1In one sentence
You may use what you make, including for your business, within Midjourney's rules; but your pictures are public by default, some content is banned, and there are real things Midjourney is bad at.
2New words
- Terms of Service — the contract you accept when you subscribe. It says who owns the pictures and what you may do with them. Read the current one at midjourney.com/terms.
- Stealth Mode — a setting on Pro and Mega plans that keeps your pictures out of the public gallery. Without it, anyone can see what you made and the prompt you used.
- Community Guidelines — the content rules: what you may not make or upload.
- Copyright — the law about who owns a creative work. In many countries a picture made purely by AI cannot be copyrighted by anyone, which means you can use it but you may not be able to stop others from using it too.
3Why you would want it
Sam wants to print a poster, put a picture on the website and post daily. All of that is allowed on a paid plan. What Sam should know first: the poster idea is visible to every Midjourney user (unless Stealth); the smiling "baker" in the portrait is not a real employee and should not be presented as one; and the logo mock-up is a sketch, not a protected brand mark.
4The checklist
| Question | Short answer (November 2026) |
|---|---|
| Can I use pictures for my business? | Yes on any paid plan; companies over one million US dollars a year in revenue must be on Pro or Mega |
| Are my pictures private? | No, unless you have Stealth Mode (Pro or Mega) |
| Can I make pictures of real people? | Only if it cannot harass, deceive or harm them; sexual or political uses of real people are banned |
| What is banned? | Gore, adult content, anything sexual involving minors, hateful content, political campaign material, fraud, illegal activity |
| Does Midjourney get it right every time? | No: text spelling, hands, counts of objects, exact brand logos and exact repeats are unreliable |
| Can I get the exact same picture again? | Roughly, with --seed and the same prompt; not exactly |
| Can I make video from words only? | No, video always starts from a picture |
| Is there an official programming interface? | Midjourney's help pages list no official API as of November 2026; "Midjourney API" services are third parties and may risk your account |
5Try it now
- Open midjourney.com/terms and read the section on ownership. Note the revenue rule.
- Open the Community Guidelines (linked from the help pages) and skim the banned list once.
- Open one of your pictures, click More Options, and look at the privacy setting. If you are not on Pro or Mega, it will be public.
- Generate a poster with a line of text and count the spelling errors across the four. Decide: add the text yourself in Canva or another tool.
6What you will see
The terms page, written in plain enough English, and your gallery with its public and private markers.
7Watch out
- Midjourney has been sued by large film studios (Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. in 2025) over copyrighted characters. Avoid prompts for famous characters, celebrities and brand logos you do not own; even where the tool allows it, you may not.
- Rules are enforced on your whole account, including private pictures and Stealth Mode. A ban comes without refund.
- Shared folders (on the Alpha site since October 2026) let you invite a designer or client to add pictures or just look, or share by link. Sharing does not make pictures private: without Stealth Mode they can still appear on Explore.
- Do not tell customers a picture is a real photo of your product if it is not. Besides the guidelines, it is bad business.
8Go further
Put your real text on top of Midjourney pictures in a layout tool, keep a folder of your best prompts, and use Draft mode for every new idea. You now know more than most paying users.