Dall-E2’s New Pricing Is Making People Upset

Jim Clyde Monge
4 min readJul 22, 2022
OpenAI dall-e2 officially in Beta and revealed its new pricing
Image by Author — Screenshot from OpenAI’s announcement

OpenAI, the Artificial Intelligence research lab, has announced the pricing for its popular text-to-art tool: Dall-E2.

If you’re not yet familiar with what Dall-E2 is, here’s a short explanation:

Dall-E2 is an artificial intelligence program that creates images from textual descriptions, revealed by OpenAI on January 5, 2021. It uses a 12-billion parameter training version of the GPT-3 transformer model to interpret the natural language inputs and generate corresponding images.

$15 For 115 Credits

One credit is applied each time a prompt is entered, and a user hits the “generate” or “variations” button.

OpenAI dall-e2 officially in Beta and revealed its new pricing
Image by Author

Let’s do some math real quick.

  • 115 (credits) x 4 (image per prompt) = 460 images
  • 15 (USD) / 460 (images) = $0.032 per image

Three cents per image isn’t all that bad for some people.

But looking at the Reddit community, users are now on fire with this pricing.

camacca280 : DALL-E has just lost the magical spark that made this whole thing feel so surreal after these new changes. Partly because of the ridiculous price per prompts charging and not just a subscription based system so you don’t have to worry about any unwanted image generated.

battleship_hussar: $15 holy sh*t, I thought they would just do something like $1–5 for 50 more extra generations or something and keep giving 50 free gens per month.

With how much iteration is involved in generating acceptable images and how its down to 4 per generation… you are basically gonna be forced to pay $15 basically right away if you want to generate good images fast.

SmithMano: This might be acceptable if they at least gave you a low-res preview of the images, then you could pay to have the full res version. In my opinion the price is too high for a roll of the dice. At least with stock photos, they’re expensive, but you know exactly what you’re getting.

OpenAI Exploring More Pricing Model

Jim Clyde Monge

4X Top Writer. Chief Editor at https://generativeai.pub/. Programmer, Artist, Writer. Join me on medium: https://jimclydemonge.medium.com/membership