Been running Facebook and Instagram ads for my e-commerce business for 2 years now. Always struggled with creating enough ad variations to test properly. Heard about AdCreative AI from a marketing group and decided to test it out, specifically focusing on whether the pricing makes sense for small businesses.

Spoiler alert: the pricing structure is more complicated than they make it seem, and there are some hidden costs you need to know about.

AdCreative AI pricing breakdown after 6 weeks of testing

What AdCreative AI actually does: It's an AI tool that generates ad creatives (images + copy) for social media advertising. You input your brand info, product details, and it spits out dozens of ad variations in different formats for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.

The pricing plans I tested: Starter Plan ($39/month):

• 10 downloads per month

• Basic AI generated creatives

• Standard support

• This is what I started with

Professional Plan ($249/month):

• 100 downloads per month

• Advanced AI features

• Priority support

• Upgraded to this after week 3

Here's what they don't tell you upfront:

• Downloads burn fast - Each ad creative counts as 1 download, so 10 per month is basically nothing if you're testing multiple campaigns

• Quality varies wildly - Maybe 30% of generated creatives are actually usable, so you need way more downloads than expected

• No rollover credits - Unused downloads disappear at month end

• Annual discount is misleading - They advertise 40% off annual plans, but you're locked in even if the tool doesn't work for your business

My actual costs over 6 weeks:

• Week 1-3: Starter plan $39/month

• Week 4-6: Professional plan $249/month

• Total spent: $288 for 6 weeks of testing

• Usable creatives generated: 47 out of 156 total downloads

• Cost per usable creative: $6.13

What worked well:

• Speed is impressive - Can generate 20+ ad variations in under 5 minutes

• Copy quality is decent - Headlines and ad text are usually on point

• Multiple format options - Square, story, feed formats all available

• Brand consistency - Once you upload brand assets, it maintains your style

What frustrated me:

• Image placement is often terrible - Products get cropped weirdly or placed in corners

• Generic stock photo feel - Many creatives look obviously AI generated

• Limited customization - Can't fine tune specific elements after generation

• Customer support is slow - Took 3 days to get response about billing issues

• No refund policy - Stuck with subscription even if results are poor

Real performance results:

• Tested 47 AI generated creatives against 12 manually created ads

• AI ads averaged 2.3% CTR vs 3.1% for manual ads

• Cost per conversion was 18% higher with AI creatives

• Only 3 out of 47 AI ads became winning creatives in my campaigns

The honest verdict on AdCreative AI pricing: For $39/month, you're basically paying for a very limited trial. The 10 downloads disappear in days if you're seriously testing. The $249/month Professional plan gives you enough downloads to properly evaluate, but at that price point, you could hire a freelance designer for similar results.

The tool works as advertised but the quality to price ratio doesn't make sense for most small businesses. You're paying premium prices for mediocre results that still need significant manual tweaking.

Who should consider AdCreative AI:

• Agencies managing multiple client accounts

• Large e-commerce businesses with big ad budgets

• Companies that need volume over quality

Who should skip it:

• Small businesses with limited ad budgets

• Anyone expecting professional quality creatives

• Businesses that need highly customized ad content

Better alternatives I found:

• Canva Pro ($15/month) - More control, better templates, way cheaper

• Freelance designers on Fiverr - $20-50 per creative but much higher quality

• Facebook Creative Hub - Free mockup tools that work just as well

After 6 weeks, I cancelled my subscription. The pricing doesn't justify the mediocre results, especially when there are cheaper alternatives that produce better creatives.

Anyone else tested AdCreative AI recently? Curious if your experience with the pricing and quality was similar. What's your go to tool for ad creative generation?

Google’s Nano Banana image model was just released this week (Gemini 2.5 Flash Image) and I've seen some pretty crazy demos on Twitter on what people have been doing with creating and editing images.

One thing that is really interesting to me is its image fusion feature that allow you to provide two separate images in an API request and ask the model to merge them together into a final image. This has a ton of use cases for eCommerce companies where you can simply provide a picture of your product + reference images of influencers to the model and you can instantly get back ad creative. No need to pay for a photographer, book studio space, and go through the time consuming and expensive process to get these assets made.

