The image generation bill: per-image costs add up fast
DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion bill per image — and agents generate hundreds. The math agents don't show you.
Text models bill per token — visible in every dashboard. Image models bill per image — and agents iterate, regenerate, and scale without anyone doing the per-image math.
The multiplication
A content agent generating 100 assets with 3 iterations each is 300 billable images — before campaigns, A/B variants, or localization. At per-image rates that's a real line. DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion providers all multiply the same way.
The control
Per-agent ceilings on image generation, a regeneration limit (velocity), and a category budget that separates images from text. The bill is per-image × volume; the ceiling governs the volume. The full cost picture →