A Krea Alternative for Occasional AI Images: Coins That Keep Instead of Units That Reset

Krea is one of the most capable image studios on the web, and a lot of people who take AI pictures seriously pay for it. It does things we do not: real-time drawing, training your own models, upscaling, node-based workflows. This post asks a narrower question. If you make pictures now and then, a batch for a project and then nothing for a month, is a monthly compute plan the right way to pay for them, or is a wallet you top up per picture?

Everything about Krea below was read on their pricing page and in their terms of use on 29 September 2026. They price in US dollars and we sell in euros; we have not converted between them, because an exchange rate would add a number that moves every day. If their page says something different by the time you read this, their page is right.

How Krea charges, as of 29 September

Compute units, on a plan. Free comes with 100 units a day that refill daily. Pro is $35 a month billed monthly or $21 a month billed yearly, for 20,000 units; Max is $105 or $63, for 60,000. Their compare table says Pro buys about 3,600pictures a month from Krea's own model; third-party models on the same list use more units per picture, so the same plan buys fewer of them.

Three rules matter as much as the prices. On Basic, Pro and Max, monthly units do not roll over: unused units expire at the end of each billing cycle. The commercial license comes with the paid plans, not with Free. And under their terms, cancelling stops the renewal but does not refund the rest of the period; the same terms rule out sexually explicit content.

How we charge

Fellowi Images has no plan. You buy coins in packages, and every picture in the image studio costs a fixed number of them: a Standard picture is 40 coins. The full list is on the product page, built from the code that charges, and the figures here come from that same code. Coins do not expire. A generation that fails on our side refunds its coins automatically. New accounts get 60 free coins once, not a daily allowance.

One picture, priced both ways

• Krea Pro, their own model, units used in full: about $0.010 a picture billed monthly, $0.006 billed yearly.
• Fellowi Standard: €0.239 a picture at the Starter package rate, €0.123 at Creator, €0.098 at Scale.

Read plainly: on a plan you use in full, Krea's own model is many times cheaper per picture than we are, and we are not going to argue with arithmetic. Two different models make two different pictures, so read the lines as a comparison of how each side charges, not a claim about which picture is better.

Where the arithmetic turns around

A plan is priced for the month you use it. The month you do not, the units expire and the plan bills again unless you cancel. If you make fifty pictures for a launch in October and none in November, the November plan is the most expensive picture you never made. Coins bought in October are still in the wallet in December; the package costs more per picture than a used plan, and nothing more than that (an image generator without a subscription).

What Krea does better

• Price per picture on a used plan, as above, by a wide margin.
• Tools around the picture. Real-time generation as you type or draw, upscaling, background removal, an image editor, video style transfer, and a visual node editor for building repeatable workflows. We make the picture and stop there.
• Training your own models. Every plan can train LoRA models on your own images. We offer reference images per generation (editing with your own photo), which is lighter and nowhere near the same thing.
• Range. Their own models plus a long list of third-party image, video, 3D and lipsync models under one account.
• A free tier that refills. A daily allowance you can come back to, where our free coins arrive once.
• Teams. A Business plan with up to 50 members on one workspace, shared units, rollovers and usage analytics. We sell to individuals.

What we do differently

• No plan, no reset. Coins stay until you spend them.
• Commercial use from the first coin. Our terms place no restriction on commercial use of anything you generate, free coins included (the commercial-use clause).
• Adult content for adults. Their terms prohibit sexually explicit content; we allow it for adults, within our own rules (choosing a character generator).
• Failures refunded automatically. The pages we read on their site do not say what happens to units spent on a generation that fails.

And what we lack, in the same breath: no upscaler, no model training, no workspace for a team, and finished files are kept for a limited time only (the window is on the product page), so download what you want to keep.

So which one

If pictures are a weekly habit, or you need training, real-time drawing and a team around them, a Krea plan is the better tool and the better price, and we would say the same to a friend. If your pictures come in bursts, a few for a post and a batch for a project, the units that would expire unused are the whole difference, and a wallet that does not expire is the cheaper habit. Open the image studio, see the price of the next picture before you press the button, and decide with the number in front of you.