u/Watermelon_Sherbert

Hey guys. I need to ask you something because I genuinely don't know what to do here. I work for a contractor who's been my friend for years. We both share a passion for cars and became friends before we even started working together. One day my company let me go, and he was the one who helped me get back on my feet.

Before I get into my rant, I want to say I'm truly grateful to this guy for trusting me for over 18 months now. He referred me to another business and I ended up making a nice chunk of money from it. We've actually done well together. We live in a well known high income community in Texas, and the average lead here brings home a lot of net profit. He's probably the most expensive remodeler in the area. But after a few months of being fully booked (tariffs hit right around the same time, of course) things started going south. We saw a real drop in leads, and to try to stop the bleeding I put in the work to sharpen my skills and build newer ads for the company, different angles, different setups, whatever I could think of. Business was going through a rough patch, so I ran a bunch of trials trying to improve our ads across every platform you can think of.

I ended up getting a Magnific subscription for image and video generation to improve our ads, and I also got ChatGPT Pro for extra help with the social media stuff and to test some agentic capabilities. I ended up switching to Claude because ChatGPT was giving me pretty useless output, and I spent a little over $70 total between all three subscriptions. I didn't ask to get reimbursed because I didn't want to sound like a petty bitch, but now we're in a new month and he's still asking for more AI videos, more ideas, more things he wants to try. We have a limited $600 ad budget, and I get paid a fixed $1,000 a month, which doesn't go any higher, not even counting taxes or other expenses (internet, driving to the office a couple times a month, days out shooting, then editing).

I think the question here is pretty clear. Do I just take this hit as a normal part of the job and accept that my income has effectively dropped almost 10%? Or do I tell him "hey brother, you literally just got a new F250, would you help me out with this?" (side note: he really did buy a new F250) while my wife is pregnant and we're expecting our kid by the end of September. He's got another employee in Mexico who told me the same thing, been with him since 2019 and never gotten a single raise. In my case, counting every client and side gig I've got,I'm averaging around $3k a month now.

So please, Reddit, help me figure this out. I don,t want to lose my job, a friend, or both.

So I've been using FloraFauna AI mainly for motion design since their video tools are pretty solid, especially when it comes to smooth transitions and dynamic effects that feel more intuitive than some competitors. But I recently stumbled on Magnific, which, from what I gather, used to be Freepik before they rebranded, and it’s like this all-in-one AI creative hub with a massive library and a bunch of models for video, image, and even audio generation. They’ve got stuff like Veo 3 for video and Flux 2 for images, plus integration with ElevenLabs for audio-all under one subscription. It sounds promising for someone like me who needs more than just video tools, but I’m not sure if it’s genuinely as polished or if it’s trying to do too much at once. FloraFauna feels way more focused and specialized, which is nice when you want deep customization on motion stuff. Has anyone switched between the two or used Magnific enough to know if it’s worth consolidating everything, or is FloraFauna still king for motion?