The Two Midjourney Buys Client-Work People Get Wrong

If you take client work on Midjourney, the easy mistakes are not “forgot to turn on Stealth” or “picked the wrong aspect ratio.” They happen at checkout.

Two of them show up as green text on the plan chart and still produce the wrong invoice:

Commercial qualification is a USD gross-revenue gate, not “any paid plan.” Every tier on the comparison chart is labeled General Commercial Terms. The footnote is the actual rule: a company over $1,000,000 USD in annual gross revenue must be on Pro or Mega. Basic and Standard do not satisfy that documented requirement just because money left the card.
Fast GPU time is a monthly allotment, not a warehouse. Unused Fast hours do not carry over. Annual billing does not bank a year of GPU. The 20% yearly discount buys the seat. If you run out mid-cycle, extra Fast is $4 per hour on every plan.

This is not the same argument as annual plans locking the seat rather than the quota. That piece is about lock-in while the meter can still change. This one is about what the discount actually purchases when the meter is Fast time: a renewal seat, not stored GPU inventory. You can take the annual 20% off and still be right. You just cannot treat prepaid months as a Fast-hour tank.

Prices, Fast allotments, and commercial language below are what Midjourney’s docs showed on 2026-08-28. Plans, footnotes, and Terms of Service change. Re-read the live pages before you bill a client or renew.

What the plan chart actually sells (2026-08-28)

From Comparing Midjourney Plans:

Plan	Monthly	Annual (pay-upfront)	Fast GPU / month	Relax	Stealth	Extra Fast
Basic	$10	$96 ($8 / month)	3.3 hr (200 min)	No unlimited Relax	No	$4 / hr
Standard	$30	$288 ($24 / month)	15 hr	Unlimited images	No	$4 / hr
Pro	$60	$576 ($48 / month)	30 hr	Unlimited images and SD video	Yes	$4 / hr
Mega	$120	$1,152 ($96 / month)	60 hr	Unlimited images and SD video	Yes	$4 / hr

Annual is a 20% seat discount paid in full up front. All four rows say General Commercial Terms. That label is where client-work buyers stop reading.

They should not.

The same page says past subscribers may generally keep using their creations, but a company making more than $1,000,000 USD in annual gross revenue must buy Pro or Mega.

Unlimited Relax images start at Standard. Unlimited Relax video starts at Pro. Stealth Mode is Pro/Mega only. Basic video is SD; Standard and up list SD and HD. Subscriptions auto-renew monthly or yearly unless you set the plan to cancel.

None of that means every paid tier satisfies every client-work requirement.

Mistake 1: Treating every paid tile as equivalent for commercial work

The gate is USD gross, and it is not your local-currency P&L

The help article Using Images & Videos Commercially is the short version:

You own the images and videos you create, including after you cancel.
Exception: if you upscale another user’s image, that image stays theirs. You need their permission.
Exception: if you are part of a business grossing more than $1,000,000 USD a year, you need a Pro or Mega plan to use your images commercially for your company.

That number is USD. It is gross revenue, not net profit, not owner draw, not “what we cleared after contractors.”

If you invoice in SGD, EUR, JPY, CNY, or anything else, convert annual gross to USD before you decide Basic or Standard is fine. A studio that “doesn’t feel like a million-dollar company” in local currency can already be over the line. A studio with a large local-currency top line can still be under it. Do not use the number on last year’s tax return in local currency as if it were the Midjourney meter.

The Terms are slightly broader than the marketing footnote. Terms of Service (version effective May 27, 2026), Section 4, Content Rights:

You own Assets you create “to the fullest extent possible under applicable law,” subject to the Agreement and third-party rights.
If you are a company or any employee of a company with more than $1,000,000 USD a year in revenue, you must be subscribed to a Pro or Mega plan to own Your Assets.
Upscales of other people’s images remain theirs.
Ownership of Assets you created persists if you later downgrade or cancel.

The help article still points at “Section 4: Copyright and Trademark.” The live Terms heading on 2026-08-28 is Content Rights. Read the live Section 4, not the old section title.

