Civitai Review 2026: Pricing, Buzz Costs and the civitai.com Split

Civitai review for 2026: what the $10, $25 and $50 memberships buy, what Green, Yellow and Blue Buzz cost per image and LoRA, and the fine print after the April split.

The Proof Desk9 min read

Civitai's Two Front Doors announcement card showing a blue door for civitai.com and a red door for civitai.red

Civitai is where most people go to find Stable Diffusion and Flux models, LoRAs and the settings to use them. It is also a paid service: an in-browser image and video generator, a LoRA trainer and a creator payout scheme, all run on a credit called Buzz.

2026 changed how that works. Since 15 April, civitai.com is a PG-only site that takes cards, while crypto payments and mature content moved to civitai.red. This review covers what the $10, $25 and $50 memberships buy now, what generation and training cost in Buzz, and the rules that catch new users out.

What Civitai is in 2026

Civitai is the largest open hub for community-made image and video models. Most of what is on it is built on Stable Diffusion (SD 1.5 and SDXL), Flux and Wan: full checkpoints, LoRAs, embeddings and the workflows people use to run them. You can browse and download all of it for free and run it on your own GPU.

On top of the library, Civitai runs a paid layer. An on-site generator runs those community models in your browser, a LoRA trainer builds your own model from a folder of images, and a Creator Program pays model makers out of a shared pool. All of that runs on Buzz, Civitai's internal credit, which you get from a membership, buy directly or earn by using the site.

Model library: free to browse and download, no account needed for most files.
Image and video generator: runs SD 1.5, SDXL, Flux and hosted video models such as Wan, Kling, Hailuo/MiniMax, Vidu and Veo3, paid in Buzz.
LoRA trainer: open to every account, from 500 Buzz per run.
Memberships: Bronze at $10, Silver at $25 and Gold at $50 a month, each bundling a monthly Buzz allowance.

The April 2026 split: civitai.com and civitai.red

The biggest change to Civitai this year is not a feature. On 15 April 2026 the site split into two front doors. civitai.com became a PG-only site that takes credit cards, sells memberships and runs the Creator Program. All mature content, and every crypto payment, moved to a second domain, civitai.red. The old civitai.green address now redirects to civitai.com.

Civitai's announcement is blunt about why: "we've lost every mainstream payment rail except crypto". Card networks would not process payments for a site that hosts adult content, so the company separated the two.

What did not change

Both sites share one database and one login. Civitai says "Your account, your Buzz, your content: all of it stays exactly where it is. Nothing is reset, deleted, or clawed back." civitai.com simply hides anything rated above PG.

For a reader deciding whether to pay, the split matters in two ways. Memberships can only be bought on civitai.com, by card. And the Buzz you buy there is tied to the PG site. This review covers civitai.com, the version most people will sign up for.

Membership pricing: Bronze, Silver and Gold

Civitai sells three monthly memberships. No annual price is listed on the pricing page, so plan on paying month to month.

Bronze - $10 a month

Civitai membership comparison table listing Free, Bronze, Silver and Gold tiers with their monthly Buzz and generation limits — Civitai's membership table as published in its February 2025 guide. Prices are unchanged in 2026, but some perks listed here have since changed.

10,000 Green Buzz a month, 5% bonus Buzz on purchases, 1.5x bonus on daily Blue Buzz rewards.
8 images per job and 8 queued jobs, with free high-priority generation.
3 private models, ad-free browsing, priority support, Civitai Link and early access to features.
Creator Program access and up to 10 monetized model versions a month.

Silver - $25 a month

25,000 Green Buzz a month, 10% bonus Buzz on purchases, 2.5x daily Blue Buzz.
10 images per job and 10 queued jobs.
10 private models, premium support and up to 25 monetized model versions a month.

Gold - $50 a month

50,000 Green Buzz a month, 20% bonus Buzz on purchases, 4x daily Blue Buzz.
12 images per job and 10 queued jobs.
100 private models, VIP support, an animated badge and unlimited monetized model versions.

The useful way to read these tiers is through the exchange rate. Civitai's own code values Buzz at roughly $1 per 1,000. At that rate, each tier's Buzz allowance is worth about what the membership costs, so the perks (bigger batches, priority queue, ad-free browsing, private models) come on top for nothing. If you were going to buy Buzz anyway, a membership is the cheaper way to do it.

