FLUX
Image generation and editing models from Black Forest Labs, available as a hosted API or as downloadable weights you run on your own GPUs.
Overview
Black Forest Labs was founded by researchers who built Stable Diffusion, and the product shape reflects it: a hosted API for teams that want to ship this week, plus downloadable weights for teams that cannot send images to someone else's servers. The current image family is FLUX.2, covering klein at 4B and 9B parameters, then pro, flex and max. API prices run from $0.014 to $0.07 per image, scaled by output resolution, with a 1024x1024 render counting as roughly 1.05 megapixels.
Self-hosting is where the detail matters. Klein 4B is Apache 2.0 and fits in about 13GB of VRAM, so a single consumer card runs it. Everything above that is not permissive: klein 9B and FLUX.2 [dev] carry a non-commercial license, and commercial self-hosted use needs a paid tier starting at $999 a month for 100,000 images with a cent per image after. Fine-tuning and LoRA rights come with all tiers, which is why manufacturing and hardware product teams tend to land here rather than on a closed API. Train on your own product photography, keep the checkpoint.
Who should skip it: teams whose main need is text-heavy output, posters, annotated diagrams or UI screenshots with readable labels. FLUX.2 improved on typography but Ideogram 3.0 and Nano Banana Pro still win on dense text. Anyone planning a roadmap around FLUX 3 should also wait. The multimodal model was announced in July 2026 covering image, video, audio and action prediction, but as of late August only the video endpoint is generally available and the open-weight dev version has no announced date. The FLUX.2-dev precedent, announced November 2025 and released to Hugging Face in April 2026, suggests months rather than weeks.
Key Features
- ✓ FLUX.2 family spans klein 4B and 9B, pro, flex and max, priced from $0.014 to $0.07 per image on the hosted API
- ✓ Multi-reference editing with up to four images per request on klein endpoints, output up to 4 megapixels
- ✓ FLUX.2 [dev] is a 32B parameter flow-matching transformer with downloadable weights for self-hosted inference
- ✓ Fine-tuning and LoRA rights included on every self-hosted license tier, including the entry Builder tier
- ✓ FLUX 3 video reached general availability on 4 August 2026: clips up to 20 seconds with audio generated in the same pass rather than dubbed on after
- ✓ Official inference repo published on GitHub, with distribution also through fal, Replicate and OpenRouter
Where it holds
- • Weights you can actually download and run, which matters when client images cannot leave the building or the country
- • Per-image API pricing is among the cheapest at this quality level. klein 9B at $0.015 undercuts nearly everything comparable and runs a generation or an edit in under a second
- • Generation and editing live in the same model, so there is no separate inpainting pipeline to maintain alongside it
Where it breaks
- • The dev weights ship under a non-commercial license. Commercial self-hosting starts at $999 a month for 100,000 images, then a cent each after that
- • FLUX 3 was announced on 23 July 2026 as a multimodal image, video, audio and action model, but only the video endpoint is callable. No public image endpoint yet and no date for the open-weight dev release
- • Only klein 4B is Apache 2.0. The 9B model and FLUX.2 [dev] are not, and teams keep getting this wrong in planning documents
- • Text rendering inside images still trails Ideogram 3.0 and Google's Nano Banana Pro on dense layouts and small labels
My Take
What changed recently is the thing to track: FLUX 3 landed on 23 July 2026 as a multimodal model, but four weeks later only video is callable, so FLUX.2 is still the image workhorse. No real loss, because FLUX.2 [pro] at three cents an image is hard to argue with and klein 9B handles generation and editing in under a second on a consumer GPU with roughly 13GB of VRAM. The catch is legal, not technical. Dev weights carry a non-commercial license and the self-hosted commercial tier is $999 a month before you generate anything, which changes the maths for small teams who assumed open weights meant free.
Quick Info
- Pricing:
- paid
- Openness:
- Open weights
- Licence:
- FLUX.1 dev non-commercial; schnell Apache 2.0
- Starting at:
- Hosted API is credit-based at 1 credit = $0.01, priced per image and scaled by output resolution. FLUX.2 klein 4B from $0.014, klein 9B from $0.015, pro from $0.03, flex from $0.05, max from $0.07. FLUX 3 video is billed per second: $0.06/s draft, $0.17/s HD, $0.29/s at 1080p, with video continuation at $0.43/s HD. Self-hosting is separate: klein 4B is Apache 2.0 and free, while commercial self-hosted use of klein 9B or FLUX.2 [dev] needs a paid license starting at $999 a month for 100,000 images and $0.01 per image after that. Builder, Platform, Professional and Enterprise tiers are listed without public prices.
- Added:
- Aug 2026
- Updated:
- Aug 2026
Use Cases
Judge it on your own work
The notes above say where FLUX holds and where it breaks. The fastest check is your own workload.
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