Freepik/Magnific’s “unlimited generations” have slowly become less and less usable
I want to get the community's opinion on this. Personally, I actually signed up for Freepik back in Janurary of 2025, but forgot to use it for months. Then I discovered Seedream 4.5 and figured Freepik might be worth revisiting.
In September of 2025, I upgraded to the "Premium+" membership because - at the time - it offered "unlimited image generations". I figured that, since it included Seedream, it was worth it to go up a few levels. But, a month later (I think), "Unlimited" started being throttled. Maybe that Fall they had too many people sign up and it was backlogging the systems. I didn't really mind then, though, because I could live with the average 1-2 minute time for each generation.
Then Nano Banana Pro came out. And its specific computing demands (as I understand) caused unique issues for its systems. So, at first the messaging was "NB Pro will be unlimited until date X". But then "date X" kept getting pushed back until finally, in February, Freepik said "NB Pro will be staying Unlimited". At that point, though, they no longer offered "unlimited image generations" for every model, because to use NB Pro 4K, you needed to spend credits. And in the meantime, I had actually signed up for Higgsfield as well because they were offering "365 day access" to NB Pro, which was a useful backup for me in case Freepik decided "Nope, NB Pro can't stay unlimited".
I was still fine with the service because, for most of my needs, 2K was fine, and generations still lasted 2-3 minutes on average. Even when Nano Banana 2 came out, I was still okay because, even though 4K was locked by credits, 1-2K wasn't, and generation times were still reasonable. Until Freepik merged with Magnific last month. Now, suddenly, "Unlimited" generations - for me - seem to be taking on average 4.5-5.5 minutes per generation. And this has been consistent, so I don't believe there's an issue client side with Google. Especially with the notices at the bottom saying "spend credits to go quicker". What it's done is severely limit my experimentation, because now I need to wait 4-5 minutes to see if something works (unless I - you guessed it - spend credits) which isn't necessarily useful if I want to see, for example, how a character looks or if a prompt modification was useful.
Thing is, though, I don't think this is just limited to myself. I've seen other people complaining, and not just about Google but other models as well being slow. And looking at Freepik's website, the service no longer offers "unlimited image generation" in perpetuity - it's only for 365 days. NB Pro has been shifted permanently into the highest tier. NB2, meanwhile, is only offered "unlimited" for 1K, which is a resolution I find inadequate. Look, I understand that system needs change and that Terms can be reviewed at any time - I would not say running a website is easy. But it feels like I'm always constantly getting the rug pulled out from underneath me
Long story short, the "unlimited" I signed up for back in September has been slowly chipped away at, to the point where I reason that it's 90% less useful than what it was in September. But I do want to know - especially for people who've been here for a while - if others are experiencing the same issues/feelings. And if support is reading this I can't "just spend credits" to make things better because money is not an infinite resource. Also, I understand that things need to be staggered so that things run smoothly. But that doesn't mean that certain tiers should be nerfed to the point that its essentially unusable.
Anyway, community, this is what I feel. Am I the only one, or do others feel the same way? I'm not necessarily trying to bash the site, I'm just trying to understand if I'm not the only one feeling this way.