The correct comparison includes loaded labor, review, correction, tools, production, rights, disclosure, adaptation, and failed outputs—not only the price of a generation subscription.
A scalable image workflow begins with rights, product truth, a source hash, approved transformations, accessibility ownership, and provenance—not a prompt that quietly invents the rest.
There is no reliable one-line answer. Human authorship, generated material, source rights, contracts, publication, trademarks, design patents, territory, and the exact asset must be reviewed separately.