Start Here
- Free and you own the output: Nano Banana 2 in the Gemini app, or Adobe Firefly at 25 credits a month with no watermark and commercial use permitted.
- Cheapest per image at production volume: FLUX.1 Schnell at $0.00050, or FLUX.2 Dev at $0.0084 with open weights you can self-host.
- Best look for the money: Midjourney Basic at $10 a month, still the one people can pick out of a lineup.
Those three cover most people. The rest of this page is for when they do not.
All Ten, Side by Side
| Tool | Best at | Free tier | Entry paid | Per image, API |
|---|
| Nano Banana 2 | Value, conversational editing | Yes, in Gemini app | API usage only | ~$0.067 at 1K |
| GPT Image 2 | Prompt adherence, text in many languages | No | In ChatGPT Plus | $0.005 to $0.211 |
| Midjourney V8.2 | Art direction and look | No | $10/mo | No public API |
| FLUX.2 | Self-hosting, volume | Open weights | $0.0084/image | $0.0084 to $0.073 |
| Ideogram 4.0 | Headline typography | 10 slow credits/wk | $15/mo annual | $0.03 to $0.10 |
| Recraft V4 | Real SVG and vectors | 50 credits/day | $12/mo | ~$0.010 raster |
| Adobe Firefly | Legal safety | 25 credits/mo | $9.99/mo | Credit based |
| Leonardo | Studio workflow, volume on free | 150 tokens/day | $12/mo | Pay as you go |
| Seedream 4.5 | 4K and brand consistency | No | API usage only | $0.04 flat, any size |
| Grok Imagine | Flat 2K pricing | No | API usage only | $0.02 at 1K and 2K |
Read This Before You Use Any Free Tier
Five of the ten have a free tier. Three of those five take the rights to what you make on it, and the listicles that rank them together never mention it.
| Free tier | What you actually get | Can you sell it? |
|---|
| Adobe Firefly | 25 generative credits a month, no watermark | Yes, commercial use permitted |
| Nano Banana 2 | Free in the Gemini app | Yes, under normal Gemini terms |
| Recraft | 50 credits a day | No. Outputs are public and owned by Recraft, no commercial rights |
| Leonardo | 150 tokens a day, no rollover | No. Creations are public and Leonardo retains rights |
| Ideogram | 10 slow credits a week | Images go to the public explore feed and you cannot delete them |
Recraft's free tier is the most generous number on this page at 50 images a day, and it is the one you should be most careful with. Fifty images a day you do not own is not a free tier, it is a demo. If the work is going on a client invoice, a product page or anything you will be asked to prove you own, the free tiers that matter are Firefly and Nano Banana 2, and nothing else here.
Ideogram's is a subtler trap. You keep usage rights, but the generation is permanently public and undeletable. For a client brief, an unreleased product or anything under NDA, that is disqualifying on its own.
The Other Thing Nobody Quotes Properly
GPT Image 2 costs $0.005 per image. GPT Image 2 also costs $0.211 per image. Both are true, same model, same API.
| GPT Image 2 quality | Portrait / landscape | Square |
|---|
| Low | $0.005 | $0.005 |
| Medium | $0.041 | $0.053 |
| High | $0.165 | $0.211 |
That is a 42x spread inside one tool, which makes any sentence beginning "GPT Image 2 costs" close to meaningless unless it names a tier. It also means a thumbnail pipeline and a hero-image pipeline on the same model have completely different economics, and the cheap tier is cheaper than most of the open-weight competition.
Worth noting while you are in there: GPT Image 1 is being deprecated on 23 October 2026. If you have anything pinned to it, that is three weeks.
1. Nano Banana 2 - Best Value, and the Best Free Option
Verdict: the default recommendation for most people, because the free route is genuinely free and the paid route is roughly a third the price of GPT Image 2 at medium quality.
Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash Image, universally called Nano Banana 2. Free in the Gemini app, and available through AI Studio and the Vertex API. Published API rates are $0.50 per million input tokens and $60 per million output tokens, with a 131,072-token context and 65,536 max output. A 1K image runs around 1,120 output tokens, which works out to roughly $0.067 per image - that figure is derived from the token rates, not a price Google publishes directly, so treat it as an estimate and measure your own.
Standout: conversational editing. You iterate by talking to it rather than rewriting a prompt from scratch, which is a different workflow from everything else on this list and a faster one for small corrections.
Limitation: it is positioned on speed-to-quality-to-cost rather than on topping any single quality ranking. If you want a specific look, Midjourney still wins.
Best for: anyone starting out, high-volume editing, and anybody who needs a free tier whose output they can actually use.
2. GPT Image 2 - Best Prompt Adherence and Multilingual Text
Verdict: the one that renders what you actually asked for, and the only one with a serious claim on non-Latin text.
Best-in-class prompt adherence and photorealism, plus text rendering in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Hindi and Bengali - which matters because almost every other model on this list is effectively English-only once text enters the frame. It also handles infographics, slide layouts and maps, a category most image models fail at completely.
Free tier: none. It is bundled into ChatGPT Plus and Pro, so most people reach it through a subscription they already have rather than the API.
Paid: $0.005 low, $0.041 to $0.053 medium, $0.165 to $0.211 high. GPT Image 1 Mini is cheaper still at $0.005 to $0.052 if you need volume on the OpenAI stack.
Standout: multilingual text inside the image. If you publish in more than one script, this is close to a solo category.
Limitation: the high tier at $0.211 square is the most expensive single image on this page, around 25x FLUX.2 Dev. Easy to burn a budget without noticing which tier your code requested.
Best for: infographics, slides, anything with text in it, and non-English markets.
3. Midjourney V8.2 - Still the Best Look
Verdict: the most expensive way to make one image and still the one worth paying for if the output has to look intentional.
V8.2 has been the default since 24 July 2026. Midjourney remains the tool whose output reads as art direction rather than as generation, and no amount of benchmark parity elsewhere has changed that.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual | Fast GPU hours | Relax | Stealth |
|---|
| Basic | $10 | $96 ($8/mo) | 3.3 | No | No |
| Standard | $30 | $288 ($24/mo) | 15 | Unlimited | No |
| Pro | $60 | $576 ($48/mo) | 30 | Unlimited | Yes |
| Mega | $120 | $1,152 ($96/mo) | 60 | Unlimited | Yes |
Free tier: none, and there has not been one since March 2023. The entry point is $10.
The pricing model is the part people get wrong. You are buying GPU minutes, not images. A basic image prompt costs about one GPU minute, so Basic's 3.3 fast hours is roughly 200 images - but a batch of four HD videos costs 26 GPU minutes, and the same plan empties fast if you touch video. Unused fast hours do not roll over, even on an annual plan.
Standout: a distinctive house look that reads as deliberate. Unlimited relax mode from Standard up is effectively uncapped image generation for $30.
Limitation: no public API, so you cannot put it in a pipeline. And refunds are only available under 20 GPU minutes consumed - about 15 to 20 images - so you cannot meaningfully evaluate it before committing.
Best for: brand and editorial work where the look is the product, and anyone generating constantly on relax mode.
4. FLUX.2 - Best for Self-Hosting and Volume
Verdict: the cheapest credible image per dollar anywhere on this list, and the only serious open-weights option.
| Variant | Per image | Licence |
|---|
| FLUX.1 Schnell | $0.00050 | Open weights |
| FLUX.2 Dev | $0.0084 | Open weights |
| FLUX.2 Klein 4B | $0.012 | Proprietary |
| FLUX.2 Pro | $0.015 | Proprietary |
| FLUX.2 Flex | $0.030 | Proprietary |
| FLUX.2 Max | $0.073 | Proprietary |
Free tier: the klein variant ships under Apache 2.0 and runs on consumer hardware. Self-host it and your marginal cost per image is electricity.
