How to Choose an AI Rendering Tool for Your Practice: 8 Questions to Ask

Every AI rendering tool's homepage shows the same thing: a grey box on the left, a beautiful house on the right. The demo can't tell you whether the tool will hold your geometry on the fiftieth render, what a month actually costs, or whether your client can open the result. These questions can. We've answered each one for Archify as well, including where the honest answer is "no."

1. Does it keep my geometry, and how do I know?

The single most important question. Ask for the mechanism — a structure lock, a fidelity control — and ask what happens without it. Then test it: run the same input twice and compare the buildings. Archify: Structure Lock plus a Faithful ↔ Creative slider, on by default for sketches because our own testing showed a single-storey house growing a second storey without it. It's a strong constraint, not a geometric guarantee, and we say so on the page.

2. What does it refuse to do?

A tool that claims it does everything is describing a demo. Today's image models reliably restyle, relight, and change season or time of day; they reliably fail at removing objects wholesale, changing what a room is for, and producing drawings rather than photographs. Archify built and then removed a "vacant" preset and a "room repurpose" preset because they didn't hold up. Ask any vendor what they pulled.

3. What am I actually paying per image, and per month?

Per-seat pricing hides the per-image cost; per-image pricing hides the monthly floor. Work out both. Archify: every image tool is 100 credits; Starter is $29 a month for 3,000 credits (about 30 renders, watermarked), Pro $79 for 10,000 (about 100, watermark-free). Unused credits roll over while you stay subscribed. If you'd render 300 images a month, that math matters more than any feature.

4. What's the output resolution, and is there a watermark?

Find out what the base output is, whether upscaling is included or extra, and which plans carry a watermark. Archify: a downloadable image per render, a 4K Upscaler at 2× or 4× as a separate run, and a watermark on free and Starter output that Pro and Studio remove — with the option to put your own studio branding on instead.

5. Can my client open the result without an account?

Renders are easy to send. 3D models and walkthroughs often aren't. Ask what the client receives and what they have to install. Archify: 3D models share by a private link that opens in any phone browser and places the model in AR with no app; client review rooms let a client approve or request changes without an account. Shareable 3D links are a Studio-tier feature, which we'd rather you knew before signing up than after.

6. Does it only make pictures?

A picture is the start of the job, not the deliverable. Ask what else comes out — floor plans, schedules, exports your CAD software reads. Archify's Design Studio draws a real editable 3D house and exports DXF, IFC, and GLB for free, which is the part of the product the demo never shows and the part architects end up using daily.

7. Is the marketing honest about limits?

Read the FAQ, not the hero. If every answer is yes, the vendor hasn't tested the edges or won't tell you about them. You'll find the edges on your first real project either way; better to find them on the pricing page.

8. Who owns the output, and where does my work live?

Ask whether results persist or expire, and under what licence you can use them. Archify stores every result durably after a period when provider links expired and destroyed finished work — we learned that one the hard way — and paid plans carry a commercial licence; free-account output is licensed for evaluation.