Skip to content

What's new in Krea 3: 2K photo edits in under 8 seconds

What's new in Krea 3: 2K photo edits in under 8 s for $0.06, up to 6 reference images and LoRA training. How it compares to Nano Banana Pro and how to try it.

Piotr Sobolewski2 min read

This article in other languages:العربيةDeutschEspañolFrançaisItaliano日本語Polski简体中文

In this article
  1. What’s new in Krea 3?
  2. How to try Krea 3 for free?
  3. Why is everyone talking about it?
  4. TL;DR

On October 15, 2026, Krea released Krea 3, a photo editing model that handles most 2K edits in under 8 seconds through the API, at $0.06 per image. That is the short answer to what’s new in Krea 3, and the launch made the front page of Hacker News.

What’s new in Krea 3?

Speed and price come first: by Krea’s own measurements, it is several times faster than Google’s Nano Banana Pro at less than half the price. The model is in beta and you can try it right away, even on a free account.

Krea 3 is not a from-scratch image generator but an editing model: we upload a photo, describe the change, and the model changes only what we asked for. The key features, according to Krea’s post and TestingCatalog’s coverage:

  1. Speed: most edits finish in under 8 seconds, from submission to result.
  2. Resolution: native 2K, and up to 4K according to TestingCatalog.
  3. Up to 6 reference images in a single edit, including style references.
  4. Product and character consistency, plus preserved text and labels (so the logo on a bottle doesn’t turn into gibberish).
  5. Bounding boxes to mark where a new element should appear, and multi-step editing.
  6. LoRA training: Krea claims it is the first editing model you can fine-tune on a specific product, person or style.

In a post on X, the company says its quality matches Nano Banana Pro and GPT Image 2.5.

How to try Krea 3 for free?

The easiest way is krea.ai. According to the pricing page, the free plan gives 100 compute units per day, which Krea translates into about 5 Krea 3 Beta images a day. The Pro plan costs $21 a month, billed annually.

Developers can use Krea 3 through Krea’s API and through partners: fal, Hedra, Together AI, Nous Research, OpenRouter and Replicate.

Interestingly, Krea 2 came out in June with open weights. Nothing like that has been announced for Krea 3, so for now we can’t run it locally (for comparison: I wrote about a large open model released the same day in my post on Muse Spark Open).

Why is everyone talking about it?

LoRA. If training on your own product works as Krea promises, an online store could turn a single photo of a bottle into a whole series of lifestyle shots, with the label intact. According to Glitchwire, Pixelcut and Doodles are among those already testing it.

TL;DR

What is Krea 3?

An AI photo editing model from Krea, released on October 15, 2026 as a beta. It changes selected parts of an image based on a text description and up to 6 reference images.

Is Krea 3 free?

Partly. The free plan on krea.ai allows about 5 Krea 3 edits per day. Through the API you pay $0.03 (1K) or $0.06 (2K) per image.

Is Krea 3 better than Nano Banana Pro?

According to Krea, it is several times faster at less than half the price, with similar quality. On CPI-Bench it took second place, behind GPT Image 2.5. Independent comparisons are still missing.

Does Krea 3 have open weights?

Nothing suggests so for now. The previous version, Krea 2, had open weights.