Midjourney

Midjourney fits individual creators and small studios that generate images all day: concept art, mood boards, campaign visuals. Its pricing suits that habit. Plans buy GPU time rather than a count of images, and from Standard up, image generation continues without limit in Relax mode once the Fast hours are spent, so heavy use doesn't turn into a bigger bill. Each prompt returns four options, and the Editor's inpainting, Pan, Zoom Out and layers let you rework a promising result instead of starting over.

The catches are about control. Everything you make is publicly viewable and remixable by default, and hiding it with Stealth Mode requires Pro or Mega; even then, images made in a shared Discord channel stay visible to that channel. The Terms give Midjourney a perpetual, irrevocable, sublicensable license to your content, and its training summary says user prompts and input images are used to train its models, with no opt-out stated. A company with more than $1 million a year in revenue must be on Pro or Mega to own what it creates. Teams get nothing extra, since each account is for one person, with no seat management, admin controls or SSO, and the Terms bar automated tools.

Basic costs $10 a month, or $8 a month billed yearly, but its 3.3 Fast hours have no Relax fallback, so once they're gone you buy extra time at $4 an hour (valid for 60 days) or wait for renewal. Standard, at $30 a month or $24 billed yearly, is the sensible starting point, with 15 Fast hours and unlimited Relax images. Businesses above the revenue threshold should budget for Pro: $60 a month, or $48 billed yearly, with 30 Fast hours and Stealth Mode. Refunds apply only if the account has used less than 20 GPU minutes in total.

Choose Midjourney for high-volume image work done by one person at a time. If provenance matters to your legal team, look at Adobe Express: Adobe says its current Firefly models were trained on licensed content such as Adobe Stock and public-domain material, and Express Premium costs $9.99 a month with 250 generative credits. For images that end up in social posts and slides, Canva's free plan includes up to 20 AI uses a month inside its design editor.