Krea 3 edits in seconds, but a real 2K edit costs $0.13, not $0.06

On the product page for Krea's new model there is a low-angle plate of a gas station, two people and a car, and an instruction to relight it for night while keeping "the camera, the action and both people". A footnote on the same page admits the outputs are pre-generated, so it is a demo and not a test. The job it describes is real, though. A night relight of a finished plate used to mean a reshoot or a compositor's afternoon, and Krea says its new model, Krea 3, does it in seconds for a few cents.

Krea opened the Krea 3 beta on Thursday 15 October. It is the company's own image-editing model, it runs in the Krea app on every plan including Free, and Replicate, fal, OpenRouter, Together AI and other partners served it the same day. Only Krea's own API, the paid connection developers use to call the model from their own software, is gated: early access for workspaces in the beta, through sales.

The launch post on X made three claims: "end-to-end 2k edits in under 8s", quality that "matches Nano Banana Pro or GPT Image 2.5", and "bounding box control and precise multi-turn edits". Krea's blog added the price, "$0.06 per image at 2K". We read the blog, the API docs, the price sheet and the product page footnotes. The controls hold up best, and the speed, price and quality claims are each softer than they read.

The 8 seconds is a playback time

Krea's blog puts Krea 3 at under 8 seconds against 33 seconds for Nano Banana Pro and 90 seconds for GPT Image 2. The rival figures are medians Krea measured on its own queue for edit jobs between 24 September and 1 October, queue included. Krea 3 gets no measured median in that table. The product page is more candid: "Krea 3 uses an illustrative playback time of 8s per edit," while Nano Banana Pro and GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst get measured times of 26.8 and 39.9 seconds.

One reply under the launch post asked for exactly the missing number, and we saw no public answer by Friday morning. The headline ratio also moves with the comparison. Against the older GPT Image 2, Krea's figures give roughly ten times the speed; against GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst, its own product page gives about five. Krea's blog is honest about the ceiling, too: "Krea 3 isn't real time yet," and its fastest setup finishes an edit in about 4 to 5 seconds.

What an edit actually costs

The $0.06 is the list price for a 2K image with no reference image attached. An edit always has at least one, because the reference is the picture you are changing. Krea's API price sheet adds $0.02 for each 1K reference and $0.07 for each 2K reference, plus $0.02 for its slower high-thinking mode, so a 2K edit of a 2K frame lists at $0.13.

• Job (Krea API list price, 15 Oct): 2K image, no reference, fast. Price: $0.06; What it adds: The headline number
• Job (Krea API list price, 15 Oct): 2K edit from one 1K reference, fast. Price: $0.08; What it adds: $0.02 for the reference
• Job (Krea API list price, 15 Oct): 2K edit from one 2K reference, fast. Price: $0.13; What it adds: $0.07 for the reference
• Job (Krea API list price, 15 Oct): Same edit in high-thinking mode. Price: $0.15; What it adds: $0.02 for high thinking
• Job (Krea API list price, 15 Oct): Composite from four 2K references, fast. Price: $0.34; What it adds: Four references at $0.07
• Job (Krea API list price, 15 Oct): Replicate, 2K fast, one 1 MP input. Price: about $0.08; What it adds: $0.02 per input megapixel

To be fair to Krea, it quotes rival prices the same way, without references, so its price ratios hold at list. The problem is only the word edit sitting next to $0.06. Krea's comparison also leaves out the cheapest rival. After a Google price cut last week, creativeainews lists Nano Banana 2.1 at $0.0504 per 2K image, which we have not checked against Google's own price list. Krea's FAQ says of its prices: "We expect it to go down, not up."

The quality claim is still a claim

The parity line appears only in the X post, and the blog drops it. Krea 3 is not on Artificial Analysis's image-editing leaderboard yet, so no independent ranking exists. That board also shows why the line is slippery: GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst sits first at an Elo score of 1199 and Nano Banana Pro sits 14th at 1106, so matching one or the other covers a wide range.