Two wording gaps matter for client work:

Plan comparison and the commercial article say gross / grossing. The Terms say revenue. Until Midjourney unifies that, treat USD annual gross as the conservative billing test.
The Terms catch the company and its employees, not only “we use Midjourney as a brand.” A staff designer generating on a personal Standard plan for an over-threshold employer is the fact pattern the Terms are written to block.

Midjourney also says it will not advise you on copyright. Assets are provided AS IS, including no warranty of non-infringement. Platform permission to use what you generated is not a full chain of title for a client’s campaign, and it is not a substitute for looking at third-party IP inside the prompt or the output.

What “subscribed at any point” does and does not save

The comparison page and Section 4 both say ownership persists after downgrade or cancellation. A conservative buy-side reading is:

Under the revenue gate, ownership of already generated Assets persists after you cancel, subject to the Terms and third-party rights.
Over the revenue gate, Pro or Mega is the condition of ownership, not a nicer watermark. Generating client-facing work on Basic or Standard because “we paid something” is the wrong buy.
Canceling stops new generation. It does not prepaid-bank Fast time, and it does not keep Relax running.

If you are an independent freelancer under the USD gross line, generating on your account, then assigning or licensing the files to a large client, that is a different fact pattern than being employed by the large client and generating on a $10 plan. Do not collapse those. Get legal advice if the client is the over-threshold company and needs the files as work product. This article is a plan-buy guide, not an opinion on your contract.

Default visibility is part of the commercial buy

Section 4 also says the community is open by default: content posted in public is viewable and remixable, and you license Midjourney to allow that. Stealth is Pro/Mega (or a previously sold add-on). Midjourney’s “best efforts” not to publish apply when Stealth is actually on. Anything you drop in a shared Discord channel is still visible to that room.

For unreleased products, embargoed campaigns, and “the client must not see this on Explore,” Standard is the wrong plan even if you are under $1M USD. That is a privacy buy, not a revenue-gate buy. They get confused at checkout because both point at Pro.

Mistake 2: Paying annually as if Fast hours were inventory

Plan Information links Subscription Fast Time Expiration: unused Fast time from the subscription does not carry over to the next month, on monthly or yearly billing.

That is the whole trap.

Annual Standard is $288 on 2026-08-28. That is not 180 Fast hours in a tank (15 × 12). It is 15 Fast hours that expire every month, twelve times, plus a cheaper seat. Skip a slow month and those hours are gone. Stack two client rushes in the same renewal window and you still only have that month’s allotment.

If Fast runs out before renewal, Purchasing Extra Fast Time is the overflow valve. The comparison chart prices it at $4 / hr on Basic, Standard, Pro, and Mega.

So the annual 20% off is a good seat deal when you already know you will use the product every month. It is a bad mental model for GPU inventory. Client work is lumpy. Lumpy work burns unused Fast in quiet weeks and then buys $4/hr in delivery week.

Do the $4/hr math before you “just top up”

Stay on Standard and buy Extra Fast only when the overflow is occasional. Step up a tier when the overflow is the job.

Using 2026-08-28 list prices, if you use the extra Fast:

Standard ($30, 15 hr) → Pro ($60, 30 hr) is +$30 for +15 hr, about $2 / hr, and you also get Stealth, Relax video, and the over-$1M ownership path.
Pro ($60, 30 hr) → Mega ($120, 60 hr) is +$60 for +30 hr, again about $2 / hr if you actually burn it, plus higher video concurrency.
Extra Fast at $4 / hr is the correct buy for a one-off overrun. It is the expensive way to rent a missing tier every month.

Relax does not rescue a Fast shortage if the client deadline is this afternoon. Unlimited Relax images are Standard and up. Unlimited Relax video is Pro/Mega, and it is SD. Fast is still the scarce meter for rush stills, HD video, and anything that cannot wait in the Relax queue.

One more billing constraint from the Terms: one user per registered account, one account per user. A small team cannot buy one Mega and pass the login around. Each person who generates is a seat. “We will share the Pro because we only need Stealth sometimes” is a Terms problem, not a savings.

Decision table: which tile to buy

Use USD annual gross for the revenue column. Convert. Do not guess.

