Midjourney

There are two things to weigh: whether you are ready to pay in dollars and to write the prompt in English.

What people come to Midjourney to do and whether they get it.

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. Anyone already paying an aggregator for "access to Midjourney" by subscription or by tokens: Basic costs $10 straight from the vendor, and the vendor's rules threaten such accounts with a ban.

Who it is not for. Not for anyone who wants to try it for free: there has been no free trial since 28.03.2023. Or for anyone who needs private images without the $60 plan: everything you create is public by default.

Good fit: section 3 takes you from sign-in to your first image.

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 Jul 24, 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 Aug 28, 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.

If you need a 3D object for a game from the drawing, the next step can go through a model in Meshy. Rights to the source image and mesh quality are checked separately.

For a series of game assets in your own style, compare art production in Layer.

Video. Since Jun 18, 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.

What the vendor itself shows. The loop above the card comes from a video on the official channel dated Sep 26, 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, there are two doors: the site and a bot in Discord.

Step 1. Open midjourney.com and sign in with Google or Discord, the vendor has no separate login and password of its own. .

Step 2. Sign up for a subscription; without one you cannot generate anything. The vendor charges in dollars only, through Stripe.  On the checkout screen the annual tab is open by default, where $8 a month means $96 up front for the whole year; the monthly price lives 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 generated in Midjourney before August 2024, the vendor requires you to sign in through Discord, otherwise the old image history will not open. A new account through Google 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 Sep 6, 2026 against the vendor's help center

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 Sep 4, 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 counts everyone who has joined since 2020, not those who pay; the revenue figure comes from a studio lawsuit, not financial reporting, and the vendor publishes no figures of its own. Midjourney's place among image tools appears below the card title, and the full tool ranking is on the main page.

There has been no free version since Mar 28, 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.

The vendor accepts only US dollars through Stripe: Visa, Mastercard, and American Express cards, Apple Pay, and Google Pay, with no PayPal; taxes are added on top.  

Other people's accounts. The vendor has no unlimited plan, and its rules directly forbid reselling access and shared accounts under threat of a ban.

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 Sep 3, 2026 lists prompts and uploaded images among collected data, and model training among its purposes. The EU AI Act disclosure dated Aug 11, 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 Jan 13, 2023; a jury trial is set for Sep 20, 2027, and the founder had been deposed by 03.09.2026. Disney and Universal filed suit on Jun 11, 2025, calling the service a "bottomless pit of plagiarism"; Warner Bros. Discovery joined on Sep 4, 2025, and the cases have been consolidated since Nov 4, 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: no investors, 60 people 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 licensed its technology; terms were not disclosed.

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.