Frequently asked questions
Everything you need to know before getting started.
Getting started
What is AakrutiAI?+
AakrutiAI is a studio-grade AI content suite for YouTube, Shorts, and Reels creators. Its core tool generates click-worthy thumbnails from a YouTube link or uploaded video: it reads the video, writes a hook line that matches the content, and composites your face — kept consistent by a 3-pass face-identity pipeline — onto a niche-appropriate background, delivering ready-to-upload variants in about two minutes. Paid plans add an AI Video Editor (auto-zoom, captions, AI b-roll) and Magic Clips, which cuts a long video into ranked, ready-to-post Shorts. Hook text works in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and 10+ other languages, and billing is native INR (UPI, cards, net-banking) or USD for international creators.
Do I need any design experience?+
No design experience is needed. The workflow is deliberately simple: pick a template from the 40+ options organised by niche and format, add one to three reference photos of yourself once, and paste your video link or type your topic. AakrutiAI handles everything a designer would normally do by hand — composition, background generation, typography, colour contrast, and hook-text placement. You choose between the generated variants rather than assembling anything yourself. There are no layers, no font hunting, and no canvas to manage. Creators who do have design skills can still fine-tune results with the built-in AI edit step, which accepts plain-language instructions like "make the background darker" or "move the text to the left."
Is there a free plan?+
Yes. Signing up is free, requires no credit card, and includes 10 thumbnail generations per month on the Free Trial plan so you can judge output quality on your own content before paying anything. Free-plan exports are 720p and carry a small watermark. When you outgrow it, Pro is ₹599 per month with 100 thumbnails, all templates, watermark-free HD export, the AI Video Editor and Magic Clips; Pro Max is ₹999 per month with 500 thumbnails plus API access and team collaboration. Yearly billing gives two months free — you pay for 10 months and get 12. Full details are on the pricing page.
Credits & billing
How do credits work?+
Every plan grants a monthly pool of credits, and each thumbnail generation consumes one credit. A single generation is not a single image: it returns multiple distinct variants — different hook text, layout, and colour treatments of your chosen template — and you download the ones you like, so one credit typically yields several usable options. The Free Trial includes 10 credits per month, Pro includes 100, and Pro Max includes 500. Credits refresh at the start of each billing cycle, including monthly refreshes inside a yearly subscription. Re-editing an existing thumbnail with the AI edit step is separate from generation and does not consume a full generation credit.
What happens to unused credits?+
On current plans, unused credits do not roll over — each billing cycle starts with the plan's full allowance rather than an accumulating balance. This keeps pricing simple and predictable: you always know a cycle starts with 10, 100, or 500 generations depending on your plan. If you consistently finish a month with a large unused balance, the smaller plan probably fits you better, and downgrading takes effect from the next cycle with no penalty. If you consistently run out mid-month, upgrading applies immediately. The exact terms shown at checkout for your plan are the authoritative version if anything here ever differs.
Which payment methods are supported?+
Payments in India run through Easebuzz, an RBI-regulated Indian payment gateway, and support UPI (Google Pay, PhonePe, Paytm and any UPI app), debit and credit cards, net-banking, and popular wallets — prices are in INR with GST included, and there are no foreign-exchange conversion fees. Creators outside India pay in USD via international credit or debit cards, also processed through Easebuzz's cross-border rails. The site auto-detects your country and shows the right currency, and you can switch manually on the pricing page. Subscriptions renew automatically each month or year depending on the billing cycle you choose, and you can cancel renewal at any time from Settings.
Can I get a refund?+
Yes — every paid plan comes with a 100% money-back guarantee, no questions asked. If you don't like AakrutiAI, go to Settings → Money-back guarantee and click Request a refund: your most recent subscription payment is refunded in full, with no form to fill and no reason required. Refunds are initiated within 3 working days and reach your original payment method or UPI within 7–10 working days depending on your bank. Duplicate or failed charges — you were charged but credits were not delivered — are likewise refunded in full; write to [email protected] with the payment reference if that happens. The policy page documents timelines and details in full.
How do I cancel?+
Cancelling takes under a minute and needs no email or phone call: go to Settings → Billing → Cancel inside your account. Cancellation stops the next renewal charge; it does not cut off access immediately. You keep your plan's features and remaining credits until the end of the billing period you already paid for, and on a yearly plan your monthly credit refreshes continue for the remainder of the paid year. After the period ends, the account drops to the Free Trial plan rather than being deleted, so your generated thumbnails and settings remain available. You can resubscribe at any time and pick up where you left off.
AI & face consistency
Which AI models power AakrutiAI?+
Thumbnail generation runs on Google's Gemini image models: the templated pipeline uses Gemini's flash-class image model tuned for speed and face-identity preservation, while the freeform generator uses Gemini's pro-class image model for stronger multilingual text rendering, including Devanagari and other Indic scripts. Finishing passes run on Replicate — most notably Real-ESRGAN upscaling so final exports land at up to 4K resolution. Video features add Gemini's reasoning models for scene analysis and viral-title writing, plus Whisper-class speech recognition for transcription. Model choices are locked behind internal quality evaluations — particularly a face-accuracy eval — so a model swap only ships when it measurably beats the current one.
Will my face look the same across different thumbnails?+
Yes — face consistency is the core engineering problem AakrutiAI is built around. Most AI image tools re-imagine a slightly different person in every generation, which makes a channel grid look disjointed and erodes the viewer recognition a creator's brand depends on. AakrutiAI runs a dedicated 3-pass pipeline instead: the first pass generates the scene, the second composites your actual face from your reference photos with a strict likeness requirement, and the third enhances the image while explicitly protecting facial identity. The result is that thumbnail number 200 looks like the same person as thumbnail number 1, across different expressions, backgrounds, and templates.
