Krea opens the Krea 3 image API in early access

Krea’s changelog for 15 October 2026 says the Krea 3 API is in early access. The API overview says the same thing, and it limits calls to workspaces already in the Krea 3 beta. Access requests go to [email protected]. The press kit dates the model itself to 12 October 2026: “Launched October 12, 2026,” under a “New · October 12, 2026” label. The beta model page says Krea 3 Beta is available on Krea for generating and editing images. The 15 October news is the API gate, not the first day the model page existed.

What the API accepts

The overview describes an instruction-following editor. The caller says what should change and what should stay, and can also use the model for text-to-image. The endpoint is POST /generate/image/krea/krea-3. image_urls takes up to eight references. resolution is 1k or 2k. thinking_mode is fast (the default) or high. regional_edit: true tells Krea 3 to regenerate only the parts that need to change and leave the rest as it was. The product page describes the same idea as drawing a box. The overview’s parameter list does not add a separate box-coordinate field.

The product page says Krea 3 renders 2K natively, and one labeled frame is 2736 by 1536 pixels. The overview also allows width and height up to 4096 each, then says that with those fields the output is rounded to a supported aspect ratio and a 1K or 2K canvas, and that exact pixel dimensions are not guaranteed. A reference larger than 4 megapixels is resized to 4 megapixels. With five or more references, each image is resized to at most 1536 pixels on its longest side.

The changelog says legacy thinking-mode values sunset on 23 October 2026: send fast instead of instant, and high instead of medium. Until then the old values still work.

Prices Krea lists

The overview’s price table is a list price per image, before any bill was measured here. Base price is $0.03 for 1K output and $0.06 for 2K output. Each 1K reference adds $0.02, and each 2K reference adds $0.07, on either output size. high thinking mode adds $0.02 per generation. The changelog’s shorter line is “Pricing starts at $0.03 per 1K image.” The product page shows $0.06 per image, and its comparison footnote calls the costs approximate USD list prices for 2K edits. A 2K edit with references costs more than the $0.06 base.

Zero Data Retention is an enterprise option. The overview says those requests send X-Api-Zero-Data-Retention: 1, must pass images as base64 data URIs, may use either thinking mode, and may include at most four references. That cap is tighter than the eight-reference limit on an ordinary request.

Speed, as Krea states it

The product page says an edit finishes in under 8 seconds. The same page’s side-by-side comparison is labeled “Pre-generated outputs, not a live benchmark,” and it says Krea 3 “uses an illustrative playback time of 8s per edit.” The changelog says the API “returns the edit in seconds” and does not repeat the 8-second figure. None of these times is a measurement from this account.

The product page’s partner strip names fal, Baseten, Comfy, Luminal, Together AI, and others, including Envato, Civitai, and Flora. Testing Catalog, on 15 October, also names OpenRouter, Replicate, Hedra, and Nous Research, and it says each edit can draw on up to six references and that output can go to 4K. Those partner names, the six-reference cap, and the 4K line are not on the Krea pages opened here. The FAQ on the product page says Krea 3 can be self-hosted on enterprise plans. It does not publish hardware sizes.

The practical split is the one in Krea’s own pages: the press kit dates the model to 12 October, the app page calls it Krea 3 Beta, and the 15 October docs put the API in early access for workspaces already in that beta.