The one number in circulation is a CPI-Bench score of 4.81 out of 5 for a Krea 3 "Ultra" tier, second only to GPT Image 2.5. AlphaSignal reports it as Krea's figure and notes that Krea's materials do not map the Ultra tier to the fast and high modes you actually pay for. Replicate adds a further wrinkle: it serves "the Berry version of Krea 3, which is tuned for image quality", and says a faster version called Jam is coming. Which build the Krea app runs today is not stated anywhere we found. Krea says the final release comes next week, "together with more benchmarks".

The box is the real product

The control layer is where Krea 3 earns attention. In the app you "draw a box and say what changes", and Krea says the model redraws inside the box and leaves the rest of the frame as it was. The API takes up to eight references, matches colors by hex code and offers a regional mode, although there it is a simple on or off switch with no box coordinates, and Replicate labels that mode "experimental", with lower quality and slower generation. Krea's docs say regional edits chain "without quality loss", while ordinary edits can build up artifacts over several turns.

Drift over a long chain of edits is the question makers keep asking in the replies, and nobody outside Krea has published a test. One maker has put it to work, though. @JagTheHero, who makes a fan animatic series from the web serial The Wandering Inn, says he made 128 images with the beta for one episode, kept 107, and that paying would have cost about $8. His access was gifted by Krea.

Read the launch coverage with the labels on. LuminaBench, which reads like an independent write-up, discloses that its Krea 3 launch post was sponsored and that Krea gave it early access. Min Choi's "Nano Banana Pro-level quality" demo carries X's Paid partnership label. The a16z partner quoted in Krea's blog works at one of Krea's investors. The loudest unpaid reaction asked for open weights, and @viccpoes, in a reply Krea reposted, answered "there will be open-source greatness" with no date. Krea 3 itself is closed, and self-hosting is offered only on enterprise plans.

What it means for your next sequence

In practice, for anyone making work this week, Krea 3 is worth a test as a look-dev and keyframe tool, because a regional edit that comes back in seconds changes how many variants a solo maker can afford to try. The numbers to plan with are these.

• A real 2K edit of a 2K frame lists at $0.13 on Krea's API, and a four-reference character or product composite lists at $0.34.
• The box control lives in the Krea app; developers calling the API get an on or off regional switch that Replicate still calls experimental.
• Consistency across a sequence is untested in public, so a six-turn run on one of your own frames is the cheapest proof before you build a scene on it.

Krea's final release and its promised benchmarks are due the week of 19 October, and the old API mode names (instant and medium) stop working on Friday 23 October. If the measured median for Krea 3 lands with those benchmarks, the speed claim can finally be compared like for like.

Timeline

• Date: 7 Apr 2025. What happened: Krea raises $83 million; a16z among its investors; Source: TechCrunch
• Date: 24 Sep to 1 Oct 2026. What happened: Krea measures rival edit times on its own queue for the comparison table; Source: Krea blog
• Date: Wed 14 Oct 2026. What happened: Pre-launch teaser with access codes; Source: @krea_ai on X
• Date: Thu 15 Oct 2026. What happened: Krea 3 beta opens in the app for all plans; partners go live; API early access for beta workspaces; Source: Krea on X, blog, changelog
• Date: Thu 15 Oct 2026. What happened: LuminaBench publishes a sponsored launch post; Min Choi posts a paid-partnership demo; Source: LuminaBench, X
• Date: Week of 19 Oct 2026. What happened: Final release due with more benchmarks; Source: Krea on X
• Date: Fri 23 Oct 2026. What happened: Legacy API modes instant and medium switched off; Source: Krea changelog

Sources and what is unconfirmed: Krea's launch post and thread on X and its blog post Introducing Krea 3 (15 Oct); the krea.ai/krea-3 product page and FAQ, changelog, API docs and pricing page (read 16 Oct); Replicate's krea/krea-3 listing; Artificial Analysis's image-editing leaderboard (read 16 Oct); AlphaSignal and creativeainews launch write-ups; LuminaBench's sponsored post; TechCrunch (7 Apr 2025). We ran no hands-on or timing test and did not watch the launch-thread videos. The Nano Banana 2.1 price is creativeainews's figure, the CPI-Bench score is Krea-reported, and which build (Berry, Jam or Ultra) each surface serves is unconfirmed.

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