B-06 · Category pricing economicsarchive-recorded · snapshot 2026-09-27
Design AI Tools: Pricing Economics
Pricing economics for the Design category across 55 archives: 46 carry a numeric starting price, 40 are free-tier listings, and 9 archives without a numeric amount are compared by pricing label only. Unit groups are never mixed — every comparison below is within a single billing unit.
Key numbers
Archives
55
data/tools · N=55
Numeric starting price
46
pricing.startingPrice.amount · N=55
Free-tier listings
40
pricing.model · N=55
Median mo starting price
$9/mo
unit=mo amounts · N=39
Label-fallback listings
9
pricing.label · N=55
Unit groups
4
startingPrice.unit · N=46
Starting-price spread by billing unit
only numeric amounts; null amounts excluded (R5)
| Unit | Listings | Min | Median | Max |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| mo | 39 | $0 | $9 | $20 |
| user | 4 | $9.99 | $14.3 | $16 |
| once | 2 | $65 | $80 | $95 |
| image | 1 | $0.04 | $0.04 | $0.04 |
Lowest mo-unit starting prices (top 10)
the largest unit group in this category: unit="mo", N=39
| Tool | Starting price | Model | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| Image Creator | $0/mo | free | Free with a Microsoft account (boosts system for speed) |
| BlueWillow | $0/mo | freemium | Free to try — no quotas published |
| Fontjoy | $0/mo | free | Completely free |
| HunyuanImage | $0/mo | free | Free open source (Tencent Hunyuan Community License) |
| Khroma | $0/mo | free | Completely free (no pricing, no account tiers) |
| Kolors | $0/mo | free | Free open source (Apache 2.0) |
| Qwen-Image | $0/mo | free | Free open source (Apache 2.0) · Hugging Face/ModelScope download |
| Upscayl | $0/mo | free | Desktop free OSS · Cloud Pro $24.99/mo |
| Pixlr | $2.49/mo | freemium | Free tier exists · Plus $2.49/mo ($1.99 annual) · Premium $9.99 ($7.99) · Ultra $24.99 ($19.99) · Ultra MAX $49.99 ($39.99) |
| Coolors | $3/mo | freemium | Free (10 saved palettes) · Pro $3/mo (discounted from $5, $36/yr) |
Pricing model distribution
Count of archives per recorded pricing.model across the 55 Design archives.
Method
- Population: category = "design" archives (N=55); pricing fields as recorded (pricing.model, pricing.startingPrice.amount, pricing.startingPrice.unit).
- Unit discipline: amounts are grouped by startingPrice.unit and compared only within the same unit; cross-unit arithmetic is never performed.
- Null discipline: archives with a null startingPrice.amount (9 here) are excluded from every numeric statistic and fall back to pricing.label, then pricing.model, for display.
- Median over each unit group uses the standard median; min/max are the observed extremes in that group.