Midjourney: Is It Free, What Each Plan Costs and How It Works Now

Midjourney is an AI tool that turns a text description into images, and these days into videos too, from its own website or from Discord. Is Midjourney free? No. There's no free trial on midjourney.com or in Discord, and you need a paid plan to create anything. Plans start at $10 a month with Basic and go up to $120 with Mega. What you can do for free is browse its public gallery, which is more useful than it sounds.

What Midjourney is in 2026

If you remember Midjourney as a bot in a Discord server, where you typed /imagine and waited for four images, that version of the story is out of date. Today the main way in is the website: a Create page with a prompt bar, an Edit section, ways to organize your work, and the Personalize and Moodboards sections. Discord still works with the same subscription, but Midjourney's own docs say the Editor (cropping, panning, repainting part of an image) works better on the web.

You still get four images per prompt, and from there you can upscale one, make variations, zoom out or pan, and even turn an image into a video. The default model gets updated regularly, and you can switch to older versions if you liked their style better.

Is Midjourney free?

Short answer: no, and I'd rather tell you now than let you find out at the sign-up screen. Midjourney's docs say it plainly: "No free trial is currently available in Discord or the midjourney.com website." The only limited trial is in niji·journey, a separate app for iOS and Android focused on anime style.

What you can do without paying, or even without an account, is look around. The Explore gallery is public, with images and videos from the community, and it's the best way to judge whether Midjourney's style is what you're after. The prompt bar at the top is locked, though, and when I clicked Create, a window popped up saying plans start at $10 a month, with 20% off yearly plans, and a big "Join now" button.

To sign up, you use a Google or Discord account; there's no separate email sign-up.

Midjourney pricing

These are the prices from Midjourney's plan comparison in its docs, in US dollars. Tax is added at checkout depending on where you live. Every plan is a subscription that renews on its own until you cancel it.

On all four plans you can buy extra fast time at $4 an hour, earn free GPU time by rating images, and use your work under the same general commercial terms. One exception worth knowing: if you're a company making more than $1,000,000 a year in gross revenue, Midjourney requires Pro or Mega.

Fast hours and Relax mode, without the jargon

Sorry, this gets a little technical, but it's what actually decides which plan you need. Midjourney doesn't count images. It counts GPU time, meaning time on its servers. Fast hours give you results quickly and run out. Relax mode puts your jobs in a slower queue, but it doesn't eat into your hours, and from Standard up, images in Relax mode are unlimited.

That's why Basic is trickier than it looks. Its 3.3 fast hours are your whole budget, because there's no Relax mode: when they're gone, you wait for next month or buy more at $4 an hour. Standard is the plan where Midjourney stops feeling metered, and Pro and Mega add unlimited SD video in Relax mode plus Stealth Mode.

Who owns what you make, and who can see it

Under the general commercial terms, once you've subscribed you can use your images and videos in just about any way you want, with the revenue exception above. Privacy is a different matter. Unless you're on Pro or Mega, which include Stealth Mode, what you create can show up publicly. If you're working on a client project or anything confidential, that alone may decide your plan.

What I could see without an account

Enough to make a decision, honestly. The Explore gallery, the window that points you to the plans, and Midjourney's docs on plans, free trials, and versions are all public. What you can't see without paying is the Create page itself and how your prompts turn out. That's where the official tutorial in this review helps: it walks you through making your first image on the website.

Who Midjourney is for, and who should skip it

Midjourney makes sense if images are part of your work or a serious hobby and you care about a particular look: illustration, concept art, moodboards, social media visuals. In that case, Standard at $30 a month, with unlimited images in Relax mode, is the plan I'd start with.

Skip it if you need an image once in a while, or if you can't pay before trying. Without a free trial, you're paying to find out whether you like the results, and other tools let you test first.

Midjourney or something else?

If you want to start without paying, Leonardo.Ai has a free plan with daily tokens, and its paid plans start at $12 a month. If you already use ChatGPT, its free plan can also make images, with limits, straight from the chat. And if you'd rather pay per image than per month, Flux models are billed per image through their API.