Krea said on 15 October 2026 that Krea 3, its new image editing model, is live. The company pitches it for production editing work where quality is already good enough, but latency and cost still block catalog-scale iteration.
According to Krea: “Most edits come back in under 8 seconds, end to end, at native 2K. It costs $0.06 per image at 2K.” At 1K, it lists $0.03 per image. It also says the model takes up to 6 reference images per edit and tries to leave alone what you did not ask it to change — product labels, characters and approved background details.
Those speed and price figures are Krea’s own claims, including the comparison table below. TSN has not independently timed or priced the jobs.
Availability
Krea says Krea 3 is live on krea.ai and through fal, Hedra, Together AI, Nous Research, OpenRouter and Replicate. Enterprise teams can request access through Krea Partnerships. A model page is also listed at krea.ai/models/krea-3-beta.
How Krea compares the model
Krea’s blog publishes a comparison of edit-job medians measured on Krea from 24 September to 1 October 2026, queue included, with list prices per image (without image references):
| Model | Time per edit | Price per image |
|---|---|---|
| Krea 3 (2K) | under 8 s | $0.06 |
| Nano Banana Pro | 33 s | $0.135 |
| GPT Image 2 | 90 s | $0.22 |
Treat the table as Krea’s measurement and list-price framing, not an independent bake-off. Secondary coverage has used round phrases such as “10× faster” or “one-third the price”; this post sticks to Krea’s published seconds and dollars.
What Krea says the model is for
Krea’s examples focus on e-commerce and campaign work: keep a packshot’s label sharp while changing the scene; swap only named furniture in a room; hold a cast of characters consistent across poses; materialise line drawings with a fixed colour palette. CEO Víctor Perez is quoted saying editing’s potential is “still held back by speed” and that Krea 3 aims to remove a speed–quality trade-off at 2K.
Krea also says Krea 3 is not real-time yet. Its “fastest setup finishes an edit in about 4 to 5 seconds,” and the company wants that lower, plus cheaper high-resolution architectures and more ways to instruct edits (for example circling regions on the image).
Pricing at catalog volume
Krea also frames monthly cost for 100,000 edits at list price (Krea 3 at 2K, without image references): about $6,000 for Krea 3 versus $13,500 for Nano Banana Pro and $22,000 for GPT Image 2 on its table. That arithmetic is just list price × volume from Krea’s own post; real bills will depend on partners, queues and whether reference images change pricing.
Justine Moore of a16z is quoted on the same page arguing that when a top-quality edit returns fast enough to try the next idea immediately, “the model stops being a step in the workflow and becomes the workflow.” Treat that as investor/partner colour, not a measured productivity study.
Context from earlier TSN coverage
Image and video tools are shipping in parallel waves. TSN recently covered Kling 4.0 becoming fully available with MCP and CLI access, FLUX.3 Image Klein landing in Diffusers, and ElevenLabs Instant Soundtracks for uploaded video. Krea 3 sits on the still-image editing side of that stack: partner APIs first, catalog economics second.
Why it matters
For marketing and e-commerce teams, edit latency decides whether AI is a hero-shot tool or a catalog pipeline. If Krea’s under-8-second / $0.06 framing holds in real queues, the interesting story is volume economics and identity consistency (products and faces), not another one-off demo still.
What’s still unknown
- Independent latency and quality comparisons outside Krea’s Sep 24–Oct 1 sample
- How reference-image inputs change effective price and time
- Roadmap timing for true real-time and on-image instruction UX
What to watch
Watch partner API docs (fal, Replicate, OpenRouter and others) for rate limits and whether “Krea 3” and “krea-3-beta” naming stay aligned.
What this means
- Krea 3 is live for image editing on krea.ai and listed partner platforms.
- Under 8 seconds at 2K / $0.06 — and the rival timing table — are Krea’s claims.
- Up to 6 reference images per edit, per the company blog; not yet real-time.
Sources
Related stories
- Kling AI Says Kling 4.0 Is Fully Available, Including MCP and CLI Access
- Black Forest Labs’ FLUX.3 Image Klein Lands in Hugging Face Diffusers
- ElevenLabs Launches Instant Soundtracks, Adding Music and Timed Sound Effects to Uploaded Video
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