Can You Make Money With AI Models? I Followed the Money From Fanvue to Caramels

The woman who doesn't exist

Aitana López is in her mid-twenties, lives in Barcelona, has pink hair and loves gaming and the gym. She has also never existed. She was created by The Clueless, a small Barcelona agency, and at her peak she was reportedly bringing in up to €10,000 a month from brand deals and fan subscriptions, with a more typical month closer to €3,000.

Her creator, Rubén Cruz, was refreshingly blunt about why he made her. He was tired of working with real influencers, he said, people "who have egos, who have manias, or who just want to make a lot of money by posing." So he built one who didn't.

Then there's Emily Pellegrini. Her anonymous creator says he asked ChatGPT what "the average man's dream girl" looks like, got the answer "long brown hair and long legs," and built exactly that. Within months, footballers, MMA fighters and at least one billionaire were sliding into her DMs, apparently unaware she wasn't real. She was reportedly earning more than $10,000 a month, mostly from subscriptions on Fanvue.

Stories like these are why so many people are now typing the same question into Google. When I started looking into this, the autocomplete told me more than any article: "can you make money with AI models", "do people make money with AI models", and, more than anything, "…reddit". People want to know if it's real, and they want to hear it from someone who isn't selling them a course.

So I followed the money: where it comes from, who keeps it, and what it costs to get a share.

Following the money

Almost every road leads to Fanvue. It's a London subscription platform, founded in 2020, that looks a lot like OnlyFans with one big difference: it openly welcomes creators who are entirely AI-generated. It even ran the world's first AI beauty pageant in 2024, Miss AI, which drew around 1,500 entries. The winner, Kenza Layli, is an AI influencer from Morocco.

That openness turned out to be a business model. OnlyFans requires AI content to look like a verified human creator, and Fansly banned photorealistic AI content in 2025, which left Fanvue as the main large platform where you can launch a fully synthetic character from scratch. It passed $100 million in annual revenue in early 2026, with around 17 million monthly users and 250,000 creators, and fully AI creators now account for roughly 15% of what fans spend there.

But the most revealing number I found wasn't about subscriptions at all. Fanvue says creators who use AI-assisted messaging earn 6.3 times more than those who don't.

That changes how you should picture an AI model's income. The monthly subscription is the door. The real money is in the inbox: pay-per-view photos, tips and paid messages sold one conversation at a time. Once I saw that, I stopped thinking of an AI model as a content account and started thinking of it as a sales business with a pretty face.

The job behind the pretty face

So what does it actually take to run one? Picture setting up your own Fanvue model from scratch.

First, you need a face that never changes. Followers notice when a "person" looks slightly different in every photo, and trust falls apart quickly. The standard fix is training a custom face model on a set of reference images, then generating everything from it. It works, but it's a real technical project before you've posted a single thing.

Then you need content every day, in two places. Free posts on TikTok and Instagram to bring people in, and paid content on Fanvue to keep them paying. Operators describe tool stacks of roughly $80 to $200 a month for images, video and voice, and that's before the hours of actually making and editing everything.

Then there's the inbox. If the money lives in conversations, someone has to have them, around the clock, in character. Either that's you, every evening, or it's chatters, who typically earn $3 to $8 an hour plus commission. Many models are run by agencies, and that's where the economics get uncomfortable. A BBC investigation into OnlyFans management agencies found contracts where managers took up to 70% of a creator's earnings. On OnlyFans, subscribers have even sued after realising they had been flirting with agency staff following sales scripts, not the creator they paid for.

And the ground keeps moving. Since September 2026, Instagram has been limiting the reach of accounts built around an AI persona that don't carry its new "AI-generated profile" label, starting in the US. Platform rules on AI content are changing faster than almost anything else in social media, and every change lands on whoever owns the account.

By the time I had listed it all, the "passive income" pitch looked a lot less passive. And one part of the list stood out, because it doesn't go away whichever path you choose.

The quieter way in

That's when I realised you don't have to own the model at all. You can be the person who brings the audience and let someone else do everything after the click. There are two ways to do that.

Fanvue's own programs. Fanvue has a referral scheme that pays you 5% of a creator's qualifying earnings for their first year if you recruit them to the platform. It also has a newer affiliate program, still in beta, where creators publish offers and you earn a commission when fans you send them start paying. Each creator sets their own rate, anywhere up to 50%, and you can promote up to five creators at a time, with commission capped at $50,000 per creator. You'll need your own Fanvue creator account to take part.

Caramels. Caramels is a subscription platform built entirely around AI models. Every model is created and run in-house: her personality, her look, her photos and videos, and every conversation with her subscribers. As an affiliate, you run social pages around a model, and when someone subscribes through your link, you get 25% of their subscription every month they stay. The rate is the same for every model. Anyone who clicks your link is credited to you for 90 days, and once they pay their first invoice, they're yours for good. You never answer a message, handle billing or deal with support, and the model's photos and videos, plus tools for making new content, come with the program.

Here's how the three paths compare side by side.

Running the numbers

To make this concrete, imagine your pages bring in the same 100 paying subscribers whichever path you choose.

If you run your own model at $10 a month and keep around 80%, that's roughly $800 a month before pay-per-view, which can add a lot more. From that you'd subtract your tools, chatters if you hire them (a full-time chatter costs $1,200 to $2,500 a month), and every hour you spend creating and chatting.

As a Caramels affiliate, a subscription costs €14.99 a month, so 25% comes to about €3.75 per subscriber, or around €375 a month for those same 100 people. There's nothing to subtract: no tools to pay for, no chatters, no account to run. And because it's recurring, each new subscriber stacks on top of the ones you already have.

The honest takeaway is that running your own model has the higher ceiling. The top AI creators on Fanvue reportedly make $10,000 to $20,000 or more a month. But every one of those numbers I could find came from someone treating it as a full-time business, usually with help. For most people, the better question isn't which pays more per subscriber. It's which one you'll still be doing in three months.

What I took away

I started out asking whether you can make money with AI models. You can, but the people who do aren't the ones with the most beautiful model or the cleverest prompts. They're the ones who are good at getting attention, again and again.

Aitana López's creator built her so he wouldn't have to depend on anyone else. Funnily enough, that's exactly what promoting an established model gets you too. You bring the audience; someone else worries about the face, the inbox and the platform rules.

If you're curious about this space, that's where I'd start. Promoting a model is the cheapest way to find out whether you're good at the one skill everything here depends on. If you turn out to be great at it, you'll know exactly what you're getting into before you spend a cent building your own.