Standout: multi-reference conditioning, and a licence that lets you put the model inside your own product without asking anyone.
Limitation: you are assembling a pipeline, not opening an app. There is no polished interface, and the variant sprawl - Pro, Max, Flex, Klein 4B, Klein 9B, Dev, Schnell, three Kontext tiers - means picking wrong is easy and the price range across them is 146x.
Best for: engineering teams, high-volume generation, and anyone who needs the model on their own infrastructure for privacy or cost reasons.
5. Ideogram 4.0 - Best Typography
Verdict: the cleanest headline text of anything here, and the free tier is unusable for client work.
Ideogram 4.0 is the current generation, with native text rendering. For a poster, a social graphic or any layout where a headline has to be legible and correctly spelled, it is the specialist.
Free tier: 10 slow credits a week. Images appear in the public explore feed, you cannot delete them, and generation queues for several minutes each.
Paid: Plus around $20 monthly or $15 a month annually for 1,000 priority credits. Pro around $60 monthly or $42 annually for 3,500. Team around $30 per user, $20 annually, 1,500 per user. Per-image API runs $0.03 to $0.10.
Standout: text that does not need fixing afterwards. That saves a round trip into Photoshop on every graphic.
Limitation: unused priority credits expire every billing cycle with zero rollover. If your work is seasonal or bursty, you are paying monthly for capacity you lose monthly.
Best for: marketing graphics, posters, thumbnails, anything where a headline sits in the image.
6. Recraft V4 - The Only One That Makes Real Vectors
Verdict: if you need a logo or icon that scales, nine of the ten tools here are the wrong answer regardless of how good they look.
Recraft V4, now V4.1, outputs native SVG. Not a raster image traced into paths afterwards - actual vector output. For logos, icons and anything that has to go on a billboard and a favicon, that is the whole decision.
Free tier: 50 credits a day, which is the most generous raw number on this page. Read the terms first: outputs are public and owned by Recraft, with no commercial rights.
Paid: Basic $12 a month for 1,000 credits, Pro 2K $20 for 2,000, Pro 4K $40 for 4,000, Pro 8K $80 for 8,000, all around 20% off annually. One credit is one raster image; a vector costs two, so SVG lands at roughly $0.020 to $0.024 each. Creative Upscale costs 20 credits. Paid tiers give you full ownership and commercial rights.
Standout: real SVG, uncontested on this list.
Limitation: vectors cost double, and the free tier is a demo rather than a working allowance because you do not own what it makes.
Best for: logos, icon sets, brand assets, anything that has to scale cleanly.
7. Adobe Firefly - The Only One That Will Indemnify You
Verdict: pick this when the legal exposure matters more than the image does.
Free tier: 25 generative credits a month, no watermark, commercial use permitted. Along with Nano Banana 2, one of only two free tiers here whose output you can actually sell.
Paid: Premium $9.99 a month, $7.99 annually, for 2,000 credits plus 4K output, priority processing and Image Model 5. Creative Cloud All Apps $59.99, $54.99 annually, with Firefly built into the suite. Enterprise is custom, around $79.99 and up per seat, with unlimited credits, custom model training and full IP indemnification - Adobe accepts legal liability for copyright claims on what you generate.
Standout: that indemnification clause. No other tool on this list offers it at any price, and for regulated industries, agencies signing client contracts, or anyone whose legal team asks who is liable, it is not a feature - it is the entry requirement.
Limitation: output quality is generally rated behind Midjourney and GPT Image 2. You are buying legal certainty, and it costs you some aesthetic ceiling.
Best for: agencies, enterprises, regulated sectors, and anyone already inside Creative Cloud.
8. Leonardo - Best Free Tier for Volume, With a Catch
Verdict: a capable studio with real workflow tooling, and a free tier that costs you the rights.
Free tier: 150 tokens a day with no rollover. Creations are public and Leonardo retains the rights - in the plainest terms, you do not hold the IP on the free plan.
