On published prices rather than picture quality: if you generate daily in a UI, Midjourney Standard at $30/month is the cheapest tier here that includes unlimited Relax generation; under ~100 images a month, a per-image API at $0.02 costs a fraction of any subscription. We did not test output quality and this article does not rank it. We read thirteen vendors' own pricing pages on 5 September 2026. Beyond the credits and GPU time you would expect, three of them scale something no headline mentions: how many jobs you may run at once, and who can see them.
- Cheapest way to make an image at all: Google Imagen 4 Fast, $0.02 per image on the API. No free tier — Google's own pricing table lists the free column as "not available".
- Midjourney's $10 plan is 200 minutes of Fast GPU time, not a number of images, and it is the only tier with no unlimited Relax mode. Relax starts at $30.
- Privacy is a $60 feature at Midjourney. Stealth Mode, which keeps your images private, exists only on Pro and Mega.
- Concurrency is the ladder. Midjourney 3 → 12 concurrent prompts; Leonardo 2 at $12 → 3 at $30. Nobody advertises this and it is what you feel every day.
- Black Forest Labs sells no subscription at all — FLUX is pay-as-you-go, "no subscriptions, no seat fees".
- Recraft's free plan owns your output; its Basic plan is $10/month billed annually for 1,000 credits.
- The 15× gap at low volume: 100 images a month costs $2 on Imagen 4 Fast against $30 on a Midjourney Standard subscription. Above ~1,500 images the subscription wins. Which side you are on is a volume question, not a quality one.
What each AI image generator charges, and for what
Read 5 September 2026 from each vendor's own pricing page or docs. "Not published" means the vendor does not state it.
| Tool | Entry price | What the money buys | Concurrency | Privacy on the entry tier | Source (read 5 Sep 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Midjourney | $10/mo ($96/yr) | 3.3 hr/mo Fast GPU; Relax unlimited only from $30 | 3 → 12 concurrent prompts | No — Stealth Mode starts at $60 | Plan comparison, 5 Sep 2026 |
| Google Imagen 4 | $0.02/image (Fast) | Per-image API: Fast $0.02 · Standard $0.04 · Ultra $0.06 | Not published | Paid tier is excluded from product-improvement use | Gemini API pricing, 5 Sep 2026 |
| OpenAI GPT Image 2 | Per-token API | Image tokens $8.00/1M ($2.00 cached, $30.00 output) | Not published | Not published | API pricing, 5 Sep 2026 |
| Leonardo.Ai | $12/mo Essential | 8,500 fast tokens/mo, bank 25,500, 10 models, private | 2 (Premium 3; free not published) | Yes — "Creations access Private" | Pricing page, 5 Sep 2026 |
| Ideogram | $20/mo Plus | 1,000 credits/mo | Free tier is 1 running + queued | Yes — private generations are a paid feature | Pricing, 5 Sep 2026 |
| Recraft | $10/mo annual ($12 monthly) | 1,000 credits/mo; top-ups from $2/200 credits | Not published | Yes — free-plan images are owned by Recraft and public | Paid plans, 5 Sep 2026 |
| Black Forest Labs (FLUX) | Pay as you go | "No subscriptions, no seat fees. Only pay for what you generate." | Not published | Not published | Pricing, 5 Sep 2026 |
| Krea | $9/mo Basic | 5,000 units/mo; free tier is 100 units/day | Free 1 image at a time | Not published | Pricing page, 5 Sep 2026 |
| Adobe Firefly | Credits by plan | Free credits are allocated on first use and expire one month later | Not published | Not published | Credits FAQ, 5 Sep 2026 |
| Playground | Not published on the free card | Free is 10 images / 3 hours; 3 monthly runs on premium models | Slower at peak on free | Worldwide royalty-free licence on free | Pricing page, 5 Sep 2026 |
| NightCafe | Not published | 5 free credits/day on login | Not published | Not published | Pricing page, 5 Sep 2026 |
| Freepik | Not published on the free card | Per-model credit costs published for paid tiers | Not published | Not published | Pricing page, 5 Sep 2026 |
| Kavel | $19.90 credit pack | Cost shown before each run; failed jobs not charged | Free queue | "Clean downloads, no watermark" is listed on paid plans and packs, not on Free | Live config + pricing page, 5 Sep 2026 |
You are buying queue position, not images
Every paid tier here buys more output — more credits, more tokens, more GPU time. Three vendors also scale two things that no pricing headline mentions: concurrent jobs and privacy.
