AI image generator free tiers in 2026: the limit is speed, not images
Neither major free tier caps how many images you can make. Both meter how fast you can make them, in a unit each vendor invented for itself. One of them also makes everything you create public until you pay.
- No image cap on either free tier. Leonardo gives 150 Fast Tokens a day; Ideogram gives slow credits and no priority credits. Both ration speed.
- Leonardo's free plan makes your creations public. Privacy starts at $12 a month. That is the real catch, and it is not a quota.
- Ideogram's free access is conditional, described as slow credits "weekly for eligible accounts". Eligibility is not defined on the pricing page.
- Credits and Tokens are different invented units. Ideogram's 1,000 credits and Leonardo's 8,500 Fast Tokens do not convert.
- "Unlimited" means unlimited slow, on selected models, and Leonardo's own footnote reserves the right to slow it further on demand.
What the paid tiers cost, to scale
Monthly rate excluding tax, read from each vendor's own pricing page on 25 August 2026. Both vendors also publish a discounted annual rate.
Solid bars Leonardo, lighter bars Ideogram. Read from leonardo.ai/pricing and ideogram.ai/pricing on 25 August 2026, excluding tax.
Annual rates, team plans and top-ups
Leonardo advertises up to 20% off when paying yearly. Its team plans are Starter at $72 a month for 3 seats ($24 a seat, 75,000 shared tokens) and Growth at $144 a month ($48 a seat, 180,000 shared tokens). Every paid tier also carries a Token Bank, a ceiling on accumulated unused tokens: 25,500 on Essential, 75,000 on Premium, 180,000 on Ultimate, which is exactly three months of that tier's allowance in each case.
Ideogram advertises up to 33% off yearly, which brings Plus to $15 a month ($180 a year), Pro to $42 ($504) and Team to $20 per user. Team requires a minimum of two users. Priority credits can be topped up for $4.
Two vendors, two invented units, no conversion
Both meter generation, and each named its meter something different. Nothing on either pricing page converts one into the other, or either into an image.
Leonardo
Essential 8,500 / mo
Ultimate 60,000 / mo
Ideogram
Plus 1,000 / mo
Pro 3,500 / mo
A comparison that puts 8,500 next to 1,000 is inviting a subtraction that means nothing. They are different units with different names, priced by different vendors, and neither publishes what one image costs in its own unit.
What the free tier actually restricts
This is the part that decides whether a free tier is usable for your work, and it is not on any comparison table we could find.
| On the free plan | Leonardo | Ideogram |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 | $0 |
| Hard cap on total images | None stated | None stated |
| Generation allowance | 150 Fast Tokens per day, 150 Token Bank | Slow credits, "weekly for eligible accounts" |
| Are your creations private? | No. Public. | Private generation is listed from Plus |
| Quality settings | Basic | Not specified for free |
| Personal collections | 1 | Not specified for free |
| Personal AI models | Not on free (10 from Essential) | Not specified for free |
What "unlimited" means here
Both vendors sell unlimited generation. Neither means unlimited output.
Leonardo's unlimited relaxed generation appears from the $30 Premium tier, and its own footnote restricts it to a named list of selected models, adding that "concurrency and queuing of unlimited generations may be slowed from time to time based on demand." Ideogram gives unlimited slow credits on every paid tier while metering priority credits separately.
Which one, in one line
The cheapest point at which creations become Private, and the cheapest paid tier in this comparison at all.
150 Fast Tokens a day is a real daily allowance with a stated number, and the terms are legible. Assume everything you make is public.
The tier where unlimited relaxed generation starts, on selected models. Above that you are buying queue priority, not access.
Why the recommendations skew to one vendor here
Because only one of the two publishes a legible free tier. Leonardo states a daily number, a bank ceiling, a privacy status and a quality level for its free plan. Ideogram's free row says slow credits are available "weekly for eligible accounts" and defines neither the cadence nor the eligibility. That is not a judgement about output quality, which this page does not test; it is a judgement about which vendor lets you know what you are getting before you sign up. Ideogram may well be the better generator, and its $15 annual Plus rate undercuts Leonardo's Premium tier substantially.
Three we could not price
All three belong in this category and carry no figure here. On 25 August 2026 their sites returned bot-protection challenges or JavaScript-only responses to an automated request, so their pricing could not be read the way every other figure on this page was read.
We do not bypass bot protection and we do not publish a price we did not read. They display normally to a human, so open them in a browser if you need them compared.
How to check this, and when it expires
Every figure above was read from leonardo.ai/pricing and ideogram.ai/pricing on that date, excluding tax.
Allowances change more quietly than prices do. A vendor that halves a token allowance has raised your effective cost without changing the number on the pricing page, and nobody announces it. If a figure here no longer matches the vendor's own page, the vendor's page is right and this one is stale.