Create AI images: 11 generators compared on price

What does it cost to create AI images?

The entry barrier is lower than many expect: if you only need an image now and then, the free tiers of Google Gemini, ChatGPT or Playground will do. If you work regularly, you pay between roughly five and twenty euros or dollars a month, depending on the provider. There is no ceiling at the top – Midjourney Mega costs $120, getimg.ai Ultra €210 and Adobe Firefly Premium as much as €219.98 per month.

The three hidden cost traps

First, VAT. Almost all US providers quote net prices. The advertised $10 for Midjourney Basic becomes around $11.90 once German VAT (Umsatzsteuer) of 19% is added. Recraft states this explicitly. If your credit card also charges a foreign-currency fee of one to two per cent, the amount you actually pay each month is noticeably above the list price.

Second, expiring allowances. Midjourney does not count in images but in Fast GPU hours – and unused time expires at the end of the month instead of rolling over. If you buy extra compute time, you pay $4 per hour; these extra hours expire after 60 days and are non-refundable.

Third, usage rights. A free plan is of little use if you are not allowed to use the images. On Recraft's Free plan all images are publicly visible and commercial use is excluded. On Ideogram, private generation is only possible from the Plus plan. Midjourney offers Stealth Mode, which keeps images private, only from the Pro plan at $60 a month – and companies with more than a million dollars in annual revenue have to book at least Pro anyway.

Worked example: what does a single image cost?

Because almost all providers bill in credits, the monthly price alone says little. Some providers convert their allowance into images on their own pricing page – which gives a rough price per image (entry plan with annual billing in each case, as of October 2026):

The calculation shows that the lowest monthly price is not automatically the cheapest image. Fotor is the cheapest plan on an annual subscription, but with the demanding Nano Banana Pro model it delivers only a handful of images. If you need lots of motifs, you are considerably better off with Krea, Ideogram or Playground. Ideogram also allows unlimited slower “Slow” generations. The figures are rules of thumb: depending on model, resolution and post-processing, an image uses considerably more or fewer credits.

Which tool suits which purpose?

For text in images – posters, social media graphics, logo drafts – Ideogram is the obvious choice because it renders lettering more reliably than the competition. For true vector graphics that scale without limit, there is Recraft, which outputs SVG files instead of pixel images. For product photos in an online shop, Photoroom is the specialist: cut-outs, backgrounds and batch editing instead of free-form art.

For an artistic look, Midjourney is still the best-known name, running version V8.2 by default since 24 July 2026. If you already use Photoshop or Illustrator, Adobe Firefly is the smoothest option, since generation sits right in the familiar interface. And if you only need images as a side dish to text and research, ChatGPT or Gemini covers that in a single subscription.

A market that moves fast

While researching this comparison it became clear how short-lived offers are in this market. Freepik AI now trades as Magnific. Ideogram has replaced its classic free plan with pay-as-you-go plus weekly free credits for eligible accounts. With V8.2, Midjourney replaced character and omni reference with a new Edit Model. OpenAI has introduced “Go”, a budget tier that may contain ads, Google a new entry class with “AI Plus” at €4.99, and Adobe Firefly has grown to four paid tiers plus a free one.

That argues against long commitments: the annual discount of 20 to 40% is tempting, but only makes sense if you already know the tool and are sure you will use it for twelve months. For anything you are trying out for the first time, a monthly plan is the cheaper insurance against switching providers.

What we do not rate

We deliberately excluded image-quality rankings from this comparison, as there is no objective, verifiable yardstick for them – the result depends heavily on the subject and the prompt. Nor do we make statements about server locations or GDPR (DSGVO) compliance as long as providers give no reliable information on them. The oft-cited advantage that Adobe Firefly is “trained exclusively on legally safe content” can also no longer be substantiated in that blanket form: Firefly now integrates partner models from Google, OpenAI and FLUX.