Paid: Essential $12 a month for 8,500 tokens plus 25,500 rollover. Premium $30 for 25,000 plus 75,000 rollover. Ultimate $60 for 60,000 plus 180,000 rollover. All around 20% off annually. Team Starter is $72 for three seats minimum, Growth $144. Paid plans carry full commercial rights, and the API has a $5 starter credit that never expires.
Standout: rollover. Leonardo is one of the few here that lets unused allowance accumulate rather than evaporating monthly, which is the opposite of Ideogram and Midjourney. Unlimited relaxed generation covers Lucid Origin, Phoenix, the FLUX models and Motion.
Limitation: text rendering is weak, so pair it with Ideogram for anything with a headline. And premium third-party models - Veo 3, Kling, Sora 2 - always consume tokens at full rate even on Ultimate, so "unlimited" has a hard edge.
Best for: solo creators who generate in bursts and want unused allowance to carry forward.
9. Seedream 4.5 - Flat 4K Pricing
Verdict: $0.04 per image regardless of size is the simplest pricing on this page, and it includes 4K.
ByteDance's model, with unified generation and editing in one call and support for up to six reference images - which is the feature to care about if you are holding a brand style across a large asset set.
Free tier: none through the API.
Paid: $0.04 per output image, any size. Compare that with GPT Image 2 at $0.211 for a high-quality square and the case makes itself for volume 4K work.
Standout: six reference images plus flat pricing. Brand consistency at scale without a per-resolution penalty.
Limitation: API-first with no first-party consumer app, and less independent evaluation than the Western models have had. For some organisations the ByteDance association is itself a procurement question.
Best for: 4K asset libraries, brand-consistent batches, e-commerce catalogues.
10. Grok Imagine - Cheapest 2K
Verdict: $0.02 per image at 1K and at 2K, which makes it the cheapest route to a 2K image here.
xAI's image model, grok-imagine-image. Output is $0.02 per image at both 1024x1024 and 2048x2048 - the resolution does not change the price. Image input is billed separately at $0.002 per image, which catches people doing image-to-image work.
Free tier: none on the API. Access is bundled into X and SuperGrok subscriptions.
Standout: flat pricing across both resolutions. If you need 2K, nothing else here gets you there for two cents.
Limitation: resolution caps at 2K, so no 4K path. And you are billed on inputs as well as outputs, which is easy to miss when costing an editing pipeline.
Best for: 2K output on a budget, and anyone already paying for SuperGrok. Our Grok Imagine API guide covers getting a key and the rate limits.
Decision Framework
- You want free and you need to own the output - Firefly or Nano Banana 2. Not Recraft, not Leonardo.
- You need a logo or icon that scales - Recraft, paid tier. Nothing else here outputs real SVG.
- Your legal team needs to know who is liable - Firefly Enterprise. It is the only indemnification on offer.
- The image has a headline in it - Ideogram 4.0, or GPT Image 2 if the text is not in Latin script.
- You publish in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Hindi or Bengali - GPT Image 2, effectively alone.
- The look is the product - Midjourney, Standard at $30 for unlimited relax.
- You are generating tens of thousands of images - FLUX.2 Dev at $0.0084, or self-host klein under Apache 2.0.
- You need 4K cheaply - Seedream 4.5, $0.04 flat regardless of size.
- You need 2K cheaply - Grok Imagine at $0.02.
- Your workload is bursty - Leonardo, the only one here with meaningful rollover. Avoid Ideogram and Midjourney, where unused allowance expires monthly.
- You want the best single default - Nano Banana 2, free to start and roughly a third of GPT Image 2 at medium quality.
- Anything under NDA or pre-launch - never the Ideogram free tier. Those generations are public and undeletable.
