How To Make Money With Midjourney

Midjourney enables users to create and monetize original artwork and designs through print-on-demand, web design, freelancing services, NFTs, stock photography, book illustrations, logos, tattoo designs, anime artwork, and more by converting text prompts into AI-generated images for a monthly fee.

Key Takeaways

Midjourney is an AI that converts natural language prompts into original images for a monthly fee.
It enables users to create artwork, designs, and images for various monetization opportunities.
Popular ways to make money include print-on-demand, web design, freelancing services, NFTs, stock photography, book illustrations, logos, tattoo designs, and anime artwork.

Is Using Midjourney Free?

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Using Midjourney is not free. They charge a monthly fee as low as ten dollars. For ten dollars, you'll receive a limited number of images. If you want unlimited, you'll need to pay $120 per month.

There are unlimited ways to make money online on Midjourney. We'll explore Midjourney and how you can make money with it. We'll also give you a few of Midjourney's competitors.

What is Midjourney?

Midjourney is an AI that converts natural language prompts into original images.

You don’t need any specialized hardware or software. It works through the Discord chat app.

Although you must pay for Midjourney, the barrier is low. Anyone can create authentic images within minutes. Depending on your prompt, the results can be funny or visually stunning.

How Midjourney Works

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Because Midjourney uses closed-source and proprietary code, its workings are secret. However, some generalities can be assumed.

Midjourney relies on large language models and diffusion models.

It uses a large language model to understand the meaning of the words you type into your prompts and then converts them into a vector.

The vector guides a process known as diffusion. Diffusion is when a computer gradually adds random noise to its images’ dataset. It then learns how to recover the original image by reversing the noise.

With enough training, Midjourney can generate new images.

What Does Midjourney Cost?

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Some services similar to Midjourney, like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot, offer almost unlimited free responses.

But Midjourney charges. Keep in mind that each AI art generation takes a lot of computing power. This costs money.

They have several plans to choose from. They include:

Basic: $10 monthly
Standard: $30 monthly
Pro plan: $60 monthly
Mega: $120 monthly

The basic plan will probably allow you to create 200 images per month.

Does Midjourney Have a Free Trial

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Midjourney doesn’t have a free trial. When they first launched in 2022, you could use up to 25 images for free. Once you used these, you had to upgrade to the paid plan.

In 2023, they eliminated the free trial period.

How to Earn Money on Midjourney

It’s fun making images, but it’s even more fun when you can make money from them. You’re basically letting your imagination run wild and earning an easy buck.

But in what ways can you make money?

1. Print on Demand

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Print on demand (POD) allows you to design a product and have a partner company print and ship it to customers on your behalf.

This is a white-label approach, which means the company's name doesn't appear on your product.

With POD, your Midjourney design is printed on a product.

Products could be:

T-shirts
Cups
Mouse pads
Tote bags

They are produced only when an order is received, eliminating the need for inventory. Once the order is produced, the POD company ships the product to the customer.

You take the costs of the POD company out of your sales proceeds and keep the profit.

You can use Midjourney to design beautiful or funny images to place on the products.

They can be sold through:

Your website
Shopify
eBay
Amazon
Printify

This is a no-muss, no-fuss way to start a company. And Midjourney is the starting point.

I have written a dedicated article on how to get started with printify. Do check the post and you’ll get to know everything about it.

2. Website Design

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Web design can be very lucrative. All businesses need them, and many people who start blogs want them.

If you’re using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress or Wix, you might want to use Midjourney. A CMS allows you to add more complex features that will support Midjourney using AI-generated images as background illustrations.

Use website building as a way to make money with Midjourney by offering images that your clients want.

When you build websites, you can charge a one-time fee or a recurring fee for maintenance.

You don’t need to spend a full day to earn this money. You can make this as your side hustle whether you are an account, a writer or a teenager who wants to make some extra money.

3. Selling Services

There are many platforms where you can sell your personalized services as an image creator. These platforms connect individuals with freelance service providers.

Some of these platforms include:

With Fiverr, you present your skills to clients, who hopefully choose you to do the job. With Upwork and Freelancer, clients post jobs, and you propose with your abilities and fee.

All three are great places to find clients. The downside is that you pay a fee to all three to use their platform.

You can help people who want to start a blog or YouTube channel by offering different kinds of services with Midjourney Art.

Once, you start to earn money with your services, you don’t have to go to places like Geebo for jobs.

4. Creating NFTs

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An NFT or non-fungible token, is a digital asset that represents a unique item. These could include:

AI art
Media
Digital content

The NFT is stored on a blockchain. It is unique and cannot be replicated. Each one contains a unique identification code and metadata.

Non-fungible tokens enable artists to create unique and scarce digital assets. You can be part of these unique offerings with Midjourney.

Generally, an NFT sells for $100 to $1,400. But this depends on three factors.

They are:

Scarcity
Utility
Popularity

Besides these factors, fluctuations in cryptocurrency’s underlying value may impact NFTs price.

Places to sell NFTs include:

Some NFTs have sold for millions of dollars. For example, CryptoPunks sold for $16,962,500. We’re not saying you can make millions, but it’s a lucrative way to use Midjourney.

5. Selling on Adobe Stock

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Adobe Stock is a great place to sell your Midjourney creations as it is one of the best stock image websites on the web. It’s an online marketplace. You can upload and license your original artwork to customers worldwide.

Adobe Stock allows you to set the price for each file. Once you’ve uploaded and set the price, the Adobe Stock image website makes the file available for customers.

