Pulled from 20 full Reddit threads, live job listings and studio case studies. Short version: ComfyUI is not the product. The people earning consistently were already selling something, and use Comfy to cut what each deliverable costs them.
The same answer comes back in every thread, phrased a dozen different ways.
"I don't think you can just earn money with ComfyUI. You can earn money with it if you're good at something and it takes your creative vision further. It's like asking, can I make money with a saw. Sure you can. If you're a good carpenter. If you have a relevant skill that made money before ComfyUI, then ComfyUI can help you make more. It's just a chess piece, not the board."
u/Last_Ad_3151 · r/comfyui
Across 20 threads the tool gets compared to a saw, a chisel, a screwdriver, a hammer and Windows. That is not people being unhelpful. It is the actual finding. Two paths work and one fails:
Path A. You already sell a creative service. Comfy replaces a cost line inside it: the stock library, the second photoshoot, the masking hours, the storyboard illustrator.
Path B. You build a product or an audience. Comfy is the hidden engine nobody sees, and you charge for the app, the subscription, the character or the physical thing.
"I learned ComfyUI, now pay me for ComfyUI." There is no market for the skill on its own. The one person in the dataset who argued hardest that there was demand for setup and optimisation services got told to check his own portfolio, and could not point to revenue.
Grouped by what the money is really for. The first group is the biggest and healthiest.
Used to bill clients $1,000 to $2,000 per image for the stock library. Now bills the same for AI regenerated images. About 10 images a week on top of the photography. Still drags out the PhaseOne to shoot real floors and ground to composite in, because AI still fails on wide smooth tiles at 150MP. Paid off two RTX 5090s.
"The workflow is almost the same for years: just instead of endless scrolling in the stock photobanks, I simply generate what I need, and instead of manually masking something I press the button."
u/Ill_Director2734 · r/comfyui 1p9o4p6
Train a LoRA per product on Flux or Z-Image, generate the stills, then Wan 2.2 to turn them into video. His extra tip: you can put clothing on a human model from just a shot of the garment alone. Sold as one of the agency's services.
u/RM0nst3r · r/comfyui 1q5ilmm
Animation lane plus a toolbox lane: upscaling, enhancing old or low-res pictures. He trains the other creatives at the agency too. His caveat matters: "it always needs compositing after the AI, because AI made wonderful visuals but for professional works it's not accurate enough."
u/Accurate_Public4674 · r/comfyui 1cf19cg
"Mostly pre-vis type stuff for conveying or dumping a load of ideas for cheap to get the client in the feedback mood, without me spending hours creating stuff just to get that same initial feedback."
u/PestBoss · r/comfyui 1p9o4p6
This is the most important operational fact in the whole dataset, and almost nobody outside production knows it.
"CG Supervisor here. Using ComfyUI for preproduction, LookDev and refining. For final pixels isn't allowed by contract."
u/Bisnispter. Another in the same thread: "Tv platform doesn't allow using comfy Ai over the table in professional production environment."
In broadcast and platform-commissioned work, Comfy is allowed in the exploration phase and banned in the delivered frame. The budget you can sell into is the pre-production budget, not the delivery budget.
A production-house owner uses it for storyboards, comics, proof-of-concepts, thumbnails and animation as a service. "For the post-production team, this is just another tool in their arsenal."
u/javisth · r/comfyui 1cf19cg
A studio filmmaker used A1111 for a year, then demoed turning a drawn commercial storyboard into a photorealistic one with Canny and controlnets. Only then did his bosses see it and let him use it on more projects. He notes smaller companies adopt faster: big studios are rigid about pipelines set ten years ago.
u/Florian_Claassen · r/comfyui 1cf19cg
A freelancer "did a stint at an animation studio setting up a few internal animation tools." VFX houses hire Comfy people to build in-house tools, for instance extracting HDRIs from images. Honest note from the same commenter: "it's far from a creative role."
An indie card-game team hiring to restyle and upscale a 20 to 30 card deck. They had switched to ChatGPT and the outputs were too inconsistent to ship. That inconsistency is the whole reason they are paying someone.
"In the backend the images and videos are generated through comfyui. People pay either a subscription or they buy virtual tokens. The webapp is profitable." A second operator builds exactly these backends for other people's sites.
