The free tier publishes your work
This is the most important thing on the page, so it goes first.
Leonardo's free plan gives 150 Fast Tokens per day, which is a reasonable allowance for trying things. But its "Creations access" setting is Public. Private creations start on the $12 Essential tier.
For hobby work that is fine. For anything client-facing, anything under NDA, or any product that has not launched yet, the free plan is simply not an option — and that is a constraint no token count can compensate for. Anyone comparing free tiers across platforms should weigh this more heavily than the daily allowance.
The Token Bank is the good idea here
Most subscription generators reset your allowance every month, which quietly punishes uneven work. Leonardo does something better: unused Fast Tokens accumulate in a Token Bank, up to a cap set by your tier.
- Essential: 8,500 tokens a month, bank capacity 25,500
- Premium: 25,000 a month, bank capacity 75,000
- Ultimate: 60,000 a month, bank capacity 180,000
Each bank is roughly three months of allowance. So a quiet month is not lost — it rolls into the next one until you hit the ceiling.
That is meaningfully fairer than a hard monthly reset, and it deserves credit. It is still a cap rather than true persistence: bank three months of unused tokens and the fourth month's allowance starts evaporating. But for most uneven workloads three months of headroom absorbs the variance.
Personal model training is the real differentiator
From the $12 tier you can train your own models — 10 on Essential, 20 on Premium, 50 on Ultimate — with a per-model image cap that varies by plan.
This is the feature that decides the comparison. If you need one character, one product or one style reproduced consistently across hundreds of images, a trained model does that and prompting does not. Most general-purpose multi-model platforms, ours included, do not offer training at all.
If that is your workflow, the rest of this page is academic. Leonardo, Krea and self-hosted tooling are your real shortlist.
Where Leonardo is the wrong tool
Two cases.
Video as a primary output. Leonardo does video, but it is clearly the secondary half of the product. Relaxed unlimited video only arrives on the $60 Ultimate plan, and the catalogue is narrower than a video-first platform's. If half your deliverables are moving images, you are paying image-platform prices for a weaker video product.
Iteration speed. Simultaneous generations are 2, 3 and 6 across the three tiers. If your process is "run eight variations, pick one", you will be queuing on anything below Ultimate.
What pay-as-you-go changes
The case for buying credits instead of subscribing is narrower here than against other platforms, precisely because the Token Bank already softens the monthly reset.
Where it still applies: if your usage varies by more than the bank can absorb — a busy quarter followed by a quiet one — or if you want video and image treated as equals on one balance. On ZOOOP credits never expire at all, with no cap and no tier gating which models you can reach, and generations land on a real-time collaborative canvas rather than in a gallery.
What we do not do, and will not claim: no personal model training. That is Leonardo's strongest card and we do not hold it.