Im honestly spiraling a bit trying to figure out which of these tools is actually gonna save me money in the long run because it feels like every time I find a 'cheap' option there is some huge catch. I am a student living in Seattle right now and I am trying to start this little side hustle making posters for local bands—mostly just small gigs—but my budget is basically non-existent. I can probably swing maybe 10 or 15 bucks a month if I skip a few lunches but I really cant go over that.

So I was thinking maybe Midjourney since everyone says it looks the best for artistic stuff but then I looked at their pricing and it feels like you pay a lot just to wait in a queue or get limited 'fast' hours and I dont even fully understand the Discord interface anyway it seems so chaotic. My logic was that if I am paying for a subscription I should just be able to use it whenever I want but I guess that isnt how these things work?

I read online that Stable Diffusion is the 'cheapest' because it is open source and free but then I realized you need a beefy graphics card to run it properly. I only have this older MacBook Air and I am pretty sure it would literally catch fire if I tried to generate a high-res poster on it lol. I looked at some cloud versions like Google Colab but then you have to pay for compute units and it just adds another layer of math that makes my head hurt.

I also tried Bing because people said it uses DALL-E 3 for free but it keeps giving me those 'content warning' blocks for totally normal things like a guitar or a dark alleyway and I run out of those 'boost' things so fast. I heard about Leonardo.ai too but they have this token system that resets daily? Does that actually work for a professional-ish workflow or am I gonna be stuck waiting for a timer to reset right when I have a deadline? I really need to get these posters finished by next Friday and I am just terrified of sinking my last bit of cash into something that limits me too much...