One AI image a day for a year: 365 images cost $1.825 to $96.27
A daily image for 365 days costs $1.825 on Soul at 720p, $9.13 on Grok, $13.69 on Flux 2 Pro and $96.27 on ChatGPT Image 2. Table and a scheduling note.
Generating one image every day for 365 days costs $1.825 on Higgsfield Soul at 720p, $9.12 on Grok Imagine, $13.69 on Flux 2 Pro and $96.27 on ChatGPT Image 2, at Sume's billed prices. The arithmetic is 365 times the per-image price, with no volume rate to apply.
A daily image shows up in newsletters, calendar apps, advent pages and "image of the day" sites. For those, the cost question is less about the total and more about whether a better model is worth a few extra dollars a year. The table answers that.
A year of daily images by model
Prices come from the Sume image docs: provider list price times 1.25, one image per call. A leap year has 366 days, which adds one image to every row.
| Model | Billed per image | 365 images |
|---|---|---|
| Higgsfield Soul (720p) | $0.005 | $1.825 |
| Grok Imagine | $0.025 | $9.125 |
| Seedream 4.0 | $0.0325 | $11.863 |
| Flux 2 Pro | $0.0375 | $13.688 |
| Ideogram 4.5 (medium) | $0.075 | $27.375 |
| Nano Banana 2.1 (1K) | $0.10 | $36.50 |
| Nano Banana Pro (1K) | $0.1875 | $68.438 |
| ChatGPT Image 2 | $0.26375 | $96.269 |
What the gaps mean
The widest gap is between Soul and ChatGPT Image 2: $94.44 a year, or $7.87 a month. The gap between Flux 2 Pro and Nano Banana 2.1 at 1K is $22.81 a year, about $1.90 a month.
For a hobby site those are small numbers either way. For a business with a hundred such feeds the same gap is a hundred times larger, and the table scales: multiply any row by the number of feeds.
Scheduling a daily generation
A daily image should not depend on a person remembering. Run the generation from a scheduler, request it ahead of time, and keep the result URL, since the image lives at a Sume-hosted address. Generate a week in advance so one failed run does not leave a gap; a failed generation is not billed, so retrying costs nothing extra.
If you want every image to share a style, put the style in a fixed prompt prefix and vary only the subject. Sume does not accept seed, so the prefix is your only consistency tool.
Why a daily image is a good price test
One image a day is a small, steady load, which makes it a clean way to compare two models over time. Run one model on odd days and another on even days for a month, 30 images each, and the cost difference is a number you can read off the log. For Soul against Flux 2 Pro that month is $0.15 against $1.12.
It also shows drift. A prompt that looks fine on day one can start to repeat itself by day forty; a daily log of thumbnails makes that visible long before a year has passed.
A practical setup
- Pick the model by looking at ten sample outputs, not the price column.
- Store the prompt, model id, billed cost and URL for each day.
- Set an annual ceiling at the table value plus 10%. For Flux 2 Pro that is about $15.06.
- Review the log each quarter and test a newer model on one week of prompts.
Sources
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