The pricing page also offers a perks-only membership paid for with Buzz instead of cash, for people who earn more Buzz than they spend. Its Buzz price was not shown when we checked.

Buzz explained: Green, Yellow and Blue

Buzz now comes in three colours, and the colour decides where you can spend it. This is the part of Civitai most likely to cost a new user money, so it is worth getting right before paying for anything.

Green Buzz: bought by card on civitai.com, and the Buzz your membership pays out. It can only be spent on PG generation and training.
Yellow Buzz: bought with crypto and spent on civitai.red. It cannot be used on civitai.com.
Blue Buzz: earned, not bought. You get 100 when you sign up and a daily amount for logging in and opening the generator. It works on both sites, but only for generation and training.

Civitai My Buzz dashboard with Blue, Green and Yellow Buzz tabs, a spending chart and a transaction list — The My Buzz dashboard keeps each Buzz colour in its own balance. They cannot be converted into one another.

No conversions

Civitai says plainly: "You can't convert between Green Buzz and Yellow Buzz." Blue Buzz cannot be traded between accounts either. Buy the colour you will actually use.

Two things work in your favour. Buzz does not expire, and membership Buzz rolls over from month to month, so a quiet month is not money lost. Direct card purchases have a $5 minimum, and larger top-ups earn bulk bonuses, starting at 1.1x on 250,000 Buzz.

One warning: some of Civitai's own help guides still describe the old setup, with Yellow Buzz on civitai.com. The April 2026 announcement and the live pricing page are the current rules.

What generation actually costs

Civitai prices each generation by model, resolution, step count and batch size. The figures below come from its developer documentation for the same generation engine, so treat them as close estimates rather than a price list. The generator shows the exact cost before you click.

SD 1.5, 512x512, 20 steps: about 4 Buzz per image, the cheapest option.
SDXL, 1024x1024, 20 steps: about 8 Buzz per image, or about 32 Buzz for a batch of four.
Flux.1, 1024x1024, 20 steps: about 8 Buzz, scaling up with size, steps and quantity.
Flux.2 dev, 1024x1024: about 40 Buzz per image.
Wan video, 5 seconds: about 650 Buzz at 720p and 1,300 Buzz at 1080p.

Civitai generator image menu showing Remix, Upscale, Background Removal and Image To Video options — Every finished image can be remixed, upscaled or turned into a video, and each of those actions costs Buzz.

Put against the monthly allowance, Bronze's 10,000 Buzz covers roughly 1,250 SDXL images, about 250 Flux.2 dev images or around 15 short 720p Wan clips. Images are cheap. Video is not, and Civitai admits as much: "We know video gen is pricey." If a partner video service refuses a request, the Buzz is refunded.

Free accounts can use the same generator with Blue Buzz, limited to 4 images per job and 4 queued jobs according to Civitai's membership guide. That is enough to test models before downloading them, not enough for a steady workflow.

Training a LoRA on-site

The LoRA trainer is the most useful paid feature for anyone without a capable GPU. It is open to every account, including free ones, and walks you through uploading images, tagging them and choosing a base model.

SD 1.5 and SDXL: from 500 Buzz for a default run of 10 epochs. Each extra epoch adds about 10 Buzz of storage.
Flux.1: 2,000 Buzz for the default run.
Failed runs are retried automatically up to three times.

First step of Civitai's Train a LoRA wizard asking for Image or Video and Character, Style or Concept — The on-site LoRA trainer starts by asking what kind of model you want to train.

At those prices, a Bronze allowance pays for about 20 SDXL LoRAs or five Flux ones a month. The catch is that a paid run cannot be cancelled once it starts, so check your images and settings before you submit.

Earning as a creator

Civitai also pays people who publish models. Any membership lets you charge a licensing fee or put model versions behind paid access, from 10 versions a month on Bronze to unlimited on Gold.

The Creator Program is the cash-out route. To join you need a paid membership and a Creator Score of 40,000, which comes from your models being used. Members then bank Buzz into a shared monthly compensation pool and are paid a share of its cash value.

