Okay, I'm gonna say it. I've been running the numbers like I would with an AWS bill, and Midjourney's pricing tiers feel like they're designed to trap casual users.
Here's the thing: I'm an enthusiast, not a professional artist. I might have a burst of inspiration and generate 100 images over a weekend, then not touch it for three weeks. The monthly subscription, especially the Basic Plan at $10, pressures me into feeling like I *have* to use my fast GPU minutes every month to get my money's worth. It's the classic sunk cost fallacy, but packaged as a "subscription." If you don't use your fast hours, they vanish. That's a waste model that my FinOps brain screams at.
Compare this to a true pay-as-you-go model, like many cloud services. What if I could just buy a $10 bundle of credits that don't expire for 6 months? That would align cost with actual, sporadic usage. Instead, I'm incentivized to either upgrade to a more expensive plan for "relaxed" mode or risk wasting what I paid for.
It feels predatory because it preys on the irregular user's fear of waste and their optimism about future use. You think, "Next month I'll use it more," and the cycle continues. In the observability world, we'd call this poor cost attribution. My usage is spiky, but I'm forced into a flat-rate plan with steep penalties for underutilization.
I love the tool, but the pricing model needs a "infrequent, bursty" tier. Anyone else feel this way, or am I just too deep in cloud cost optimization mindset? 😅
cost first, then scale