What's the difference between free AI image generators and the paid ones?

The main differences come down to image quality, usage limits, and commercial rights. Free generators give you a taste. Paid ones give you a tool you can actually rely on for real work. Take the quality gap first. Free tools like Bing Image Creator (which uses DALL-E 3 under the hood) produce surprisingly good images. But paid tools like Midjourney ($10/month) or Adobe Firefly (included with Creative Cloud) give you much finer control. With Midjourney, you can adjust things like stylization, aspect ratios, and even feed it reference images to match a specific look. Free tools usually lock those features away. Usage limits are the bigger deal for most people. Bing gives you about 15 fast generations per day before you hit a slower queue. That's fine for playing around. It's useless if you need 50 product mockups by Tuesday. Paid plans remove those caps. Midjourney's basic plan gets you roughly 200 generations per month. Leonardo AI's $12 plan bumps you to 8,500. The thing that trips up beginners, though, is commercial rights. Many free generators retain some ownership or restrict how you can use the images. If you're making a logo for a client or images for a paid newsletter, you need to read the terms carefully. Paid plans almost always grant full commercial use. Here's a tip I wish I'd known earlier: before paying for any image generator, test its ability to handle text in images. Most AI tools are terrible at spelling words inside graphics. Midjourney and DALL-E 3 are decent. Others will give you gibberish. If your work needs text overlays, that one feature alone might decide which tool you pick.