What you are actually commissioning
A commission is a transaction with a person. You send photographs, somebody looks at your animal properly — at the set of the ears, the odd white patch on one foot, the way the muzzle has gone grey — and then makes something by hand. Weeks later an object arrives that has a texture and an edge and a signature on it, and did not exist before you asked for it.
That is a different purchase from a picture file, and the difference is not measured in resolution. People commission paintings for the same reason they commission anything: the making is part of what they are buying. If that sentence describes what you want, the price gap between a commission and a generated portrait is not the relevant number.
Two to four weeks is the figure that decides most of these
Almost every pet painting is bought for a date. A birthday, a Christmas, an anniversary of the day an animal arrived or the day they left. Commissions are commonly quoted at two to four weeks, and in November and December that queue gets considerably longer, which is why artists start closing their Christmas lists in October.
If you are inside that window, a commission is not a slower option — it is an unavailable one, and paying a rush fee to an artist who is already behind is how a gift arrives in January. A generated painted portrait is done in about twenty-five minutes and can be at a print shop the same evening, which is the whole of its argument on this page.
What a generated painting can and cannot claim
Regal and Storybook are rendered as paintings rather than photographs — visible brushwork, canvas texture, no lens grain — and on a good print they read as painted from across a room. They also follow your animal's markings closely, because that is the part of the product that matters, and a picture of a generic tabby is worth nothing to someone who owns a specific one.
What they are not is an original. There is no artist behind them, no hand, no single physical object, and we are not going to describe them as though there were. If somebody asks who painted it, the honest answer is that nobody did, and anyone selling you a generated image as an artist's work has taken a decision you should know about.
The version where you do both
Artists work from reference photographs, and the quality of the reference is most of what determines whether a commission comes back looking like your animal. A well-lit portrait — eyes sharp, coat detail intact, head turned the way you like it — is a much better thing to send an artist than a dim snapshot taken from standing height.
So one reasonable path is to run an order first, pick the frame and the angle you actually respond to, and then commission a painting from that. You get something to hang this week and something made by a person a month later, and you have spent less on the deciding than a rush fee would have cost you.