Craiyon
Craiyon turns text prompts into images in six styles, free and without an account. Formerly DALL·E mini, it adds text-driven retouching, background removal, upscaling and vectorising, while paid plans lift watermarks and unlock private generation.
What is Craiyon?
Craiyon is a browser-based AI image generator operated by Craiyon LLC, a limited liability company organised under the laws of Delaware. It began in June 2021 as DALL·E mini, a project by Boris Dayma that won the Hugging Face x Google hackathon, and was renamed Craiyon in 2022; Dayma remains the company's CEO. The about page gives 2022 as the starting year and claims more than three billion images created and over a million monthly active users.
The heart of the product is text-to-image generation. You describe what you want, choose one of six style presets, and pick a square, portrait or landscape ratio. The presets run Artistic, Photo, Anime, Illustration, Vector and Raw, the last of these stripping away Craiyon's automatic styling to leave the prompt interpreted directly. Only the square ratio is open to free accounts. An Excluded field works as a negative prompt, naming concepts the model should keep out of the frame. Prompts may be written in any language, while the interface itself is offered in English, Spanish, French, German and Portuguese.
A small suite of tools surrounds that core. Retouch edits an existing picture from a written instruction: swap an object, change the artistic style, extend the frame, add text, or move the subject somewhere else entirely. A background remover handles cut-outs free and without a daily limit, exporting transparent PNGs or flat colours in HD. Upscaling, vectorising and animation are listed across the paid plans, and Studio composes multi-element scenes with layers and an edit history. Dedicated generators cover logos, anime, tattoos, home design and posters, and any result can be ordered as merchandise.
Craiyon runs successive in-house models, currently advertised as v3, v4 and v5 with a v6 announced. Free output is watermarked, generated at base quality, published in the community search alongside its prompt, and may queue at busy times. Editing credits are consumed only when an image is fed in as input; prompt-only generation costs none. Commercial use is permitted on every tier, though free users must credit Craiyon. There is no public API and no mobile app.
What it does
- Generate images from a written description in six selectable styles
- Edit an existing image with a plain-text instruction using Retouch
- Remove the background from any picture and export it in HD
- Exclude unwanted concepts from a composition with a negative prompt
- Upscale, vectorise and animate images on the paid plans
- Compose multi-element scenes with layers and history in Studio
- Search millions of community images and read the prompt behind each one
When to use Craiyon / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Craiyon is the right fit.
When to use Craiyon
- Graphic designers and illustrators who want to sketch out visual concepts before committing time to a finished piece
- Social media and content managers producing post visuals, posters, cards and invitations on a tight schedule
- Teachers, students and academic users, whose personal and academic use is expressly permitted by the terms
- Small businesses and online sellers needing product mock-ups and clean cut-outs without a photo studio
- Curious newcomers to AI image generation, who can experiment freely without paying or creating an account
When not to use Craiyon
- Developers who need to call the service from their own software: there is no public API, only a promise of one
- Teams wanting shared workspaces, since the terms restrict each account to a single individual and forbid sharing subscriptions
- Organisations bound by strict data protection duties, as the site documents no GDPR position, retention period or processing agreement
- Anyone working on confidential material below the Professional plan, because generated images are public by default
- Users who expect to change their mind after paying: every purchase, subscription or credit pack alike, is final and non-refundable
How to use Craiyon
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Open the generator on the homepage; no account or installation is required to start
- Type your idea into the prompt box, in whichever language you prefer
- Add detail rather than keywords: subject, action, setting, style, mood and lighting all steer the result
- Pick one of the six style presets, or choose Raw to remove Craiyon's automatic styling
- Choose an aspect ratio, remembering that portrait and landscape are reserved for paid accounts
- List anything you want kept out of the picture in the Excluded field
- Launch the generation and compare the variations that come back
- Click an image to download it, retouch it, reuse it as input, remove its background, order merchandise or browse similar results
- To edit, open the detail view, write the change you want in the Retouch field and confirm it
- Sign in if you want to keep favourites and a generation history
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Genuinely usable free of charge, with no account required to generate or to remove a background
- Commercial use is permitted on every tier, free accounts included, subject only to attribution
- A full set of image tools around the generator rather than generation alone
- Prompts are accepted in any language, and the interface is offered in five
- A large community library where prompts are visible, which makes learning fast
- An unusually detailed tutorial with worked prompt examples for eleven use cases
- One-click cancellation from account settings, with no contract
Cons
- No public API, so the service cannot be integrated into other software
- No mobile application; one has been announced but not released
- Generated images are public by default, and privacy only arrives with the Professional plan
- Free accounts get watermarks, mandatory attribution, square format only and possible queueing
- No refunds at all, including on one-off credit packs
- The legal documentation is thin: no GDPR statement, no retention period, no processing agreement
- The licence granted to the publisher over prompts and images is perpetual and irrevocable
Pricing & Plans
A permanent free plan is available and requires no account, offering base-quality generation with a limited number of images and restricted features. Paid subscriptions start with the Supporter plan, advertised at 120 USD billed yearly, the lowest price point published on the pricing page. Additional credit packs may be purchased separately at any time. All purchases are final and non-refundable.