Civitai Creator Program Get Paid screen with Compensation Pool, Estimated Earnings, Bank Buzz and Withdraw Cash panels — The Get Paid screen as of February 2025. Members bank Buzz into a monthly pool and can withdraw cash from $50.

Taking banked Buzz back out of the pool is free under 100,000 Buzz, then costs 5% from 100,000 to 1 million, 10% from 1 to 5 million and 15% above that.
Minimum cash-out is $50, with a 15-day pending period and payouts on the 15th of each month.

It is a real income stream for popular model makers, but a 40,000 score is not something a newcomer reaches in a month. Treat it as a bonus, not a reason to subscribe.

The fine print

Refunds: crypto purchases are "irreversible and non-refundable", and gift card purchases are non-refundable too. We found no published refund policy for card purchases.
Memberships are card-only and bought on civitai.com. Crypto cannot buy a membership.
Green Buzz stays on civitai.com. Membership perks follow you to civitai.red, but the Green Buzz does not.
Real people: since May 2025, content depicting any real person's likeness is banned at every rating, PG included.
Region blocks: some countries, including the UK, are blocked over identity-verification rules such as the Online Safety Act. The split did not change that.
Generation and training costs vary by settings. Check the Buzz figure on the button before every job.

Verdict: who should pay for Civitai

As a model library, Civitai has no real rival and costs nothing. Anyone running Stable Diffusion or Flux locally should have an account, and most never need to pay.

The paid layer makes sense for two groups. People without a strong GPU get SDXL and Flux image generation at roughly a tenth of a cent per image, plus LoRA training from about 50 cents a run. And model creators get paid access, licensing and a route to cash. For both, Bronze at $10 is the right starting point, because its Buzz allowance alone is worth about what it costs.

Who should skip it: anyone who mainly wants video, where a single clip can use a large share of a month's Buzz, and anyone in a blocked region. And because the 2026 split ties each Buzz colour to one site, read the Buzz section above before buying any.

Bottom line

Civitai is the best free resource for open image models and a fair deal for SDXL, Flux and LoRA training on Bronze. Know which Buzz you are buying, and do not pay for it in crypto unless you accept that there are no refunds.

Frequently asked questions

Is Civitai free to use?

Yes. Browsing, downloading, uploading models, earning Buzz, training LoRAs and generating are all available without a membership. New accounts get 100 Blue Buzz and a daily top-up for logging in and opening the generator.

How much does a Civitai membership cost?

Bronze is $10, Silver $25 and Gold $50 a month, paying out 10,000, 25,000 and 50,000 Green Buzz respectively. No annual plan is listed.

How much is Buzz worth in dollars?

Roughly $1 per 1,000 Buzz, based on Civitai's own code. At that rate an SDXL image costs about a cent and a default SDXL LoRA training run about 50 cents.

What is the difference between civitai.com and civitai.red?

civitai.com is the PG-only site that takes cards and sells memberships. civitai.red shows all content ratings and only takes crypto. They share one account and one database, but Green Buzz bought on civitai.com cannot be spent on civitai.red.

Does Buzz expire?

No. Buzz does not expire, and unused membership Buzz rolls over into the next month.

Can I get a refund on Civitai?

Not for crypto or gift card purchases, which Civitai states are non-refundable. Civitai does not publish a refund policy for card purchases, so contact support before assuming one.

Can I convert Green Buzz to Yellow Buzz?

No. Green and Yellow Buzz cannot be converted into each other, and Blue Buzz cannot be transferred between accounts.

Is Civitai available in the UK?

No. Civitai blocks UK visitors because of the Online Safety Act's identity-verification requirements, and says the April 2026 split does not change that.

Key takeaways

The model library is free, and free accounts can still generate, train LoRAs and earn Blue Buzz.
Bronze ($10), Silver ($25) and Gold ($50) pay out 10,000, 25,000 and 50,000 Green Buzz a month, about what each costs at roughly $1 per 1,000 Buzz.
SDXL images cost about 8 Buzz, Flux.2 dev about 40, a 5-second 720p Wan video about 650 and an SDXL LoRA from 500.
Green Buzz (card) stays on civitai.com and Yellow Buzz (crypto) on civitai.red. They cannot be converted.
Buzz never expires, but crypto and gift card purchases are non-refundable and real-person likeness content is banned.