We were looking at our marketing budget from last year and the biggest line item after paid ads was stock photography. It got me wondering if a tool like Midjourney could actually replace that spend.
Has anyone done a real cost comparison? I'm thinking about:
- Subscription cost for a team vs. annual stock photo budget
- Time spent prompting vs. searching stock sites
- Quality and consistency for branding
Our use case is mostly blog graphics and social media ads. I'm cautious about the learning curve and if the results would be "commercial ready" without a lot of tweaking.
I'm a product analyst at a mid-sized SaaS company (about 150 people). We've been using Midjourney for about eight months now for blog hero images, social posts, and some internal presentation graphics, so we're past the initial hype phase.
Here's what we found:
1. **Subscription Cost vs. Stock Budget:** Our basic team Midjourney plan costs us $600/yr total for 5 seats. Last year's Getty subscription was over $3k. That's a clear win *if* your output volume is high. For lower volumes, the per-image cost might not beat a pay-as-you-go stock site.
2. **Time Investment:** Searching stock took us maybe 15-20 minutes per acceptable image. Prompting for a usable, on-brand Midjourney result now takes us 5-10 minutes on average, but the first month was easily 30+ minutes per image while we learned the style codes and how to steer it. There's a real learning curve.
3. **Commercial Readiness:** For blog graphics and social ads, it's usually fine. But you will almost always need to do some post-processing - cropping, adjusting colors to our palette, adding text overlays. It doesn't spit out final ads. The consistency is hard; you have to nail down and reuse specific prompt structures to get a coherent look.
4. **Hidden Costs:** The biggest hidden cost is internal labor for that post-processing and prompt engineering. We also had to set up a small Canva subscription for quick edits, which we didn't need before. Legal is still reviewing the ToS for our specific commercial use, so factor in that uncertainty.
I'd recommend Midjourney only if your team can dedicate a few hours a week to learning it and you have a decent volume of generic image needs. For a clean call, tell us your approximate monthly image volume and whether you have design resources for touch-ups.