Krea 3 image-editing model (open beta)
Partly confirmed
The takeaway
On Oct 15, 2026 Krea opened the beta of Krea 3, its own foundation image model aimed at production image editing.
Status
- Claim
Partly confirmed
- Our reporting
- Medium confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 15 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra168 days after its cutoff
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None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 107 days before it.
Key facts
- Status: open beta announced Oct 15, 2026 by Krea co-founder Diego (HN user dvrp); available in the Krea app and the Krea API, with enterprise self-hosting ‘on your own GPUs in your cloud’
- Krea’s comparison (one image, twelve identical edit prompts, 2K, median request-to-result time including queue): Krea 3 under 8 s and ~$0.06 per edit; Nano Banana Pro ~26.8 s, ~$0.135; GPT Image 2.5 ~39.9 s, ~$0.21 (Krea calls the GPT Image 2.5 price a draft estimate)
- Design claim: Krea 3 ‘finds that region first and renders only what changes’; Krea says it is ‘not a distilled copy of a larger model’
- Features Krea lists: native regional edits, pixel-precise edits (a ‘Precise mode’ that leaves pixels outside the edit area unchanged), plugins for Figma, Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve and Blender
- Pricing: ‘The launch price is the list price. We expect it to go down, not up.’
- Future (founder on HN): a technical report like Krea 2’s is planned; LoRA fine-tuning and open weights are being considered, not promised
- Hacker News: 172 points on launch day; commenters asked why FLUX 3 was not compared and criticised the sign-up discount flow
What happened
Krea, the AI image and video design platform, announced the open beta of Krea 3 on Oct 15, 2026. It is the company’s own foundation image model and is built for editing rather than for generation from scratch. The launch page compares it with Google’s Nano Banana Pro and OpenAI’s GPT Image 2.5 on the same image and twelve identical prompts at 2K resolution. On that page Krea 3 takes under 8 seconds and about $0.06 per edit, against about 26.8 s and $0.135 for Nano Banana Pro and 39.9 s and $0.21 for GPT Image 2.5. Krea says the model first finds the region to change and renders only that region. A “precision” demo counts the pixels outside the edit area that each model leaves unchanged.
In the Hacker News launch thread, co-founder Diego (dvrp) said benchmarks are “still being worked on”. He said a technical report will follow, as it did for Krea 2, and that the team is thinking about LoRA fine-tuning and open weights.
Why it matters
Image-editing models are moving from quality races to cost and latency. Krea is a large creative-tools platform that until now mostly resold other labs’ models, and it is now pricing its own model below the frontier labs’ editors. The comparison is the vendor’s own and is not yet independently checked.
Sources
3 sources from 2 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
3 sources: 2 primary, 1 reaction
Primary
- Krea: Krea 3 — frontier image editing modelkrea.ai, official
- Krea 2 technical report (earlier model)krea.ai, paper
Reactions
- Hacker News discussion (founder’s launch comment)news.ycombinator.com, discussion
Changes
- Filed (from the HN front page, 172 points). Launch page and HN founder comment read.