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Read the guideMidjourney pricing in May 2026 is structured into four monthly tiers. Basic is $10 per month, Standard is $30 per month, Pro is $60 per month, and Mega is $120 per month. All four tiers include general commercial usage rights and access to v7, v6.1, niji 6, and earlier model versions. The difference between tiers is fast GPU hours, which determine how many images you can generate at full speed, and access to stealth mode on Pro and Mega, which hides your generations from the public Midjourney community gallery. Annual billing saves 20 percent, bringing Basic to $8 per month, Standard to $24 per month, Pro to $48 per month, and Mega to $96 per month. Pricing verified May 17, 2026 against midjourney.com.
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Hobbyists, side-project creators, anyone testing whether Midjourney fits their workflow
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Regular creators, freelance designers, marketers running weekly image work, and most agency individual contributors
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Professionals shipping client work who need image privacy, NDA-bound creators, full-time AI artists
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Studios with daily heavy use, agencies producing large image batches, AI-native content businesses
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No free tier or free trial. The cheapest way in is Basic at $10 per month, prorated to your billing cycle.
Upscales (Subtle and Creative) and variations consume additional fast GPU time, so the per-month image estimates assume default workflows without heavy iteration.
Companies with over $1 million in annual revenue must subscribe to at least the Pro tier to use Midjourney commercially per the Midjourney terms of service.
Annual billing saves 20 percent across all four tiers but requires an upfront 12-month commitment, no refunds if you cancel early.
Running out of fast hours drops you into the relaxed queue, which still works but adds 1 to 10 minutes of wait per image at peak times.
Fast-hour top-ups cost $4 per hour, which is the right call for occasional surges and the wrong call for a recurring need (upgrade the tier instead).
Stealth mode is only on Pro and Mega. Basic and Standard images are visible to the entire Midjourney community by default and discoverable in the public gallery.
We verify these prices on the first weekend of each calendar quarter against midjourney.com. Last full pass: May 17, 2026. Next planned: August 1, 2026.
I have paid for Midjourney every month since the original Discord-only release in 2022. The current tier on our company card in May 2026 is Standard at $30 per month on annual billing, which works out to $24 per month effective. The reason we did not upgrade to Pro is that we rarely need stealth mode for the kind of editorial images we publish.
The single biggest pricing surprise of the last 12 months was how often we hit the fast-hour ceiling on Basic during a Midjourney v6 to v7 testing sprint. We burned 3.3 fast hours in under three days, dropped into relaxed mode, and waited 4 to 8 minutes per generation, which broke our flow. The upgrade to Standard paid for itself in saved time inside two weeks.
We tried Mega at $120 per month for one month during a heavy launch campaign and concluded that for a team of two, Standard plus occasional fast-hour top-ups at $4 per hour was the cheaper path. Mega makes sense for studios producing thousands of generations weekly, not for individual creators chasing peak velocity.
If you are picking a tier and your only Midjourney use case is image generation for a side project, start on Basic. If you generate weekly for client work, jump straight to Standard. If you ever need to keep an image private before a client review, upgrade to Pro the day you sign that client.
Midjourney Standard at $30 per month is the right pick for almost everyone who actually uses Midjourney weekly. Unlimited relaxed generations remove the anxiety about running out of fast hours mid-project, and 15 fast hours covers the time-sensitive work that triggered the subscription in the first place. Basic at $10 per month works for hobbyists who generate fewer than 200 images per month and do not need stealth mode. Pro at $60 per month is worth it the moment you have a single client who requires private generations or you cross the $1M-revenue commercial threshold. Mega at $120 per month is a studio decision, not an individual one. Annual billing is worth taking once you have used Midjourney consistently for three months, the 20 percent discount compounds fast.
Midjourney has four monthly tiers in May 2026: Basic at $10, Standard at $30, Pro at $60, and Mega at $120. Annual billing saves 20 percent, bringing the annual-equivalent monthly prices to $8, $24, $48, and $96 respectively. All four tiers include general commercial usage rights. The main step-up between tiers is fast GPU hours per month (3.3, 15, 30, 60). Pro and Mega add stealth mode, which keeps your generations private. Verified against midjourney.com on May 17, 2026.
No. Midjourney removed its public free trial in 2023 after abuse during the Pope-in-puffer-jacket viral moment. As of May 17, 2026 there is no public free trial or free tier. The cheapest way to test Midjourney is the Basic plan at $10 per month, which is prorated and cancellable monthly. If you want to try before paying, generate a few free images on DALL-E inside ChatGPT free or Ideogram free, then upgrade to Midjourney once you confirm fit.