Buyer	USD annual gross	Stealth / off-Explore client work	Relax images	Relax video	Fast pattern	Plan to buy
Solo freelancer, public-ok drafts	Under $1M	No	Nice to have	No	Fits in 15 hr/month	Standard
Solo freelancer, confidential campaigns	Under $1M	Yes	Either	No	Fits in 30 hr/month	Pro (Stealth is the reason)
Solo, image + waiting-ok video	Under $1M	No	Yes	Yes	Moderate	Pro (Relax video is the reason)
Small studio, image factory, work can be public	Under $1M	No	Yes	No	Fits in 15 hr/month; rare overruns	Standard, Extra Fast at $4/hr for spikes
Small studio, same, but Fast is always short	Under $1M	No	Yes	No	Needs ~30 hr/month	Pro (cheaper than Standard + monthly $4/hr)
Small studio, video in Relax or Stealth	Under $1M	Yes and/or Relax video	Yes	Yes	30 vs 60 hr is the remaining question	Pro; Mega only if Fast/concurrency is the bottleneck
Company, or employee of a company, over the line	Over $1M USD gross	Irrelevant to the gate	Irrelevant to the gate	Irrelevant to the gate	Size the Fast after you clear the gate	Pro or Mega only. Basic/Standard are the wrong commercial buy.
Any of the above, one brutal month	Either	Already on the right tier	—	—	Allotment gone, deadline is not	Stay put, buy Extra Fast $4/hr. Do not “upgrade forever” for a single spike.
Team of three generators	Either	Per person	Per person	Per person	Per person	Three separate accounts and subscriptions. Do not share one login.

Basic ($10, 3.3 Fast hours, no unlimited Relax, no Stealth) is the lowest-cost entry tier. For recurring client work, Standard is usually the more practical floor; the first confidential, Relax-video, or over-$1M floor is Pro.

Mega is not “more commercial” than Pro. Commercial ownership for over-threshold companies is Pro or Mega. Mega is more Fast (60 vs 30 hours), more concurrent video jobs, and a larger permutation cap. Buy Mega when the meter is GPU and throughput, not when you want a fancier license.

A checkout script that does not mix the two mistakes

Before you pay, answer these in order. Do not skip to the annual toggle.

Whose revenue? Your studio’s USD gross, and whether you are an employee of an over-threshold company. Convert local-currency gross to USD. If that number is over $1,000,000, the only commercial tiles are Pro and Mega. Stop considering Basic and Standard.
Who will see the work on the open web? If the answer is “the client would fire us,” you need Stealth → Pro or Mega, even under $1M.
Images, video, or both? Relax images = Standard minimum. Relax video = Pro minimum.
Is Fast lumpy or flat? Flat monthly use can take the 20% annual seat discount. Lumpy client weeks should assume hours will die unused and $4/hr will appear in delivery month. Do not annual-pay in order to “save GPU for later.” There is no later.
How many humans type prompts? One seat each.
Exit. If you already generated under a plan that qualified you, Section 4 says you still own those Assets after downgrade or cancel (subject to the Agreement and third parties). You do not keep Fast, Relax, or Stealth. You keep the files you already made.

Then, and only then, decide monthly vs annual. Annual is 20% off the row you already picked. It is not a way to fix a row you picked for the wrong reason. If you are still choosing the underlying product, start with the broader AI image-tool decision guide.

Official pages to keep next to the invoice

Comparing Midjourney Plans — prices, Fast hours, Relax/Stealth split, $4/hr Extra Fast, General Commercial Terms footnote.
Using Images & Videos Commercially — ownership after cancel; upscale-of-others exception; $1,000,000 USD gross Pro/Mega rule.
Terms of Service — Section 4 Content Rights; company or employee; ownership persists after downgrade/cancel; default public remix; Stealth “best efforts.”
Plan Information — index for Fast expiration, Extra Fast, Stealth, commercial use.
Subscription Fast Time Expiration — unused Fast does not roll, monthly or yearly.
Purchasing Extra Fast Time — overflow when the month’s Fast is gone.

If a live page disagrees with this article after 2026-08-28, the live page wins. Midjourney states plan availability and features are subject to change, and the Terms apply to every subscription.