cost.

You do not need to understand it. It is a list of instructions written the way you would brief a new assistant, and every line of it is either something you want or something that stops a bill running away from you.

Here is what happens after you press enter. It takes a few minutes, and your only job in it is to fetch one key and say yes twice.

That is it. No files were written by you, nothing was installed in the background, and the only decision you made was which site to get a key from.

What it is like to use

You talk to it. That is the whole interface. There is no dashboard, no credit counter and nothing to log into.

The stopping and asking is not politeness. It is one of the rules in the block you pasted, and it is there because video is the only part of this that can get expensive quickly. Four of the lines in that prompt are doing that job. Here is what each one is worth.

1. 01

   Ask before every video

   It has to tell you the model, the length and the price, then stop. Telling you is not permission. One yes covers one video, not an afternoon of them. Without this line, a vague request turns into six renders and four dollars.

2. 02

   Rough drafts on the cheap model

   Make ten versions at four cents each, pick your favourite, then remake that one on the good model. Forty cents plus one good one. Making all ten on the expensive model costs four times as much for a result you were always going to throw nine of away.

3. 03

   Never describe your logo

   Written descriptions come back with the wrong shape and the wrong colour, every time. Keep the real files in generations/refs/ and hand over the file itself. If it is missing, it stops and asks rather than guessing.

4. 04

   Write down what made each picture

   A small text file lands next to every image holding the exact words that made it. Six months from now a client will ask for something that matches a picture you made today, and those words will be worth more to you than the picture.

Do it today

In order, and stop when it works:

1. Open your last Higgsfield invoice. Count the pictures you actually kept. Divide.
2. Open Claude Code in any folder. An empty one is fine.
3. Copy the block above and paste it in.
4. Answer its questions. It will send you to fal.ai for a key when it needs one.
5. Ask for one picture. Check it landed in the right folder.
6. Ask for one five-second video. Check it asked you first.

Testing all of that costs about a dollar. If it works, cancel the subscription before it renews. If it does not suit how you work, you are out a dollar and you know.

This is free, and so is everything else in here. If it saved you a subscription, that is the whole point of the section.