I wanted to see if I could build a system that automates this whole process. The system starts with a simple file upload as the input to the automation and will kick everything off. After that's uploaded, it's then going to look to a Google Drive folder I've set up that has all the influencers I want to use for this batch. I then process each influencer image and will create a final output ad-creative image with the influencer holding it in their hand. In this case, I'm using a Stanley Cup as an example. The whole thing can be scaled up to handle as many images as you need, just upload more influencer reference images.

Here's a demo video that shows the inputs and outputs of what I was able to come up with: https://youtu.be/TZcn8nOJHH4

Here's how the automation works

1. Setup and Data Storage

The first step here is actually going to be sourcing all of your reference influencer images. I built this one just using Google Drive as the storage layer, but you could replace this with anything like a database, cloud bucket, or whatever best fits your needs. Google Drive is simple, and so that made sense here for my demo.

• All influencer images just get stored in a single folder.

• I source these using a royalty-free website like Unsplash, but you can also leverage other AI tools and AI models to generate hyper-realistic influencers if you want to scale this out even further and don't want to worry about loyalties.

• For each influencer you upload, that is going to control the number of outputs you get for your ad creative.

2. Workflow Trigger and Image Processing

The automation kicks off with a simple form trigger that accepts a single file upload:

• The automation starts off with a simple form trigger that accepts your product image. Once that gets uploaded, I use the extractor file node to convert that to a base64 string, which is required for using images with Gemini's API.

• After that's done, I then do a simple search node to iterate over all of the influencer photos in my Google Drive created from before. That way, we're able to get a list of file IDs we can later loop over for creating each image.

• Since that just gives back the IDs, I then need to split out and do a batch of one on top of each of those ID file IDs returned back from Google Drive. That way we can process adding our product photo into the hands of the influencer one by one.

  • And then once again, after the influencer image gets loaded or downloaded, we have to convert it to a base64 string in order to work with the Gemini API.

3. Generate the Image w/ Nano Banana

Now that we're inside the loop for our influencer image, we just download it's time to combine the base64 string we had from our product with the current influencer image. We're looping over in order to pass that off to Gemini. And so in order to do this, we're making a simple POST request to this URL: generativeai.googleapis.com/v1/models/gemini-2.5-flash-image-preview:generateContent

And then for the body, we need to provide an object that contains the contents and parts of the request. This is going to be things like the text prompt that's going to be required to tell Gemini and Nano Banana what to do. This is going to be also where we specify inline data for both images that we need to get fused together.

Here's how my request looks like in this node:

• text is the prompt to use (mine is customized for the stanley cup and setting up a good scene)

• the inline_data fields correspond to each image we need “fused” together.

  • You can actually add in more than 2 here if you need

{
  "contents": [{
    "parts": [
      { "text": "Create an image where the cup/tumbler in image 1 is being held by the person in the 2nd image (like they are about to take a drink from the cup). The person should be sitting at a table at a cafe or coffee shop and is smiling warmly while looking at the camera. This is not a professional photo, it should feel like a friend is taking a picture of the person in the 2nd image. Only return the final generated image. The angle of the image should instead by slightly at an angle from the side (vary this angle)." },
      {
        "inline_data": {
          "mime_type": "image/png",
          "data": "{{ $node['product_image_to_base64'].json.data }}"
        }
      },
      {
        "inline_data": {
          "mime_type": "image/jpeg",
          "data": "{{ $node['influencer_image_to_base_64'].json.data }}"
        }
      }
    ]
  }]
}

4. Output Processing and Storage

Once Gemini generates each ad creative, the workflow processes and saves the results back to a Google Drive folder I have specified:

• Extracts the generated image data from the API response (found under candidates.content.parts.inline_data)

• Converts the returned base64 string back into an image file format

• Uploads each generated ad creative to a designated output folder in Google Drive

• Files are automatically named with incremental numbers (Influencer Image #1, Influencer Image #2, etc.)

Workflow Link + Other Resources

• YouTube video that walks through this workflow step-by-step: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZcn8nOJHH4

• The full n8n workflow, which you can copy and paste directly into your instance, is on GitHub here: https://github.com/lucaswalter/n8n-ai-automations/blob/main/nano_banana_ad_creative_generator.json