AI task costs · in pounds
What it costs to generate 100 marketing images a month with AI
Recraft V4.1 Flash is the cheapest of the 20 models priced, at 53p for 100 images a month (0.53p per image). The dearest, Recraft V4.1 Pro, costs £15.83; the middle of the range is Seedream 5.0 Lite at £2.64.
How much does it cost to make marketing images with an AI image generator through its API? The answer below covers price only, not quality.
Prices of from OpenRouter's public API price list · converted at the ECB reference rate of ($1 = £0.7538) · Urbano DX
Cost by model, cheapest first
The workload
- One image of about one megapixel (1024 × 1024 pixels is 1.05 megapixels) from a text prompt, with no reference images.
- Where a model prices sizes separately, the cheapest listed price for a 1K image is used.
- 100 images generated a month, counting the attempts you throw away.
- Image models billed in output tokens, such as OpenAI GPT Image and Google Gemini image models, are left out: their tokens per image depend on size and quality settings.
| Model | Per image | 100 images a month | Rate used (USD) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recraft V4.1 FlashRecraft | 0.53p | 53p | $0.007 per image |
| Muse ImageMeta | 0.75p | 75p | $0.01 per image |
| FLUX.2 Klein 4BBlack Forest Labs | 1.1p | £1.11 | $0.014 per megapixel |
| Seedream 5.0 FlashByteDance Seed | 1.4p | £1.36 | $0.018 per image |
| Riverflow V2.5 FastSourceful | 1.4p | £1.43 | $0.019 per image |
| Krea 2 MediumKrea | 2.3p | £2.26 | $0.03 per image |
| Qwen Image 3Qwen | 2.3p | £2.26 | $0.03 per image (1K) |
| FLUX.2 ProBlack Forest Labs | 2.4p | £2.37 | $0.03 per megapixel |
| Recraft V4.1Recraft | 2.6p | £2.64 | $0.035 per image |
| Seedream 5.0 LiteByteDance Seed | 2.6p | £2.64 | $0.035 per image |
| Grok Imagine Image 2.0SpaceXAI | 3p | £3.02 | $0.04 per image (low 1K) |
| Qwen Image 3 ProQwen | 3p | £3.02 | $0.04 per image (1K) |
| Seedream 4.5ByteDance Seed | 3p | £3.02 | $0.04 per image |
| Seedream 5.0 ProByteDance Seed | 3.4p | £3.39 | $0.045 per image |
| FLUX.3 ImageBlack Forest Labs | 3.6p | £3.62 | $0.048 per image (1K) |
| Grok Imagine Image QualitySpaceXAI | 3.8p | £3.77 | $0.05 per image (1K) |
| Krea 2 LargeKrea | 4.5p | £4.52 | $0.06 per image |
| FLUX.2 MaxBlack Forest Labs | 5.5p | £5.53 | $0.07 per megapixel |
| Riverflow V2.5 ProSourceful | 9.8p | £9.80 | $0.13 per image |
| Recraft V4.1 ProRecraft | 16p | £15.83 | $0.21 per image |
How the numbers are worked out
- Each workload is written out on its page: tokens in and out, the share read from a prompt cache, audio minutes or images. Cost = workload × the model's listed rate, so you can check any figure with a calculator.
- Rates are OpenRouter's API prices in our snapshot of , the same ones on our model pricing pages. Buying from the developer directly can cost a little more or less. When rates move, the price change log records it.
- US dollars become pounds at the European Central Bank reference rate of : €1 = $1.1195 = £0.84385, so $1 = £0.7538. VAT, card fees and top-up fees are not included.
- About 0.75 English words make one token. Each model's tokenizer counts the same text a little differently, so treat a figure as a close estimate, not a quote.
- Models that reason before answering can add thinking tokens, billed as output. These figures count none, so a model with thinking switched on can cost more.
- This compares price only. It says nothing about which model does the job well: a cheap model that gets a tenth of the answers wrong can cost more in staff time than it saves.
Other tasks
- Summarise a 50-page PDF
- Draft replies to 1,000 customer emails
- Run a support chatbot: 10,000 chats a month
- Classify 10,000 support tickets
- Extract fields from 1,000 scanned invoices
- Transcribe 100 hours of calls
- Write 500 product descriptions
- Translate a 20,000-word website
- Answer questions over 10,000 internal documents
Want this running on your own data, with the cost measured? See the fixed-price AI pilot