Ideogram

Four events, and every one loosens — an unusually consistent short record. The Pro tier arrived in May 2024 (~12,000 fast generations/month); a first public API landed with Ideogram 2.0 in August 2024, its per-image billing described as on par with Flux Pro; Ideogram 3.0 rolled out across all tiers in March 2025 with no announced credit-cost increase; and in June 2026 Ideogram 4.0 was released as an open-weight model (9.3B, weights and inference code public, an nf4 checkpoint fitting a single 24GB GPU, commercial license available). That last move matters most for dependency risk, since self-hosters can drop API billing and lock-in entirely. The counterweight is a tight free tier — roughly 10 slow credits/week and single-concurrency, per the user report. Four events is a limited window, not a long behavioral record, so calling Ideogram structurally stable would overreach. Still, nothing observed is a price hike, a silent restriction, or a model gated behind a higher tier. The trend points toward more access and, with open weights, a genuine exit from vendor lock-in — just confirm current per-image and credit pricing directly, since this history is too brief to treat as a guarantee.