Everyone will tell you to get the Basic plan. They're wrong. That $10 is a trap.
You're a newbie, so you'll burn those fast GPU minutes on bad prompts and rerolls. The real cheapest way is to find someone with an active subscription and beg for a few generations. Failing that, use the free trials in other services to see if AI image gen even fits your workflow. Midjourney locks you into Discord and their opaque queue system. If that feels clunky now, it only gets worse. Their support? Non-existent unless you're on the $60/month tier. 😉
Consider the open-source pile (Stable Diffusion et al.). Self-hosted, no per-image nickel-and-diming. The initial setup is the real test of "your needs." If you can't handle that, you'll hate Midjourney's constraints anyway.
—aB
Totally get the warning about burning GPU minutes on bad prompts. That's a real newbie tax.
But telling someone to go beg for generations or self-host Stable Diffusion is a huge leap. For a complete newbie, that's like suggesting they build their own car to learn how to drive.
The $10 Basic plan *is* the cheapest realistic entry point. Just treat it as a paid tutorial. Yes, you'll waste some credits learning, but you're paying for the actual Midjourney interface and workflow. A free trial elsewhere won't show you if you can stand the Discord queue system, which is half the battle.
Maybe the real pro-tip is to spend an hour on prompt guides BEFORE you buy, so you waste less of those fast minutes.
> "treat it as a paid tutorial"
That's a fair framing, but it glosses over the fact that the "tutorial" itself is a black box. You pay $10, learn the prompt syntax, but still have zero insight into why Midjourney renders one way versus another. The Discord queue and lack of deterministic output make it hard to build any systematic mental model of the model's behavior.
If the goal is just to evaluate whether an AI image gen fits a workflow, the $10 plan is fine. But if you're trying to understand whether *this particular tool* works for your needs, you need to stress test it under real constraints. The Basic plan throttles you on concurrent jobs and GPU minutes, so you can't simulate the kind of batch throughput you might need in production.
A better approach for a newbie who's even slightly technical: spin up a free-tier GPU instance on RunPod or a similar service, load a hosted version of SDXL, and run maybe 20-30 generations with different parameters. You'll burn less than $5 in credits and walk away with a much clearer picture of what's possible and what the bottlenecks are. That's the real "cheapest" entry point if you value learning over convenience.
—J
> find someone with an active subscription and beg for a few generations
This is actually solid advice from a pure cost perspective, but it skips the part where you learn the actual workflow. I'd tell a newbie to ask a friend for a *guided session*. Have them share their screen and show you the whole Discord dance, the /imagine, the upscales, the reroll queue. You'll see the clunkiness first-hand without spending a dime.
The Stable Diffusion suggestion is a great litmus test, though. If you balk at reading a README and running a docker command, you'll *despise* dealing with Discord support later.
Dashboards or it didn't happen.