- Midjourney has no official API — any 'API access' is an unofficial third party layering fees on top of a required subscription.
- Per-image API pricing (Gemini, GPT Image, Flux) scales with output resolution — a 4K image can cost 3-5x a standard 1K image.
- Subscription models (Midjourney, some Kling tiers) make sense for steady manual use; per-image billing makes sense for bursty or automated workflows.
- Commercial usage rights are not automatic on entry-tier plans for several vendors — verify before using output in monetized or client work.
| Tool | Price | Free tier | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Midjourney (Standard)Midjourney | $30/mo | None — free trial discontinued in late 2024 | verified 35 days ago |
| Gemini 3.1 Flash ImageGoogle | ~$0.045/image (1K) | Limited free quota via Gemini API free tier | verified 35 days ago |
| DALL·E 3OpenAI | $0.04/image (1024×1024) | None for API; included in ChatGPT Plus subscription | verified today |
| Stable Image UltraStability AI | $0.08/image | 25 free credits on signup | verified today |
| Stable Image CoreStability AI | $0.03/image | 25 free credits on signup | verified today |
| Flux 1.2 ProBlack Forest Labs | $0.04/image | None confirmed | verified today |
| Ideogram 3Ideogram | $0.08/image | Limited daily free generations | verified today |
| Leonardo AILeonardo | $12/mo (Artisan) | 150 tokens/day on free plan | verified today |
Subscription vs. per-image API billing: which model fits your workflow
Image generation pricing divides sharply between subscription platforms (you pay a flat monthly fee for access and generate within a quota) and true metered APIs (you pay only for what you generate, per image or per token). Midjourney is the clearest subscription example: $30/month gets you a pool of Fast GPU hours, and at full utilization the effective per-image cost is very low — but if you only use 20% of your monthly Fast hours, your real per-image cost is 5x higher than the headline number implies. Per-image APIs like Gemini Flash Image have no fixed cost — they scale down to zero if you generate nothing — which makes them better suited to automated, bursty, or programmatic workflows where volume varies significantly month to month.
Resolution tiers and the cost multiplier most people miss
With token-billed image APIs like Gemini and GPT Image, resolution is not a free upgrade — it directly multiplies your cost because higher-resolution images require more output tokens to represent. Gemini 3.1 Flash Image charges roughly 1,120 image tokens at 1K–2K output resolution and 2,000 tokens at 4K, at a rate of $30 per million tokens. That means a 4K image costs almost double a 1K image from the same model. For applications where image quality matters less than throughput (product image variants, data augmentation, draft comps), generating at standard resolution is a straightforward way to cut image generation costs roughly in half without switching models.
The Midjourney "API" problem and why it matters for automation
Midjourney does not have an official public API. Any service marketing "Midjourney API access" is an unofficial third-party layer — typically a bot that interfaces with Midjourney's Discord interface on your behalf. This creates two real problems: reliability (unofficial wrappers can break silently when Midjourney changes its Discord interface) and cost (you're paying a markup on top of a Midjourney subscription you still need to hold). If programmatic automation is a hard requirement, Midjourney isn't a practical choice regardless of its quality reputation. The providers with real APIs — Gemini Flash Image, GPT Image, Flux — are the correct comparison set for automated pipelines.
Commercial use: don't assume it's included
Commercial usage rights for AI-generated images are not universally included at entry pricing tiers. Midjourney's terms require a Pro plan ($60/month) for companies with more than $1 million in annual gross revenue — below that threshold, the Standard tier allows commercial use, but the Basic tier ($10/month) does not grant full commercial rights for all use cases. For Gemini and other API-billed tools, commercial use is generally permitted on any paid tier. Before deploying AI-generated images in any monetized context — client work, product listings, social channels, licensed content — verify the commercial rights terms on the specific plan you're using, not the general terms for the platform.