When I launched NEXT U, I led with "no subscription pay per ad, not per month." It felt like the obvious differentiator. Every competitor charges $19 89/mo. We charge per generation, 1 credit = $0.01, only on success.

Then I watched people actually use the product. Nobody mentioned pricing first. What they talked about was: "I just answered some questions and it made the whole ad for me." The guided questionnaire. The auto-generated copy. The fact that a finished video came out without touching an editor.

Most AI video tools give you clips, images, and a copy deck then leave you in a timeline editor to assemble the final thing. That last mile is where people quit.

NEXT U skips it entirely. Once the guided questionnaire is done, the platform writes the copy, generates the images, scores the music, and automatically edits everything into one finished video. Vertical and horizontal. Ready to download and post.

NEXT U goes live here tomorrow (July 30). Before that, one decision I'd like someone to argue with me about.

The interface ships in English, , and . Four languages, solo maker, zero paying customers. Every launch guide says pick one market and go deep.

My reasoning: I'm in Taipei. My first users are far more likely to be in Asia than in San Francisco, and an English-only tool is a hard sell to a shop owner in Taichung or Osaka. Localising later means retrofitting it into every component, which is worse than doing it up front.

The counter-argument I can't answer: four languages means four sets of copy to keep correct, and I still have no idea which one converts.

Every AI tool I admire ships a blank prompt box. I shipped a wizard instead: product photo copy images video + music finished MP4. Four fixed steps.

The trade-off is real. Power users hate being walked through things, you lose the "type anything" magic, and every step is one more place to drop out.

I built it this way after making ads by hand for a friend's e-commerce store. The bottleneck was never the tools it was that we didn't know what the ad should be until we'd already made three bad ones. A blank box doesn't help with that. A wizard at least makes the decisions in an order that works.

Still might be wrong about this.

Every AI ad tool I tested starts the same way: a blank text box and a blinking cursor. Write your prompt. Be specific. Include your target audience, tone, platform

I built NEXT U the opposite way. There is no prompt box. You upload a product photo and answer a short guided questionnaire what you're selling, who you're selling to, which platform. That's it. NEXT U writes the ad copy for you, picks the visuals, scores the music, and edits everything into one finished video.

I went with credits for NEXT U (AI ad generation): 1 credit = $0.01, no monthly fee, and you're only charged when a generation succeeds failures refund automatically.

The honest downside: metered pricing makes people hesitate before every click. A subscription makes them forget they're paying, which is better for my revenue and arguably worse for them.

I picked credits anyway, because I'm the guy with four AI subscriptions he used twice last month.

But I keep second-guessing it. If you're paying for AI tools right now do you actually prefer per-use, or do you just say you do?