cut two stock site subscriptions this quarter. here's what actually replaced them

TL;DR: seeing a lot of discourse about Al "replacing" creative work, so here's what it actually looks like from someone using it daily in production

been freelancing as a video editor for fashion influencers for about two years. clients shoot their own main footage, i handle the b-roll, transitional stuff, vibe clips, that kind of thing. a spinning vinyl record, steam off a coffee cup, a vintage car on an empty road. you know the type

I was carrying two stock subscriptions and the math stopped making sense a while ago. I also used to do the thing where you pull clips from Pinterest and obscure archive uploads... I'm not proud of it, and honestly the copyright enforcement on most platforms is strict enough now that its basicaly not worth the risk anymore. so about three months ago I started taking Al generation seriously as a replacement.

the client that pushed me to actualy figure this out had a very specific brief: vintage American, cinematic, think old Marlboro-era lifestyle photography. warm grain, soft shadows, that slow unhurried light. the kind of thing that costs genuinly stupid money on Getty if you want something that doesnt look like a 2009 corporate wellness shoot.

I tried a few tools. Runway is powerful but I couldnt get it to stop defaulting to dark and moody, every clip looked like a trailer for a streaming thriller. I burned more credits than I want to admit writing negative prompts trying to correct for it. maybe a prompting skill issue on my end, I dont know.

tried a couple of the faster cheaper models too and the speed was fine but the output looked like budget template stock footage. wrong kind of dated.

I'd seen one other tool mentioned in passing somewhere a few weeks earlier and ignored it. tried it eventualy becuase I was running low on useable clips and a bit desperate. first session was underwhelming, one clip had a bad stutter, I almost closed the tab. came back to it the next day for a lower-stakes project and it clicked. the vintage lighting actualy came out the way I wanted without me having to fight it. Im talking soft window light, film grain, the whole thing. I still had to bin maybe 30% of outputs for various glitches but the queue time was low enough that this was still faster than my Runway workflow.

been using it as my main b-roll source for about six weeks. cancelled one of the two stock subscriptions. not ready to cancel the second one yet because the consistancy is still unpredictable and I dont fully trust it for high-stakes deliverables. but for the volume of b-roll I turn around weekly, its saving me a real amount of money.

the honest version: its not a clean replacement, its more like a first pass. I generate a batch, keep what works, fill gaps with stock if I have to. the ratio has been shifting in favor of Al over time but I wouldnt tell someone to cancel their subscriptions on day one. (completly unrelated but if anyone has a royalty-free music bed source that isnt Epidemic Sound and doesnt cost a fortune, drop it below. thats the next cost I need to attack)

what are others doing here? curious if anyones fully cut stock or if everyones still running a hybrid like me. for all the doom posting about Al killing creative work, its actually giving freelancers like me more options and lower overhead. thats worth talking about.