Image Generation Cost Calculator

Image generation is priced per image rather than per token, which makes the headline arithmetic trivial and hides the cost somewhere else entirely: in how many images you generate per image you keep. A feature that shows the user four options and keeps one is not a 1× workload, it is 4×. A feature that lets them regenerate until they are happy has no fixed multiplier at all, and the regeneration field above is where your real bill lives.

The tier split matters for the same reason. High-quality generations often cost an order of magnitude more than the cheap tier, so a small share of traffic can dominate the invoice — the "high tier as a share of the bill" row will happily read a third or more on under a tenth of the volume. If it does, the cheapest change available to you is a default: generate the cheap tier first, offer an explicit upgrade, and let the users who care pay the cost of caring.

What this leaves out is everything after generation. Storing images costs per GB-month forever, serving them costs bandwidth, and moderating them costs either a classifier call or a human. For a consumer product those three together often exceed the generation bill within a year, because generation is a one-time charge and storage is a rent. If you are comparing generation against a stock library or a designer, price the whole pipeline, not the API call.