Midjourney publishes the ladder outright
Its plan comparison table has a row called "Maximum Concurrent Prompts (images)": 3 Fast on Basic, 3 on Standard, 12 Fast or 3 Relax on Pro and Mega. The same table puts "Stealth Mode, which keeps your images and videos private" on Pro and Mega only — so privacy is not something the $10 or $30 plans include. Fast GPU time is 3.3 hours a month on Basic, and unlimited Relax mode does not exist below the $30 Standard plan.
Leonardo sells the same axis, one step lower
Its tiers read: Free 150 tokens/day, public creations, 1 personal collection; Essential $12/mo with private creations and Max Simultaneous Generations 2; Premium $30/mo with 3, a queue of 10, and unlimited relaxed generation on select models. Same product shape, different labels — the free plan's simultaneous limit is not published.
Before comparing monthly prices, compare the concurrency row. Midjourney Basic and Leonardo Essential are $10 and $12, and both cap you at 2–3 jobs in flight. Midjourney's jump from 3 to 12 concurrent prompts happens at $60, and so does Stealth Mode.
The gap between a subscription and a per-image API
Two of the best models on this list are not sold as subscriptions at all, and that changes the arithmetic completely.
| If you generate | Google Imagen 4 Fast ($0.02/image) | Midjourney Standard ($30/mo) |
|---|---|---|
| 20 images/month | $0.40 | $30.00 |
| 100 images/month | $2.00 | $30.00 |
| 1,000 images/month | $20.00 | $30.00 (Relax unlimited) |
| 5,000 images/month | $100.00 | $30.00 |
Imagen 4 publishes $0.02 (Fast), $0.04 (Standard) and $0.06 (Ultra) per image, and its own table lists the free tier as not available. Black Forest Labs takes the same stance in words: "No subscriptions, no seat fees. Only pay for what you generate."
Below the crossover a subscription is largely paying for a user interface; above it, unlimited Relax mode is the cheaper side. That is the question behind "which is best" for a buyer — not which model draws better.
What the free tiers tell you about the paid ones
Three vendors make the trade explicit on their own pages, and it is worth reading before you subscribe:
- Recraft: free-plan images "are owned by Recraft" and are publicly visible in the community gallery. Its Basic plan is $10/month billed annually, or $12 monthly, for 1,000 credits.
- Ideogram: the free tier allows 1 running-plus-queued generation and no private generations; Plus at $20/month is listed with 1,000 credits a month.
- Google: the Gemini API pricing table lists the free tier for Imagen 4 as not available, and on that same row marks the free tier as used to improve Google products while the paid tier is not.
How we would pick
Fewer than about 100 images a month, no UI needed: an API — Imagen 4 Fast at $0.02 an image is the cheapest published figure here. Heavy daily use in a UI: Midjourney Standard at $30, because unlimited Relax mode starts there and Basic does not have it. Client work that must stay private: budget for Midjourney Pro at $60, Leonardo Essential at $12, or Ideogram Plus at $20 — privacy is a paid feature on all three. Text inside images: Ideogram — Zapier's 2026 roundup picks it for "accurate text" — at $20/month for 1,000 credits.
On Kavel the credit cost appears before each run and failed jobs are not charged: at 1K, GPT Image 2 is 10 credits, Seedream 4.0 is 20, Nano Banana Pro and Seedream 5.0 Pro are 30, Kavel Image v1 is 5 — one balance across every model on the site.
FAQ
What is the cheapest AI image generator in 2026?
Per image, Google's Imagen 4 Fast at $0.02 on the Gemini API — its own pricing table lists no free tier. Among subscriptions, Krea Basic at $9/month and Recraft Basic at $10/month billed annually are the lowest entry prices we found.
Is Midjourney worth $10 a month?
The $10 Basic plan buys 3.3 hours of Fast GPU time a month and does not include unlimited Relax mode, which starts on the $30 Standard plan. It also caps you at 3 concurrent prompts and does not include Stealth Mode. If you generate daily, the published feature ladder points at $30, not $10.
Which AI image generators keep my images private?
Not the cheap tiers. Midjourney's Stealth Mode is Pro and Mega only ($60+). Ideogram lists private generations as a paid feature. Recraft's docs say free-plan images are owned by Recraft and may appear publicly. Leonardo's $12 Essential plan lists private creations.
Should I use an API instead of a subscription?
On the two published rates in the table above, the crossover is exactly $30 ÷ $0.02 = 1,500 images a month: below it Imagen 4 Fast is cheaper, above it Midjourney Standard's unlimited Relax mode is. That arithmetic covers those two products only.
Why do the paid tiers cost so much more than the free ones if the model is the same?
The higher tiers do buy more output — more credits, tokens and GPU hours. They also buy two things the headline price never mentions: Midjourney's own table scales "Maximum Concurrent Prompts" from 3 to 12 across its range, and puts privacy on its top two tiers only.
Last updated: September 2026.
