Building Picturesque AI: one studio, 50+ models, and the plumbing nobody wants to maintain

One creative studio for images, video, music, audio, editing, upscaling, and motion control. 50+ models, one credit balance. This is mostly about how we built it and what went wrong along the way. The problem (from a dev perspective) The models are good now. That's not really the issue anymore. The issue is everything around them. Different providers, different UIs, different billing. No shared history across modalities. No easy way to go from "generate image" to "animate it" to "add music" to "upscale" without opening four tabs. We wanted one place where you could actually finish something. What the product is Picturesque has a few main pieces: Studio - tabs for image, video, audio, edit, motion control Projects + Explore - save your work, browse what other people made Workflows - node canvas where you chain models together and run the pipeline in one go Director - an agent that plans multi-step creative work, quotes credits, and runs generations for you The studio covers a lot on its own. 4K images, cinematic video with audio, Suno music, ElevenLabs TTS, Topaz upscaling, motion control, talking avatars. The annoying engineering showed up once we tried to make all of that feel like one product instead of a folder of integrations. Stack (kept boring on purpose) Frontend is React, TypeScript, Vite, React Router. Backend is Node + Express. Socket.IO for real-time updates. Supabase for Postgres and auth. S3-compatible storage for outputs and uploads. For the actual model calls we built a service layer that normalizes inputs, maps our internal model IDs to provider APIs, and handles retries/errors in one place. Media stuff runs through FFmpeg and Sharp. Nothing fancy. When you're wiring up dozens of models with different schemas and pricing rules, you don't want your infra adding more chaos. We also refactored the backend out of a single 7,700-line server.js into routes + services. Painful refactor. Would do it again immediately. The unglamorous part: 50 models, one UI