When a customer purchases and licenses an image, you'll receive up to 35 percent on each sale. Price it appropriately to maximize your profit.

There are over seven million monthly users on Adobe Stock with over 1.5 billion downloads.

And keep in mind, that more than one person can download your art. So, this turns into passive income once you have created and uploaded it.

But keep in mind, that not all artwork is accepted. But if you aren’t accepted the first time, don’t hesitate to try again.

Alternately, you can also sell your art on other places like Fine Art America which helps creators sell their digital art to earn money.

You can easily make this as a side hustle to earn some bucks whether you are homeschooling or even teaching online as a teenager.

6. Create Children’s Books

You can make fantastic and magical books with Midjourney. Just write your text and use Midjourney to illustrate your book.

This is also a great opportunity to use ChatGPT to generate book ideas or even text. You can use regular prose or create rhyming books.

Midjourney can create AI images that correspond to the story. For example, if you talk about a cat that wears pajamas, Midjourney can create that.

After you create your text and images, use Adobe InDesign or Canva to combine them into a book.

You can self-publish them on:

You’ll need to promote your book. Use social media platforms or your own website to get the word out about it.

You'll make money once you've published and are selling your book.

7. Shutterstock

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Although finding a place to sell artwork has been challenging, Shutterstock fills that hole. It is a great place to minimize expenses but increase your earnings.

Shutterstock is a growing platform where professional artists and amateurs contribute their work to be licensed and sold worldwide.

You can sell your Midjourney art on Shutterstock. All you have to do is open a free contributor account and submit your copyrighted work. Images you submit are reviewed by one of their "expert" team members.

Once your image is placed in their Catalog Manager, it is ready to be purchased and downloaded by customers.

How much you earn per image depends on these factors:

Type of plan used for the purchase (different plans are available to customers).
A kind of license is included with that plan.
Your earnings level as a contributor at the time of download.

Once you have accrued at least $25 from licensing work, you’ll receive earnings through:

PayPal
Skrill
Payoneer

Payments are issued on a monthly basis.

8. Create Logos

Creating Midjourney-generated images in custom logos for businesses can be lucrative. Many new and existing businesses want this service.

The key is to create a good prompt (instructions to Midjourney) so it understands what you want. But you could generate trucks for a trucking company or food for a restaurant in their logo.

Letter and word generation is still rudimentary in Midjourney but use ideogram, to help you with that.

9. Tattoos

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Design tattoo designs with Midjourney. Tattoos are extremely popular and creating a design that’s unique and meaningful could be quite lucrative.

You could design tattoos with different styles including:

Trendy
Watercolor
Intricate ornamental designs
Goth
Tribal
Neo-traditional

Midjourney could do anything. You could customize them for clients based on their look and style. Contact different tattoo artists in the area and let them know your services are available for custom jobs.

10. Anime

Anime is more popular than ever, and it's just increasing. It's evolved from a niche industry to worldwide acceptance.

If anime is your thing and you want to create and sell it, Midjourney could be a money-maker for you. It launched a fine-tuned image model specifically trained in manga and anime artwork.

You might want to know how to write intricate, complex plots. Or at least buddy up with someone who can put fingers to the keyboard and write. One option is to use some Chat GPT.

If you want to avoid writing, market stand-alone anime artwork and make a name for yourself.

Alternatives to Midjourney

When paying for Midjourney, you only have so many images you can create in a month. There are several alternatives for those who don't want to pay for Midjourney. Some of them are free or have free elements.

1. Meta Imagine

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Meta is Facebook's parent company and they have an AI generator. It’s trained using public images from Facebook and Instagram. Some of these go back years.

The service is free, but every image has a small watermark.

2. Microsoft Designer

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This is a free alternative to Midjourney. This is the Bing Image Creator, also called Microsoft Designer. As a result of Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI, the DALLE-E3 image generator via Bing is free.

You'll receive 100 boosts free. You'll receive extra boosts if you pay for Microsoft's Copilot Pro subscription.

3. Stable Diffusion Online

Stable Diffusion Online has a simple interface with no settings or styles to choose from and you can easily generate the art with a few words. But it’s completely free. The downside is you’ll have to wait a few minutes for the image to generate.

Frequently Asked Questions

We’ve tried to answer all the ways to make money from Midjourney. But in case you still have some questions about Midjourney, hopefully these questions and answers help!

1. Does Midjourney steal from other artists?

Midjourney has been accused of stealing from other artists. There was a lawsuit against Midjourney claiming it lifted other artists' copyrighted work to train its models.

The trained models used this work to create other people's images without compensation to the artist. The judge of the case dismissed all allegations.

2. How can you tell if art is AI-generated?

You can tell if the image is AI-generated if it appears overly smooth and perfect. I will also be too black or too white. There are times when there are slight blemishes of weird lighting. Some people claim they can tell because the image is ordinary.

3. Is AI-generated art worth anything?

AI-generated digital art is worth money. I can be sold just like any other artwork. Some AI-generated art sells for large amounts of money. One piece of AI-generated art, "Portrait of Edmond Belamy," was sold at Christie's for $432,500 at auction.

Generate Art with Midjourney To Make Money

There are numerous ways to earn money from Midjourney. You’re only limited by your imagination. Unfortunately, if you want to get started, you’ll have to shell out a minimum of ten dollars a month. Midjourney doesn't have a free trial.

But from children's books to tattoos, you can create whatever you want.