A full-stack dev left his job to build it on ComfyUI, CatVTON and RunPod serverless. Cost about ₹2 per generation, roughly 2 US cents, and could reach ₹1 at 2,000 to 3,000 calls a day. 22 seconds warm, about a minute cold. He concluded organic traffic was too hard and the real play is selling it as an API to e-commerce companies.
Someone who took a Flux Kontext try-on workflow to actual brands:
"The feedback i got from real clothing brands is that it's only providing the vibe but not the cut and the feel of texture so it's useless to them."
A separate try-on app reported "43 freemium users, 0 paying." Impressive demos in this category keep failing to convert. r/comfyui 1ly75us
A new local pub near him looked drab. He pitched fun poster ideas around the bar's "G.O.A.T" theme: goats drinking beer, playing bar-dice. Started for bar tab. He owns a desktop laser, so it grew into coasters, kids' colouring pages and free-drink chips. Three more pubs now want wall art.
"Now we are working with real cash. Most of these people don't really get what we do, so they have no idea how to make this happen. The online digital art sales are bleak, but if you can turn your art (AI or not) into physical work, you will find there is plenty of business out there. I am in a city of 8,000 people, and I will have sold five figures worth of art by the end of the year as a side hustle."
🟢 u/scottdetweiler · r/comfyui 1lbzjkr
He also sells designs on Etsy aimed at people who make coins. The pattern: sell to people who can make money from your design.
Not Reddit talk. Published case studies and company statements.
| Who | What they did with it | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Silverside AI | SVEDKA's 2026 Super Bowl commercial, the first primarily AI-generated Super Bowl ad | 🟠 blog.comfy.org |
| Black Math | Modular pipelines joining motion, texture and generative tools, so clients get reusable design systems instead of one-off deliverables | 🟠 comfy.org/customers |
| Moment Factory | 3D projection mapping at architectural scale. Explored 20+ creative directions at 20 to 40 versions each. Concepting went from days to hours | 🟠 comfyui.org |
| Groove Jones | Holiday FOOH campaign for Dick's Sporting Goods | 🟠 comfy.org/customers |
| Ubisoft | Open-sourced the CHORD model with ComfyUI for AAA PBR material generation | 🟠 comfy.org/customers |
| Series Entertainment | Rebuilt game and video production around it | 🟠 comfy.org/customers |
| Magnopus | The studio behind Wizard of Oz at Sphere. Published on deploying ComfyUI in a shared production environment with centralised network drives for models and custom nodes | 🟠 localhosthq |
Comfy Org's own careers page claims teams at OpenAI, Netflix, Amazon Studios, Ubisoft, EA and Tencent use it. Self-reported, but stated on formal job listings.
Ranked by how well the evidence actually holds up, not by how loud the model is online.
Assembled from operators stating their own prices. Mostly from a thread where freelancers compared notes on AI video pricing.
| What | Price | Who and the note that matters |
|---|---|---|
| 60s AI video | £1,000 | u/GoobaZoup, flat 🟢 |
| 60s ad video + Meta campaign management | €700 + €500/mo + 10% of ad spend | u/Del_Teo_03. The retainer is the real business, not the video 🟢 |
| Technical product images and video | €100/image, €100/video, about €2,000 for 60s | u/chrisufin. 10 to 15 generations per approved image, 2 to 4 tries per video, Photoshop to finish. "If this thing would be filmed in real life it would be starting from 5k and some products would not even be possible to film" 🟢 |
| 30s AI video | $2,000 | u/Fickle-Firefighter11, "it all depends on the work" 🟢 |
| Commercial 8K/120fps for movie studios | $1,000 per minute | Claims their own models at each step. Unverified ⚪ |
| Stock-library replacement, per image | $1,000 to $2,000 | The photographer. Same price the stock library used to cost the client 🟢 |
| Custom ComfyUI workflow, freelance | €90/hr to $2,000/contract | €90 was explicitly a friend discount 🟢 |
| The floor | $10 for six 8s videos, $20 per workflow | This is the same tool doing the same work. Only the buyer changed 🟢 |
Every high number in that table is anchored to what the client would otherwise have to spend: a film shoot, a stock licence, a photography day rate, an agency retainer. Every low number is anchored to what another freelancer will accept. Nothing about ComfyUI decides which one you are. The anchor you choose does.