What if I don't want my real face used?+
You can use AakrutiAI entirely without a face. Skip the face-reference step during onboarding and generate with text-forward, icon-based, or faceless templates — there are nine dedicated faceless template styles designed for tutorial, ranking, news, and explainer formats where a face adds nothing. This suits faceless channels (finance explainers, tech news, listicles, devotional content) and creators who prefer privacy. Alternatively, some creators generate one stylised avatar they are comfortable with and reuse it as their consistent visual identity. You can add face photos later at any time from Settings if you change your mind, and remove them just as easily.
Is my uploaded content used to train AI models?+
No. Your face photos, uploaded videos, and generated thumbnails are used only to fulfil the specific generation requests you make. When you generate, your inputs are sent to the AI providers (Google Gemini, Replicate) solely to produce your output, under API terms that do not grant them training rights over API content. AakrutiAI does not train its own models on customer data, does not sell your content, and does not use one customer's uploads to improve another customer's results. Face photos live in access-controlled storage tied to your account and are deleted when you delete them or your account — see the Privacy Policy for retention specifics.
Content & usage rights
Who owns the thumbnails I generate?+
You do. Thumbnails you generate with AakrutiAI are yours to use commercially — on YouTube, Instagram, in advertising, on merchandise, anywhere — without attribution and without additional licensing fees, subject to our Terms of Service and the underlying AI providers' terms. This applies to both free and paid plans; the difference is that free-plan exports carry a small watermark while paid exports are clean. AakrutiAI retains no ownership claim over your outputs and will never resell or redistribute them. The only carve-outs are the acceptable-use rules: outputs that infringe someone else's rights were never yours to license in the first place.
Can I generate thumbnails with other people's faces?+
Only with their explicit consent. Uploading someone else's photo as a face reference is permitted when that person has genuinely agreed — a co-host, a collaborator, a client whose channel you manage. Generating imagery of real people without permission violates our Terms of Service and may violate law in your jurisdiction, including India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, publicity and defamation law, and platform policies on manipulated media. The upload gate also automatically rejects certain categories outright, such as photos of minors and illustrated or logo faces. If we receive a substantiated complaint that a face was used without consent, the offending content and account are subject to removal.
Are there any prohibited uses?+
Yes. The Acceptable Use section of the Terms of Service is the authoritative list, but the summary is: no unlawful content, no hateful or harassing material, no sexually explicit content, no deceptive or misleading media — including thumbnails designed to impersonate another creator or fabricate events — and no content that infringes copyright, trademark, or personality rights. Election-related deception and non-consensual imagery of real people are treated especially strictly. Thumbnails are inherently persuasive media, and the line we hold is honest exaggeration (bold, dramatic, curiosity-driven) versus fabrication (claiming things the video does not contain). Violations can result in content removal and account termination.
Privacy & security
How is my data protected?+
All traffic runs over TLS in transit, stored data is encrypted at rest where the underlying provider supports it, passwords are hashed (never stored in plain text), and internal access is role-based with the principle of least privilege. Uploads are validated and sanitised at the edge, connected-platform OAuth tokens are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, and the application sits behind independent security reviews — OWASP-style vulnerability assessments have been run and their findings remediated. Face photos are stored in access-controlled buckets scoped to your account. India-specific compliance, including DPDP Act 2023 obligations and the designated Grievance Officer contact, is documented in the Privacy Policy.
How do I delete my account and data?+
Email [email protected] from your registered email address and request deletion, or use the in-app account deletion option where available. We delete your account and associated content — face photos, uploaded videos, generated thumbnails, and profile data — within 30 days of a verified request, except for records we are legally required to retain, such as tax and payment records mandated by Indian law. Deletion is permanent and cannot be undone, so download any thumbnails you want to keep first. If you only want to remove face photos while keeping the account, you can do that yourself from Settings at any time.
Where do I report a security issue?+
Report suspected vulnerabilities to [email protected] with enough detail to reproduce the issue — affected URL or endpoint, steps, and impact. We ask for responsible disclosure: give us a reasonable window to investigate and fix the issue before any public disclosure, and do not access other users' data while demonstrating a finding. Security reports are triaged with priority over general support mail, and genuine findings get a direct response from the team rather than a canned reply. We appreciate researchers who follow this process and will credit meaningful reports if you want attribution once the fix has shipped.
Support
How do I get help?+
Email [email protected] and a human replies within two working days — usually faster. Include the email address you registered with and, if your question is about a specific generation, the approximate time it ran, which helps us find the exact request in our logs. The same address handles product questions, bug reports, billing issues, and account problems, so you never have to guess which inbox is right. Common questions about credits, refunds, cancellation, and face photos are answered on this page and on the pricing page, which is often faster than waiting for a reply. The Contact page lists every support channel in one place.
Do you offer team or enterprise plans?+
Yes. Pro Max (₹999 per month, or ₹9,999 per year with two months free) is built for teams and power users: 500 thumbnail generations a month, every template plus custom template requests, API access for programmatic generation, team collaboration, and dedicated support. Agencies managing multiple creator channels typically run each client's face references under one Pro Max workspace. If your volume or workflow goes beyond what Pro Max covers — higher generation ceilings, custom integrations, invoicing requirements — email [email protected] with a sketch of what you need and we will put together a custom quote rather than forcing you into a fixed tier.
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