What is the cheapest AI image generator?
If you want the cheapest AI image generator measured honestly — dollars divided by images you can actually produce — the answer is Midjourney, at roughly one cent an image. FlowPix is about 3.6 times that. The rest of this page explains how each number was derived, why most vendors make this comparison impossible on purpose, and the narrow set of cases where paying more is rational.
LEIA ISTO PRIMEIRO
FlowPix is not the cheapest AI image generator, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. On published figures Midjourney Basic works out at roughly $0.010 an image against FlowPix Starter at about $0.036. If per-image cost is your only constraint, take Midjourney — the honest recommendation on a page like this is worth more to you than a ranking is to us.
Quanto as alternativas cobram
| Ferramenta | Plano gratuito | Pago mais barato | O que isso compra |
|---|---|---|---|
| Midjourney | None — no free trial on Discord or the website | Basic $10/mo, or $96/yr ($8/mo) | 3.3 GPU hours ≈ 250 prompts ≈ 1,000 images → about $0.010 each |
| ChatGPT (OpenAI) | Yes — image generation "limited, and slower" | Go $8/mo, Plus $20/mo | Not stated. OpenAI publishes no images-per-month figure for any tier |
| Recraft | Yes, but "No commercial use" — free images are owned by Recraft and public | Basic $12/mo, or $10/mo billed annually | 1,000 credits/mo. Credit cost per image varies by model — output not stated |
| Leonardo AI | Yes — 150 fast tokens/day. Commercial rights not stated | Essential $12/mo, or $11/mo yearly | 8,500 fast tokens/mo. Tokens per image not published — output not stated |
| Ideogram | Unverified | Unverified — pricing page blocked to automated readers, and Ideogram’s docs decline to publish figures | Unverified. Check the live page before relying on any number you read elsewhere |
Quanto o mesmo trabalho custa no FlowPix
Calculado ao vivo a partir da nossa configuração de cobrança — uma imagem no gpt-image-2 custa 4 créditos.
| Plano | Preço | Imagens / mês | Por imagem |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $16/mo | 450 | $0.036 |
| Basic | $29/mo | 875 | $0.033 |
| Pro | $69/mo | 2,250 | $0.031 |
| Ultimate | $159/mo | 5,500 | $0.029 |
Onde essa comparação deixa de valer
Only two vendors on this list publish enough to compute a price per image. Midjourney states GPU-minutes per plan and minutes per prompt, so the arithmetic is theirs, not ours. Everyone else sells credits and declines to say what a credit buys — Recraft notes costs "vary depending on the type of action and the model used", Leonardo never states tokens per image, and OpenAI publishes no figure at all. That is a choice, and it makes "cheapest" unanswerable for most of the market. Treat any article that ranks all of them by price as having invented the missing numbers.
As perguntas que as pessoas realmente fazem
What is the cheapest AI image generator?
By verified cost per image, Midjourney — its Basic plan is $10 a month for roughly 1,000 images, about a cent each, or $0.008 on annual billing. It is also the only major generator with no free tier at all, so there is nothing to try before you pay.
Is there a free AI image generator you can use commercially?
Fewer than the marketing suggests. Recraft’s free plan explicitly forbids commercial use and Recraft owns the output. Leonardo and ChatGPT have free tiers that do not state commercial rights on their pricing pages — treat that as unresolved rather than permitted. FlowPix’s 20 free credits do allow commercial use, but 20 credits is about five images.
Why is FlowPix more expensive per image?
Because it is paying third-party model vendors rather than running one model in-house, and because a chunk of what you are buying is the routing, the canvas and the replay rather than the pixels. Whether that is worth 3.6x is a real question, and for a lot of use cases the answer is no.
How do I compare AI image generators on price fairly?
Insist on output, not credits. Ask how many images the plan produces at the quality you need, whether commercial use is included, whether output is watermarked, and whether unused allowance rolls over. Any vendor that will not answer the first question has decided you should not be able to compare.