Yes, every paid Midjourney plan grants general commercial usage rights. You own the images you generate and can use them in client work, marketing, products, and merchandise. The one caveat in the Midjourney terms is that any company with over $1 million in annual gross revenue must subscribe to at least the Pro tier ($60 per month) to use Midjourney commercially. Solo creators and small businesses below that threshold are fine on Basic or Standard.
Fast hours give you near-instant image generation, typically under 60 seconds per job. Relaxed mode queues your generation behind other relaxed jobs and takes 1 to 10 minutes per image at peak load. You get unlimited relaxed generations on Standard, Pro, and Mega. Basic has no unlimited relaxed mode, you wait in the standard queue and your monthly fast hours come from the 3.3-hour allotment. Relaxed image quality is identical to fast, only the queue time differs.
For anyone using Midjourney more than once a week, yes. The unlimited relaxed mode alone is worth the price jump because it removes the constant anxiety about burning fast hours on iterations. Standard also triples your fast hours from 3.3 to 15 per month, which covers the time-sensitive work. We recommend new subscribers start on Basic for the first month to confirm fit, then upgrade to Standard on the second month and stay there unless they need stealth mode.
Only if you need stealth mode. The Pro plan doubles your fast hours from 15 to 30 per month, which matters for power users, but the main reason creators upgrade to Pro is to hide their generations from the public Midjourney community gallery. Client work under NDA, in-progress brand assets, and personal experiments all qualify. If you do not care whether your generations are public, the extra fast hours alone rarely justify the price jump from Standard.
Stealth mode keeps every image you generate private to your account. On Basic and Standard, generations appear in the public Midjourney community gallery by default, where any other subscriber can see, like, or remix them. Stealth mode flips that off. The setting is on at the account level and applies to every job you submit while the toggle is active. Stealth mode is the single biggest reason commercial creators upgrade from Standard to Pro.
DALL-E 3 image generation is bundled with ChatGPT Plus at $20 per month, ChatGPT Pro at $200 per month, and ChatGPT Team plans, with daily caps that vary by plan. Midjourney Basic at $10 per month is cheaper than ChatGPT Plus on the surface, but ChatGPT Plus also covers a frontier text model, voice, code, and other modalities. For images alone, Midjourney wins on aesthetic quality and Discord workflow, DALL-E wins on text-in-image and easy prompt-to-result inside chat. Many creators pay for both.
Stable Diffusion is free open weights, run locally on your own GPU or through paid APIs like Stability AI Membership, fal.ai, or Replicate. The total cost of running Stable Diffusion locally depends on your hardware. A capable GPU (16 GB or more VRAM) and the electricity costs of generating thousands of images are not zero. For users who do not want to run their own pipeline, Midjourney Basic at $10 per month is cheaper than buying a GPU. For users who already have the hardware and like to tinker, Stable Diffusion is the most flexible option. We use Midjourney for client work because of speed and aesthetic consistency, and keep Stable Diffusion in our toolkit for offline experiments.
Not in the traditional sense. As of May 17, 2026 every Midjourney plan is single-seat. Teams who want shared use typically buy multiple Pro or Mega subscriptions and share an internal workflow for which seat generates which assets. Midjourney has not publicly announced an enterprise pricing tier or admin console as of the May 2026 verification window. If you need true team admin features, native SSO, and centralized billing, Adobe Firefly via Creative Cloud Teams is the closest commercial-safe alternative at this writing.
Midjourney has been stable on its $10 to $120 four-tier structure since 2023, with occasional adjustments to the fast-hour allotments and the addition of the Mega tier. The biggest pricing-relevant policy change was the $1 million revenue threshold for commercial Pro requirement, which has been in the terms since 2023. We verify these prices on the first weekend of each calendar quarter against midjourney.com. The next planned verification pass is the first weekend of August 2026. If you spot a discrepancy between this page and midjourney.com between now and then, the vendor page is canonical.
Pay monthly for the first 90 days. The 20 percent annual discount is real, bringing Basic to $8, Standard to $24, Pro to $48, and Mega to $96 per month equivalent. But Midjourney is the kind of subscription that either becomes a daily habit or fades after a project ends. After three consistent months of weekly use, switch to annual billing on the tier that fits, and budget the upfront cost. For agencies and studios with predictable demand, annual billing on Pro or Mega is an obvious win from day one.