Gathos Blog
Use cases and engineering notes on AI image, voice, video, and agent workflows.
Ecommerce · AI Catalog
The new Shopify catalog stack: 100 product shots for $18, not $7,500
Shopify stores spend an average of $1,200 per SKU on photography by the time the catalog is live. AI image generation in 2026 is good enough to replace 80% of that spend. We mapped what the new stack looks like and where it still falls short.
Apr 27, 2026
Image Gen · Pricing
Nano Banana Pro is winning quality. The cost curve is the question.
Google's Nano Banana Pro tops LMArena and the bills tell a different story at volume. We mapped the pricing curve against three real production workloads and found the break-point sits lower than most teams realise.
Apr 27, 2026
TTS · Multilingual
Why multilingual creators are quietly leaving ElevenLabs in 2026
ElevenLabs covers 32 languages and the top of those at studio quality. Creators publishing in Hindi, Tamil, Brazilian Portuguese, or Vietnamese are finding the gap between "supported" and "native-sounding" wider than the marketing implies. Here is what they are switching to and why.
Apr 27, 2026
Industry · Token Economics
Creative AI apps quietly became the highest-token-burning category on OpenRouter in two months
Between January and April 2026, OpenRouter's Creative app category went from roughly 85 billion tokens per week to over 340 billion. We pulled the numbers, talked to founders building on top of it, and mapped out what the cost math actually looks like for the apps at the top of the rankings.
Apr 26, 2026
Image Gen · Comparison
GPT-Image-2 vs Nano Banana Pro: which to pick four days after launch
OpenAI shipped GPT-Image-2 on April 21, 2026. Google's Nano Banana Pro has been the LMArena leader for months. We tested both on the same 30 prompts and broke down which job goes where, with prices as of today.
Apr 25, 2026
TTS · Pricing
ElevenLabs v3 is great. The bill is not. What teams are doing about it.
ElevenLabs v3 launched with the best English voice quality in the market and pricing that scales fast. We pulled real-world bills from 12 teams to map who stays, who switches, and where the break-even sits in 2026.
Apr 25, 2026
Engineering · Security
36% of agent skills have security flaws. Here is how to ship safe ones.
Snyk's ToxicSkills audit found 36% of public agent skills contain exploitable flaws and 13.4% contain critical ones. The Comment-and-Control attack hit Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and Copilot in April 2026. Here is what we learned writing safe Gathos skills.
Apr 25, 2026
AI Image Generation
Why AI image models still can’t render long text in 2026
Three years on from the Midjourney moment and the best image models still wreck anything past a poster headline. Here’s why that hasn’t been fixed, who got closest, and what people are doing about it.
Apr 22, 2026
Industry · Economics
The real cost of running AI content generation at scale: a 2026 breakdown
Per-image and per-character pricing looks cheap in isolation. Add retries, polling, storage, rate-limit slack, and the cost of stitching multiple providers together. The headline number stops looking representative pretty quickly.
Apr 19, 2026
Trend · Faceless YouTube
Faceless YouTube channels in 2026: real numbers, real risks, and the production stack that actually scales
Faceless YouTube has crossed from side hustle into a real industry. The top operators run 10+ channels in parallel and pull six- and seven-figure RPMs. Here’s the stack behind the boom, the platform-policy risk creators are quietly worried about, and where the real bottleneck sits.
Apr 15, 2026
Trend · Short-form Video
Short-form vertical video is now 60% of mobile attention. Here’s the AI stack creators are using.
Reels, Shorts, and TikToks now consume more daily mobile minutes than feed scrolling. The production economics have shifted to match. A 30-second vertical reel is now a sub-dollar asset, with the entire stack increasingly AI-generated. What still requires a human, and what doesn’t.
Apr 12, 2026
TTS · Voice Cloning
Voice cloning in 2026: technical reality, ethics, and the regulatory pressure quietly reshaping the market
Zero-shot voice cloning crossed the "indistinguishable from human" threshold for most listeners in 2024. The tech is now stable, the economics have collapsed, and the regulatory wave is finally arriving. Here’s what teams need to know in 2026.
Apr 8, 2026