Midjourney

There are two things to consider: whether you are ready to pay in dollars and write prompts in English. The site opens from Russia; everything else comes down to these two conditions.

What people come to Midjourney to do and whether they get it: five common Yandex requests over a month.

Search volume - Wordstat, Russia region, 06.09.2026

Who it is for. For people who create images for work or sale and are ready for a subscription from $10 a month: designers, marketers, cover and post creators. You can create an account through Google without Discord, edit images with words instead of a brush, and Draft Mode returns 24 variations in one request.

Who else. For people already paying an aggregator for «access to Midjourney» through a subscription or tokens: Basic costs $10 directly from the vendor, while intermediaries add 22 to 44 %, and the vendor's terms threaten such accounts with a ban.

Who it is not for. For people who want to try it without a card: there has been no free trial since 28.03.2023. For people writing in Russian who want Cyrillic text in the image: the vendor recommends English and Latin script. And for people who need private images without the $60 plan: everything you create is visible to everyone by default.

A fit: section 3 takes you from sign-in to your first image. If you are choosing between it and Shedevrum, see the decision point in section 7.

What vibecoding isStarting from scratch: how to set tasks for agents with no coding experience

Three steps: describe the image, edit it with words, animate it into a video. Each one uses GPU minutes rather than image credits, and that is the main thing to understand about Midjourney.

Description. Type a phrase into the field at the top, and the default V8.2 model, the main one since 24.07.2026, returns four variants: a standard image costs 0.8 compute minutes, a 2K image costs 1.3. Draft Mode returns 24 small variants at once for 0.4 minutes, so you can explore ideas and then remake the best one at full size. Style is set with sliders and style codes, which have their own catalog with examples and a «Try Style» button.

Editing. Since 28.08.2026, images are edited with instructions: upload your own or use an existing one and write «make this car red». The editing model takes up to four references at once and replaced three former tools for transferring character, style, and texture. Areas inside the image and canvas expansion are edited in the editor, which exists only on the website.

Video. Since 18.06.2025, any image can be animated into a 480p or 720p clip, extended up to four times, and run for a maximum of 21 seconds. A batch of four clips costs 8 compute minutes at standard quality and 26 at 720p, so video uses up a subscription ten times faster than images.

Taste and Discord. Personalization remembers which images you like and adapts results; moodboards do the same using your samples. The Discord bot remains, but the editor, Draft Mode, Conversational Mode, and taste profiles work only on the website, and the vendor itself is moving users there.

Russian. Officially, non-English input is confirmed only for Conversational Mode, where a separate model turns your speech into a prompt. Regular Russian prompts are accepted, but practitioners from T—Zh to Habr agree: English is more precise, and the model sometimes treats Russian text as part of the scene and adds a Russian setting to the image. The vendor recommends Latin script for text in images; according to practitioners, Cyrillic in V8 is readable but weaker.

What the vendor itself shows. The loop above the card comes from a video on the official channel dated 26.09.2025: a website window, a grid for a sky-dragon query, hover variation and animation buttons, and an image-actions panel. That video uses the seventh model version; newer support screenshots already show 8.1. We did not run Midjourney ourselves for this task.

There is no app, just two entry points: the website and the Discord bot. From Russia, start with the website.

Step 1. Open midjourney.com and sign in through Google or Discord; the vendor has no separate username and password. The site responds from Russian addresses: a test on 06.09.2026 from Moscow and Saint Petersburg nodes received normal responses three times on the homepage, in the creation section, and in the account area, and the domain is not in the blocked-domain registry. The leading Russian Midjourney guide with 1.4 million views still says the site is unavailable from Russia, but the test does not confirm this.

Step 2. Get a subscription; without one, you cannot generate anything. The vendor accepts dollars through Stripe only, and a Russian card will not work, so you will need foreign payment. The payment screen opens on the annual tab by default, where $8 a month means $96 paid upfront for the year; the monthly price is on the neighboring tab.

Step 3. Write your first prompt in English in the field at the top and press Enter. Settings let you choose the model version, standard or 2K quality, Fast Mode with metering, or an unmetered mode with a queue of up to half an hour, available from Standard.

Old account. If you created images in Midjourney before August 2024, the vendor requires you to sign in through Discord; otherwise, your old image history will not open. Access to Discord in Russia has been restricted since 08.10.2024, so for this sign-in, change your Russian IP address to a foreign one: American, Dutch, or any other. A new Google account does not need this.

Who will see it. Everything you create appears in the public Explore section by default, including images from direct messages to the bot. Stealth Mode can hide them, but it is included only in Pro and Mega, and the vendor promises only «best efforts», not a guarantee.

Steps verified on 06.09.2026 against vendor documentation, an access test from Russian nodes, and a blocked-domain registry export

There is no way to benchmark Midjourney: the vendor has not entered its current model in either of the two main public image arenas.

Arenas. In the LMArena as of 04.09.2026, there is not a single Midjourney model among 76 participants. In Artificial Analysis, the best represented model, v7 Alpha, ranks 95th with a score of 894, while V8, V8.1, and V8.2 have not been entered. These data do not show that Midjourney generates worse images: the arenas contain its older versions.

