Midjourney review: GPU hours, refunds and the public-by-default catch

What a Midjourney subscription buys

Midjourney generates images and short videos from text and image prompts, through its website and a Discord bot. Every plan is a subscription that renews automatically. What you are really buying is GPU time: a monthly allowance of Fast hours, plus, on Standard and above, unlimited generation in the slower Relax mode. We did not test it. This review reads the plan comparison, billing articles, Terms of Service, privacy documents and training-data summary on Midjourney's documentation site, as of November 4, 2026.

For most individuals, Standard at $30 a month is the plan that fits. It is the cheapest tier with unlimited Relax images. Basic's 200 Fast minutes go quickly, and once they are gone you either wait for the next month or pay $4 an hour.

GPU hours are use-it-or-lose-it

Two expiry rules shape the real value of a plan. First, subscription Fast time vanishes at the end of each month, and that is true even on yearly plans, so paying annually does not let you bank hours. Second, extra Fast hours you buy expire after 60 days, are non-refundable, and stop working if your subscription lapses.

The concurrency limits also differ by tier. Basic runs 3 Fast image jobs at once, and Pro and Mega run 12. If you batch a lot of work, that matters more than the hour count. And because Relax mode is unlimited from Standard upward, many users can treat Fast hours as a priority lane rather than a hard budget.

The 20-minute refund rule

Midjourney's refund policy fits in one sentence. You qualify only if your account has used less than 20 GPU minutes in its lifetime, counting Fast, Turbo and Relax time. If you qualify, the option appears when you cancel. If it doesn't appear, there is no refund. In practice, once you have generated a modest batch of images, the money is spent.

Cancelling, by contrast, is painless. It takes effect at the end of the billing cycle, you keep your remaining Fast time until then, and your images and history stay on the account. Note that the web version has no free trial, so the only low-risk test is the limited trial in the niji · journey mobile app.

Public by default, licensed forever

Midjourney calls itself an open-by-default community, and the documents follow through on that. Anything you generate can appear on the Explore page, including images made in private Discord servers or direct messages, unless you have Stealth mode, which is available only on Pro ($60) and Mega ($120). Even then, the terms promise only "best efforts" not to publish, and anything made in a shared Discord channel is visible to that channel.

The license clause is broader still. By using the service, you grant Midjourney a perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable, sublicensable license to reproduce, adapt and distribute your prompts and the assets you produce, and it survives termination. Midjourney's public training summary confirms that data from user interactions, such as prompts, was used to train its models. We found no training opt-out in the terms, privacy policy or privacy FAQ. Account deletion is available. It completes within 30 days, and you can reverse it within the first 7.

Commercial rights and the $1M rule

On ownership, the terms work well for creators. You own your assets as far as the law allows, and you keep them after you cancel. There is a revenue test, though. If you are a company, or work for one, with more than $1,000,000 in gross yearly revenue, you need Pro or Mega to own what you make. Upscaling someone else's image does not transfer ownership to you. Midjourney also states that it cannot advise on copyright, which is unsettled for AI-generated work in many countries.