Midjourney free trial: none on the website, 20 free generations in the niji app

Does Midjourney have a free trial?

Midjourney's own Free Trials page settles it in one line: "No free trial is currently available in Discord or the midjourney.com website." The exception is niji journey, the anime-style app Midjourney makes for iOS and Android. We read both help centers on 9 November 2026 through search snippets, because docs.midjourney.com and nijijourney.com block direct fetches.

Free use has come and gone twice. Midjourney paused its Discord trial in March 2023, after its founder David Holz cited "extraordinary demand and trial abuse." It opened the new website to everyone on 21 August 2024 with about 25 free images per account, per VentureBeat. That offer is gone. The niji journey app launched on 19 October 2023 with the offer that survives, per its launch post: "we're giving everyone 20 free generations!" It's now the only place that still gives images away.

Every free route to Midjourney, checked 9 November 2026

One of the seven routes gives a new user free images today: the niji journey app. Each row comes from Midjourney's or niji journey's own pages, except the 2024 trial, which comes from news coverage of Holz's Discord post.

Rating hours look free, but a new user can't use them. Midjourney's Earning Free Fast Time page gives the top 2,000 raters an extra Fast hour each day, but the hour expires after 30 days and you need an active subscription before you can spend any of it. So it rewards people who already pay. It won't get you in the door.

Schools get nothing extra either. Midjourney's group billing page gives organizations no discount beyond standard yearly pricing, and niji's help center puts it plainly: "we're unable to provide discounted or free plans for non-profit organizations or educational institutions." Midjourney's student billing page adds that each student needs their own account and their own subscription.

How does the niji journey free trial work?

The niji journey trial is 20 free image generations in the phone app, and you don't pay anything until they're used up. Midjourney, Inc. is the seller, and its App Store listing says: "Create stunning anime characters for free with 20 free generations." Here's the route, step by step:

1. Install niji journey from the App Store or Google Play. The niji help center says the trial is only for new users who download the app from the official stores, and emulator users can't get it.
2. Sign up in the app and spend the 20 generations. The app is built around niji's anime-style model, so judge it as that.
3. When the 20 run out, the app asks you to pay. niji's help center says you need a paid plan to keep generating once the trial generations are spent.
4. If you subscribe, one plan covers both apps. niji's help center says an existing Midjourney subscription works in niji journey, with no second subscription.

Nothing renews when the 20 run out, because no plan has started yet. It's the one free test Midjourney offers. It doesn't test the website's editor or Midjourney's main V8.1 model, though. Here's what the same Midjourney, Inc. listing charges when you do pay, next to the web price in Midjourney's plan docs:

Mini is the cheapest way to pay Midjourney anything, at about half of Basic. We couldn't find its monthly allowance on any page we could read. Check it in the app first. Yearly billing, at 20% off, is sold only on the website, according to niji's plan page.

Why did Midjourney stop its free trial?

Midjourney stopped its free trial because people opened throwaway accounts to collect free images. Holz announced the pause on Discord in late March 2023, blaming "extraordinary demand and trial abuse." Viral fake photos made with Midjourney were spreading that week. He called the idea that they caused the pause a "misunderstanding", per The Business Standard's report of his interview with The Verge.

The website trial of August 2024 came with the launch of midjourney.com for everyone. VentureBeat reported that new users could "generate approximately 25 images for free." Midjourney's Free Trials page doesn't list it anymore, and we found no dated notice of when it closed, so treat any guide that still promises 25 free images as out of date.

What is the cheapest way to try Midjourney without a free trial?

One month of Basic at $10 is the cheapest real test of Midjourney's own model. Midjourney's refund rule softens it. Its refund page offers a refund only to an account that has used less than 20 GPU minutes in its lifetime. That's about 24 SD image prompts at V8.1's 0.8 minutes each, so a short test can still come back to you.

Basic's catch is that it has no Relax mode, so every image you make spends the same 200 minutes, and time past that costs $4 an hour on the website or $3.99 in the app. Standard fixes that. It adds unlimited Relax images for $30. Our Midjourney pricing page works out what one prompt costs on each plan.

Whizi, which publishes this page, sells the last two rows. It isn't Midjourney. It has no Midjourney or niji model, no web editor and no Relax queue. Its free account is a taste: 2 pictures a month. Pick Whizi when you want pictures in the same app as Claude, GPT and Gemini, since one plan can replace two chat bills. The cheapest way to use Claude and GPT runs that sum, and one subscription for all AI models shows what it covers. If Midjourney's look is why you're here, buy Basic.