Midjourney Pricing: Which Subscription Is Right For You?
Midjourney remains the best text-to-image generator, despite increasingly tough competition from at least 6 other models.
While Midjourney no longer offers a free trial, there are pricing plans for any budget.1
Let’s look at the available pricing tiers and see which one you should pick.
Here are quick links to each section:
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Midjourney subscription cost
At the moment, Midjourney offers the following paid plans:
Basic Plan: $10 per month ($8 if paid annually).
Standard Plan: $30 per month ($24 if paid annually).
Pro Plan: $60 per month ($48 if paid annually).
Mega Plan: $120 per month ($96 if paid annually).
Features in the price table: Explained
Here’s a quick breakdown of the first column:
Fast GPU Time: How many Fast Hours you get. Fast generations start immediately and don’t depend on Midjourney’s current GPU queue.
Relax GPU Time: “Relax mode” generations go into the public queue and depend on the bandwidth at the time. Wait times range from 0 to 10 minutes. Relax Hours don’t cost anything and are unlimited if you have a Standard Plan or above.
Stealth Mode: By default, any image you generate with Midjourney is public and can be seen by others. If you want additional privacy, you’ll need a higher-tier plan.
Maximum Concurrent Jobs: How many images Midjourney can generate at the same time.
How to pick the right Midjourney plan for you?
In my opinion, this comes down to just two questions:
How many images do you realistically expect to make in a given month?
What’s your max budget?
The rest is secondary.
Here are my tentative recommendations:
Basic Plan: The best option for casual users
This plan gives you 3.3 Fast Hours per month, which adds up to around 200 generations.
That’s plenty if all you need is some featured images for blog posts or just occasional hobby use.
It’s the plan I’m currently on, and I often even find myself with unspent hours at the end of a month.
The main downside of this plan is that—once you run out of the 3.3 monthly Fast hours—you can no longer generate any images until the next billing month begins.
(Although there are ways to top this up, see below.)
Standard Plan: The only plan most of us will ever need
This plan bumps you up to 15 Fast Hours, which is just under 1,000 generations.
That’s a whole lot.
But not only that: With the Standard Plan, even if you burn through these Fast Hours, you’ll be able to continue generating images forever at the “Relax” rate.
Sure, your images will take longer, but you won’t hit a ceiling.
So if you’re willing to wait a bit for your images, you won’t ever need a higher tier Midjourney plan.
Pro Plan: For serious, privacy-focused customers
This plan does three additional things:
Gives you 30 Fast Hours per month (twice as many as the Standard Plan)
Lets you run 12 jobs in parallel (compared to just 3 on the Standard Plan)
Enables “Stealth” mode if you want your images to be invisible to others.
This is probably best suited for:
Professional designers who will be making thousands of images and want to iterate on their generations quickly.
Businesses or other users who need their images to remain hidden for e.g. proprietary reasons.
Mega Plan: For absolute maniacs
The plan is identical to the Pro Plan but with 60 Fast Hours instead of 30.
In my book, this plan only ever makes sense if you truly need a massive amount of images every month and you need them right now!
So only go for this if you’re regularly generating 4,000 images per month and you refuse to wait for the slower “Relax” generations at any point.
Midjourney pricing FAQ
I’ve tried to pull together the most obvious questions and answers here:
Do fast hours roll over to the next month?
They don’t.
This sucks, and it’s also the reason you should pick the right plan based on your realistic monthly usage.
Otherwise, you’ll be throwing money out the window on Fast Hours you’ll never use.
How can I get additional Fast Hours?
This will be most relevant for Basic Plan users who burn through their initial 3.3 Fast Hours before the monthly quota resets. (They don’t have any unlimited Relax Hours to use.)
If that happens, you’ve got three options:
1. Upgrade to a higher plan
This only makes sense if you expect your usage to generally be this high going forward.
2. Buy more Fast Hours
You can buy additional Fast Hours for $4 per hour.
The cool thing here is that, unlike the Fast Hours included in your subscription, these additional hours don’t expire. So if you buy an extra Fast Hour just before a new month begins, you’ll be able to use this hour in addition to your standard amount.
3. Earn Fast Hours by rating images
Midjourney gives you the chance to earn one free hour per day by rating images. To get the bonus hour, you need to be among the top 2,000 raters of the day.
It’s not as difficult as it may sound. In my experience, rating around 100 images is enough to be within the top 2,000 raters. This goes quite fast, especially if you use the keyboard shortcuts.
Here’s how the process looks:
In the video, I’m using the mouse pointer to help you see what I’m doing, but I usually just stick to the “1,” “2,” and “3” keys.
What payment methods does Midjourney accept?
Midjourney relies on Stripe to process payments, which means you can use whatever payment methods Stripe supports:
VISA
Mastercard
American Express
In some regions, you can use your Google Pay or Apple Pay, too.
Sadly, Midjourney doesn’t support PayPal or wire transfers
How can I manage my account?
Go here: midjourney.com/account
On your Account page, you can do stuff like:
Update your billing method
Review your invoices
Change or cancel your plan altogether
I hope this helps you figure out which Midjourney pricing option is right for your needs.
As long as that budget is $10/month or more.