DALL-E

DALL-E is OpenAI's image generation model, famous for turning a sentence into a picture. You describe what you want — a watercolour of a market in Marrakech, a logo idea, a storybook illustration — and DALL-E creates it. In 2026, DALL-E no longer exists as a standalone product or API. It lives inside ChatGPT, where image generation is powered by the DALL-E family and the newer GPT Image models, and it can edit and refine an image through conversation.

Key Features

• Generate images from a plain-language description
• Refine an image through conversation in ChatGPT
• Good at text inside images for posters and slides
• Styles from photorealistic to watercolour and pixel art
• Edit and remix your own uploaded photos
• Built into ChatGPT — no separate app needed

Pricing

Prices as listed in 2026 research. Always check the official site for the latest price — plans change. Free plan: Yes — it has a free plan.

How it works

The strength of DALL-E inside ChatGPT is the back-and-forth: you can ask for a change in plain language, such as make the sky dusk, add a cat, or try a different style, and the image updates without starting over. It is also good at text inside images, a weakness of many earlier generators, which makes it useful for posters, social graphics, and presentation slides.

ChatGPT's free plan includes a limited number of image generations per day, which is enough for occasional use. ChatGPT Plus at $20 per month raises the limit substantially and adds faster generation. The old DALL-E API was retired on May 12, 2026, so developers who need image generation by API should look at OpenAI's GPT Image family instead. For everyone else, DALL-E means opening ChatGPT and describing a picture.

Pros and Cons

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