Midjourney made image ownership a paid subscription tier

The process wall

Before a single image ships to a client, a Midjourney subscriber working for a company above a certain size has to check which plan they hold, because the platform's own Terms of Service, in force from 27 May 2026 as retrieved on 16 September 2026, make ownership of a generated image conditional on the subscription tier, not on the act of generating it. That check belongs at the start of a paid commission, not after delivery.

What the documents show

The Terms state a subscriber owns all Assets they create to the fullest extent possible under applicable law, then carve out an exception: anyone working for a company earning more than $1,000,000 USD a year in revenue must be subscribed to the Pro or Mega plan to own their Assets at all. The plans page, current as retrieved, prices Basic at $10 a month, Standard at $30, Pro at $60 and Mega at $120, so the ownership exception carries a specific, named cost. The Terms also grant Midjourney a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive licence to reproduce and display anything a user inputs or generates, and state content is publicly viewable and remixable by default unless the subscriber pays for Stealth Mode, available only on Pro and Mega.

Authorship and limitation

The phrase 'to the fullest extent possible under applicable law' is doing real work: a contract can assign whatever rights a company holds, but it cannot create copyright where a jurisdiction does not recognise authorship in an AI-generated image, so the ownership grant is bounded by law the contract does not control. The revenue-based Pro or Mega requirement sits on top of that uncertainty as a separate commercial gate — a small studio above the threshold that stays on a cheaper plan does not own its own output, per the Terms, regardless of who wrote the prompt. The licence Midjourney keeps over inputs and outputs, plus default public visibility, means an unpublished draft is not private by default; privacy itself is a paid feature.

What survives

A subscriber keeps whatever ownership the Terms grant for as long as they hold the qualifying plan for their revenue bracket. Editorially, a freelancer billing a client above that revenue line should confirm their own subscription tier before delivering Midjourney output as a work product, and should not assume default privacy without separately checking Stealth Mode eligibility.

• Check which Midjourney plan an account holds against the $1,000,000 revenue threshold in the Terms.
• Read the licence-grant clause for what Midjourney itself may still do with a subscriber's inputs and outputs.
• Confirm Stealth Mode is active before treating a generation as private.

The Terms describe ownership as a purchasable, revenue-conditioned status rather than an automatic consequence of prompting, which makes the subscription tier a legal fact about a piece of work, not only a billing detail.