What this means. The Discord counter includes everyone who has joined since 2020, not those who pay; the revenue figure comes from the studios' lawsuit rather than financial reporting, and the vendor does not publish its own figures. Demand in Russia for «midjourney» and «midzhorni» combined exceeds 66 thousand queries per month, while almost six thousand of them search for a free version that does not exist. Midjourney's place among image tools is shown below the card title, while the full tool ranking is on the general page.

There has been no free version since 28.03.2023, and prices have not changed since 2023: four plans from $10 to $120 a month.

Minutes, not images. A subscription buys GPU time; the vendor itself compares it to gigabytes in a mobile plan. Basic provides 200 Fast minutes per month, a standard image costs 0.8 minutes, meaning about 250 requests of four images each. Unused minutes expire at the end of the month, even on an annual subscription.

Basic versus Standard. Basic has no unmetered mode, and its per-minute cost is higher than on any other plan. Starting with Standard at $30, unmetered image generation becomes unlimited with a queue of up to half an hour, so practitioners call Basic a paid trial and Standard the working threshold.

Annual plans and add-ons. Paying for a year upfront gives a 20 % discount, $96, $288, $576 and $1 152, with no other discounts for students or nonprofits. Fast hours can be bought for $4 per hour, purchased hours last 60 days and are non-refundable. A subscription refund is possible only if less than 20 minutes have been used over the lifetime of the account.

Paying from Russia. The vendor accepts only US dollars through Stripe: Visa, Mastercard and American Express cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay, no PayPal, plus tax. A Russian card will not work, so intermediaries add 22 to 44 % to the monthly price, while vendors serving businesses invoice in rubles at two to six times the official price. How to arrange payment from abroad, in the guide to paying for AI services from Russia.

Other people's accounts. Listings for "unlimited Midjourney subscription for 100 rubles" sell by the thousands, but the vendor has no unlimited plan, and its rules explicitly ban reselling access and shared accounts under threat of suspension.

Three questions: who owns these images, what the vendor knows about you, and how the lawsuits will end.

Whose images. They are yours, the vendor states this directly, and ownership remains after cancellation. Two exceptions: a company with over $1 mln in annual revenue, including any of its employees, must use Pro or Mega, and an upscaled image made by someone else remains with its creator. In exchange, you grant the vendor a perpetual license to everything uploaded and created, which survives account deletion.

Data. The privacy policy dated 03.09.2026 lists prompts and uploaded images among collected data, and model training among its purposes. The EU AI Act disclosure dated 11.08.2026 says the same in numbers: training used more than a billion images, user prompts are included in the dataset, and the vendor did not sign the EU code of practice. Data is stored in the US, the vendor denies selling data, and you can check whether an image was made in Midjourney for free and without an account on the verify page.

Court cases. The Andersen artists' lawsuit against Stability AI and Midjourney has been ongoing since 13.01.2023; a jury trial is set for 20.09.2027, and the founder had been deposed by 03.09.2026. Disney and Universal filed suit on 11.06.2025, calling the service a "bottomless pit of plagiarism"; Warner Bros. Discovery joined on 04.09.2025, and the cases have been consolidated since 04.11.2025: 12 studios stand against the vendor. The cases are in discovery, with no rulings on the merits, and EVOX Productions filed another copyright lawsuit on 30.07.2026.

Who owns it. Midjourney is owned by founder David Holz and the team: it has no investors, and 60 people are supported by subscriptions. In 2026, the company is expanding beyond images: in June it unveiled a medical ultrasound scanner, and in July it acquired the astrology app Co-Star. In August 2025, Meta* (recognized in Russia as an extremist organization, its activities are prohibited) licensed its technology, with terms undisclosed.

The choice is not about who creates prettier images, but what you pay with: dollars and English or rubles and Russian.

Different checkout. Midjourney costs from $10 per month in US dollars through Stripe; from Russia, only with a foreign card or through an intermediary with a markup. Shedevrum by Yandex is free, while its paid "Pro" tier has cost 100 rubles per month on top of a Yandex Plus subscription since 20.03.2025, and offers upscaling to 4K and downloads without a watermark.

Different home. Midjourney lives on the website and Discord, has no app, and prompts work best in English. Shedevrum is available in the Russian App Store and RuStore, understands Russian prompts, and generation on its website opens after signing in with a Yandex ID. By February 2025, Yandex claimed more than 16,5 mln users.

Who else is nearby. Google's Nano Banana is part of Gemini and its second version ranks fourth in the Artificial Analysis arena; in Yandex prompts, it is the first nearby option in "or" questions. The catalog has dedicated pages for Ideogram, Leonardo and Krea; Stable Diffusion and Kandinsky appear in the questions below.

Yandex's claim. On the YandexART page, Yandex says that, by people's preference, its model scores 0,66 versus 0,60 for Midjourney. This is its own measurement without independent verification, and it compares it with version 6.1 from July 2024, not the current V8.2.

Over four years, the Discord bot became a website, gained video and word-based editing, drew 12 plaintiff studios, and began building a medical scanner.