If you’re considering using OpenAI’s DALL-E system to generate images, you might wonder how much those images will cost. Adobe just announced that it will allow creators to submit AI-generated stock photos to its platform, and other photo sales platforms are likely to follow.
If you want to create a collection of AI-generated images with DALL-E, how much should you budget?
Each DALL-E image costs approximately $0.13 to create.
To charge for images, OpenAI uses a credit system. You can buy 115 credits at a time for $15, which works out to 13 cents per credit. The minimum amount you can spend to buy DALL-E credits is $15–you can’t pay for a single image, for example.
Once you purchase credits, you can redeem them for actions like creating a new set of images (four per query), requesting variations of an image, and performing advanced functions like outpainting.
DALL-E isn’t too expensive, but it’s not as cheap as text-based systems like GPT-3. Those cost as little as a few cents per 1,000 words of text generated.