Civitai
Verified Oct 24, 2026 ActiveCheckpoint and LoRA hub with an on-site generator paid in Buzz
Listed on EffectHub ·
Pricing
- Pricing model
- Freemium
- Paid options from
- $10/mo
- Billing
- Monthly
Browsing and downloading are free; generation costs Buzz. Green memberships are Bronze $10/month (10,000 Green Buzz), Silver $25 (25,000) and Gold $50 (50,000), with 5-20% bonus Buzz on purchases and limits on how many model versions a creator may monetise; a perks-only membership can be bought with Buzz. Civitai's own post says Green Buzz is bought by credit card, and unrestricted content creation has moved to civitai.red.
Use tool ↗About Civitai
Civitai stores community-trained checkpoints, LoRAs and embeddings for open image and video models, and every upload arrives with preview images that still carry the prompt and sampler settings behind them, so a result can be reproduced rather than admired. An on-site generator runs those models for people without a local GPU, paid for in an internal currency called Buzz, and creators can sell paid access to or licences for their model versions. The main site now carries the safe-for-work side with card-billed Green memberships, while unrestricted content creation has moved to a separate red-branded domain. A developer API sits alongside the site.
- Platforms
- Web · API
- API
- Yes
- Last verified
- Oct 24, 2026
Verified sources
- Pricing page titled Green Memberships lists Bronze $10/mo (10,000 Green Buzz), Silver $25 (25,000), Gold $50 (50,000), creator monetisation limits, and states unrestricted content creation has moved to civitai.red (15 October 2026)civitai.com ↗
- Official post (13 October 2025, updated since) says Civitai Green has its own Buzz economy with credit card payments and that Blue Buzz is SFW-only (15 October 2026)civitai.com ↗
- Founded 2022 by Justin Maier; $5.1M seed led by Andreessen Horowitz in November 2023 (15 October 2026)techcrunch.com ↗
Is Civitai legit?
We don’t label tools safe or unsafe. Below are the records we checked ourselves, each with the date we read it.
- Domain registered
- Nov 3, 2022 (3 years ago)Registry record (RDAP), registrar Cloudflare, Inc., looked up Sep 6, 2026
- TLS certificate
- Issued by Let's Encrypt, valid until Dec 31, 2026Seen in our own connection to the site on Oct 24, 2026
- Last checked
- Oct 24, 2026The site answered
- On the market since
- 2022The vendor's own material, read by us
- Operated by
- Civitai, United StatesOur research, card verified Oct 15, 2026
Pros & cons of Civitai
Still the largest public library of open image checkpoints and LoRAs, and the reproduction metadata attached to sample images is what makes it more useful than a file host. But the last two years have been about payment processors and content policy rather than models: card payments came back only for the safe-for-work Green side, and unrestricted content now lives on a separate domain, so anyone depending on it should check which side a model and a membership actually sit on.
Pros
- Sample images carry prompts and generation settings, so results can actually be reproduced
- The on-site generator removes the local-hardware barrier entirely
- A documented developer API exists for pulling model metadata and files
- Membership Buzz allowances scale linearly, so the tiers are easy to reason about
Cons
- Card-billed Green memberships and Blue Buzz cover safe-for-work generation only; anything else runs on a separate domain and currency
- Model licences are set per upload by uploaders, so commercial terms vary file by file
- Repeated policy purges have removed categories of content and, with them, some users' libraries
- Two domains now exist, which splits the catalogue and the community
Best for
- Anyone hunting a specific style, character or concept LoRA for an open image model
- Users without a local GPU who want to try a checkpoint before downloading gigabytes
- Creators distributing fine-tunes to an audience that is already there
Not for
- Teams needing a stable, licence-audited model supply chain for commercial production
- Anyone who wants one catalogue and one currency rather than a site split by content rating
Watch out: The platform has been split by payment-processor pressure: civitai.com now sells card-billed Green memberships for safe-for-work work, unrestricted content creation has moved to civitai.red, and Blue Buzz from daily rewards is SFW-only. Policy rounds have removed whole content categories before, so a model you depend on can disappear or move with little warning.
Alternatives to Civitai
Civitai head-to-head
Side-by-side fact sheets against the competitors our research or their makers name — pricing, platforms, API and both verdicts on one page.