Live and recently-closed listings that name ComfyUI. This is the money most people in the threads did not realise was there.
| Role | Pay | Note |
|---|---|---|
| OpusClip, AI Artist, Mountain View | $140K to $220K / yr | Full-time, in person 🔵 |
| CoCreativ, AI Artist, NYC | $500 to $800 / day | Freelance to hire, hybrid, 5 yrs experience 🔵 |
| Technical ComfyUI Artist, Los Gatos CA, via Akraya | $60 to $70 / hr W2 | 12+ months, remote. Skills asked for: ComfyUI, video generation, style transfer at expert level, LoRA training 🔵 |
| Netflix, CG Artist Experimental (Ink), LA | not stated | ComfyUI named in both the duties and the qualifications. Also asks for LoRA training and Unreal 🔵 |
| Nike, Generative AI Design Expert | not stated | Wanted hands-on experience building custom ComfyUI workflows. Now filled. Comfy's own team named Nike alongside HP and Accenture 🔵 |
| Harbor, NYC post house, AI Animator/Artist | $66K to $101K | A real salary band for a job title that did not exist two years ago 🟠 |
| Technical Artist (Generative AI), LA hybrid | $60K to $140K | Founded by Oscar-winning artists. Temporal consistency and precise control named as the job 🔵 |
| Magnopus, Technical Artist Generative AI | not stated | ComfyUI plus A1111, ControlNet, Dreambooth, LoRA, IP-Adapter. 5+ yrs, advanced Photoshop required 🔵 |
| AI Fashion Content Creator, remote | $30 to $60 / hr | Asks for your rate, availability and a portfolio of realistic AI fashion imagery 🔵 |
| Wolf Games, Senior Video Editor & AI Motion Designer | $40 to $60 / hr | Contract, remote 🔵 |
| Sawhorse Productions · AGBO · PFX | not stated | Sawhorse clients include Walmart, Google, NBCUniversal. AGBO is the Russo Brothers' studio. PFX posted a dedicated "ComfyUI Artist" role 🟠 |
ZipRecruiter's aggregate for "full time comfyui" is $17.50/hr average, with most workers between $15.38 and $18.99. The aggregate is dominated by low-end postings. So the salaries above are the top of a very wide range, not the middle. Both numbers are true at the same time, and which one applies to you is decided by the rest of your CV, not by the Comfy line on it.
These showed up independently across different subs, different years and different countries. This is the actual takeaway.
The dataset is not all upside. These are the failures people volunteered.
Asked directly whether people hire for ComfyUI setup and optimisation, the top-voted answer was a flat "No" to every question. The person who argued back was told to look at his own portfolio, and could not name revenue.
From archviz, about the same tech people are learning to survive: "We paid almost 2k per image 2 years ago. That will never happen again. Not for us." The tool that makes you fast also makes your work cheap.
From someone at a studio that hires freelancers: "Give A.I as a tool to an established artist working in movies or video games for the last 10 years and it just beat 99% of all rookie a.i artists. I've never seen a 100% a.i artist there." Comfy is node-based, which VFX people already live in: "compare it to Houdini or Maya or Nuke, comfy is easy as."
The highest-growth solo operator in the dataset describes his own pipeline as a slot machine: wrecked sleep, not present with family, "every free moment I am not generating feels like a complete waste of time." Worth knowing before you build a business whose core loop is randomised output.
"Instead of thinking how can I use AI to make money you should think of an idea to make money and then think how can AI help to make it easier, quicker or higher quality."
comfy.org/customers · blog.comfy.org (the $30M raise) · comfy.org/cloud/pricing · comfyui.org (Moment Factory case study) · localhosthq.com · jobs.akraya.com · showbizjobs.com (Netflix) · builtin.com (Magnopus) · hirify.me · simplyhired.com · ziprecruiter.com · runninghub.ai/creator-reward · floyo.ai · graphtreon.com
Reddit is now closed to Firecrawl ("we do not support this site"), to the in-app
browser (blocked by policy), to r.jina.ai, and to direct .json fetches (403 even with a browser user
agent). Apify trudax/reddit-scraper-lite on a residential proxy worked first try:
933 items across 20 threads for about $3.80 of credits.