The Stack That Actually Works
Nobody serious uses one of these. The combination that covers a full production workflow without paying twice for the same capability:
- Explore in Nano Banana 2, free. Twenty ideas in the Gemini app at no cost, using conversational editing to steer rather than rewriting prompts. You are deciding direction here, not producing assets.
- Produce the hero in Midjourney Standard, $30. Once the direction is settled, unlimited relax mode means you can iterate on the one image that matters without counting generations.
- Add text in Ideogram, $15 annually. Headlines go on here, not in step 2, because Midjourney's text still needs fixing and Ideogram's does not.
- Vector finals in Recraft, $12. Any logo, icon or mark that has to scale gets regenerated here as real SVG. This is the step most workflows skip and then regret at print.
That is $57 a month and it covers exploration, hero production, typography and vectors, with each tool used only for the thing it leads at. Swap step 2 for Firefly Premium at $9.99 if indemnification matters more than the look, which brings it to about $37.
For a programmatic pipeline rather than a creative one the shape is different: FLUX.2 Dev at $0.0084 for bulk, GPT Image 2 at the low tier for $0.005 where prompt adherence matters, and Seedream 4.5 at $0.04 for anything that needs 4K. Three API calls, no subscriptions, and your per-image cost stays under a cent for the bulk of the volume.
FAQ
What is the best free AI text to image tool in 2026?
Adobe Firefly and Nano Banana 2, because they are the only two free tiers whose output you can use commercially. Firefly gives 25 credits a month with no watermark and permits commercial use; Nano Banana 2 is free in the Gemini app. Recraft offers far more volume at 50 credits a day, but the outputs are public and owned by Recraft with no commercial rights, and Leonardo's free tier works the same way.
How much does GPT Image 2 cost per image?
Between $0.005 and $0.211 depending on quality and aspect ratio. Low is $0.005, medium is $0.041 for portrait and landscape or $0.053 square, and high is $0.165 for portrait and landscape or $0.211 square. Any single figure quoted without a tier is incomplete. Note that GPT Image 1 is being deprecated on 23 October 2026.
Does Midjourney have a free trial?
No. Midjourney discontinued its free trial in March 2023 and the cheapest entry is Basic at $10 a month, or $96 a year. Refunds are only available if you have used fewer than 20 GPU minutes, roughly 15 to 20 images, so there is no practical way to evaluate it first.
Which AI image generator is cheapest?
FLUX.1 Schnell at $0.00050 per image, with FLUX.2 Dev next at $0.0084 - both open weights, so you can also self-host and pay only for compute. Among the mainstream hosted options, Grok Imagine is $0.02 at 1K and 2K, Seedream 4.5 is $0.04 at any size including 4K, and GPT Image 2 at low quality is $0.005.
Which one makes real vector files?
Recraft V4, and it is the only one of these ten that does. Vector output costs two credits instead of one, so roughly $0.020 to $0.024 per SVG on a paid plan. If you need a logo or icon that scales, the other nine produce raster images no matter how good they look.
Can I use AI generated images commercially?
On every paid plan listed here, yes. On free plans it depends entirely on the tool: Firefly and Nano Banana 2 permit it, while Recraft and Leonardo retain the rights to free-tier output and Ideogram publishes your generations publicly without a delete option. Only Adobe offers IP indemnification, and only on Enterprise - meaning Adobe accepts legal liability for copyright claims rather than leaving it with you.
Do unused credits roll over?
Rarely, and this is where people lose money. Leonardo is the main exception, carrying substantial rollover on every paid tier. Ideogram priority credits expire every billing cycle with no rollover at all, and Midjourney fast GPU hours expire monthly even on annual plans. If your workload is seasonal, that difference matters more than the headline price.
All pricing verified 2 October 2026 from vendor documentation and pricing pages. We have not independently generated images on all ten tools; quality characterisations come from the sources cited and from vendor claims, and pricing changes frequently - check the vendor's own page before committing a budget.
Related: best AI tools for PowerPoint presentations covers the slide side, where GPT Image 2's infographic handling comes into its own.