- base-quality images
- watermarked
- attribution required
- public generations
- square ratio only
- possible waiting times at peak hours
- unlimited images
- 100 editing credits
- Animate
- Upscale and Vectorize
- no watermark
- no attribution
- HD downloads and priority queue
- generated images remain public
- unlimited images
- 220 editing credits
- Animate
- Upscale and Vectorize
- plus private image generation and early access to new features
- unlimited images
- 900 editing credits
- Animate
- Upscale and Vectorize
- everything in Professional with the largest credit allowance
- One-off credit packs
- purchasable at any time from the account area
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Craiyon handles your data.
GDPR overview
There is none to report. Across every page collected, from the homepage and pricing to the privacy policy, terms of use, about page and tutorial, the words GDPR, data protection and CCPA do not appear once, neither in the visible text nor in the underlying HTML. No Article 27 EU representative is designated and no data protection officer is named. The policy states no legal basis for processing, no retention period and no procedure for exercising access, rectification or erasure rights. No data processing agreement is offered and no subprocessor list is published. The only route for a privacy question is the general address team@craiyon.com, given at the foot of the policy. This is an absence of stated information rather than a demonstrated breach, but for a service reachable from the European Union and offered in four EU languages it is a genuine gap.
Who owns the data?
Craiyon's terms let you keep using what you generate, but they also take a very wide licence for the company. By entering a prompt you grant Craiyon LLC, its successors and assigns a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicensable, royalty-free and irrevocable copyright licence over both your prompts and the images produced at your direction, covering reproduction, derivative works, public display and performance, sublicensing and distribution. That licence expressly survives termination of the agreement by either party. Free accounts must credit Craiyon wherever the images are used; subscribers are exempt. Images are public by default, and private generation only begins with the Professional plan.
Reuse rights
Yes, and no permission has to be requested. The FAQ states plainly that, so long as the Terms of Use are respected, images may be used as you wish for personal, academic or commercial purposes. Commercial use is open to every tier, free accounts included. The single condition placed on free accounts is attribution: Craiyon must be credited in text alongside the image, or, where accompanying text is impossible, its logo placed in a corner. Official white, black and black-and-white logo files are supplied for exactly that. Subscribers are released from attribution altogether. Craiyon does, however, reserve the right to rescind or modify a user's ability to pursue commercial use at its sole discretion.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Craiyon publishes no trust, security or infrastructure page, and names no country as the hosting location for user data. What exists is indirect. The terms of use obtain the user's consent to information being transferred within the United States and other countries for storage, processing or use by Craiyon LLC and its subsidiaries and affiliates. The privacy policy separately notes that data generated by the Google Analytics cookie, including the IP address, is transmitted to Google and stored on servers in the United States, though that statement concerns analytics rather than generated images. The publisher is a Delaware company administering the site from offices in the United States, and Texas law governs the terms, so the United States is the operative jurisdiction. At the network level the domain sits behind Cloudflare on an anycast address, which reveals the delivery edge rather than where anything is stored, and images are served from a dedicated media subdomain. Anyone with a jurisdictional requirement should seek written confirmation before relying on this.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Craiyon.
- The licence you grant over your prompts and generated images is perpetual, irrevocable and sublicensable, and it outlives the agreement itself
- Anything generated on the free, Supporter or Ultra tiers is public: your prompt and your image can be found by other users in the community search
- No refunds are offered under any circumstances, including on one-off credit packs, so mistakes on purchases are not recoverable
- The absence of any GDPR statement, retention period, processing agreement or subprocessor list makes the service hard to justify for client or employee data
- No postal address is published anywhere, and the only written contact is a single email address, which limits recourse if something goes wrong
- Disputes are subject to arbitration in Houston under Texas law, with an explicit waiver of the right to a jury trial
- Ease and speed invite volume over judgement: acknowledged model biases and unattributed training data mean generated images still need a human eye before publication
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Effectively none. Craiyon runs entirely in the browser with nothing to install, no API key to obtain and no configuration to complete. Neither generating an image nor removing a background requires an account; signing in only adds saved favourites and a generation history. The one friction the site documents is waiting during peak hours on free accounts, and its troubleshooting advice, should images fail to appear, is to switch to Chrome or a private window, clear the cache, disable any VPN or try another device.
Deployment
Supported languages
Behind Craiyon
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
Is Craiyon free to use?
What is the connection with DALL·E mini?
Can I use the images commercially?
Is there an API or a mobile app?
How do editing credits work?
Are my generated images private?
Can I get a refund or cancel?
Which languages are supported?
What are the models trained on, and are they biased?
My images will not load. What should I do?
Should you pick Craiyon?
Craiyon has aged into something broader than the meme generator DALL·E mini once was. Around a still genuinely free text-to-image engine it has assembled retouching by written instruction, an unlimited background remover, upscaling, vectorising, a scene composer and a set of purpose-built generators for logos, posters and interiors. Very little of that is gated behind a sign-up form, and the permission to use results commercially on any tier, free accounts included, is more generous than most competitors offer.
The price of that openness is paid in two places. The first is privacy: images generated on the free, Supporter and Ultra tiers are public and searchable alongside their prompts, so confidential work belongs on the Professional plan or nowhere. The second is legal thinness. The privacy policy covers little beyond cookies and analytics; the words GDPR and data protection appear nowhere on the site; no retention period, processing agreement or subprocessor list is published; and no postal address is given. Meanwhile the terms take a perpetual, irrevocable and sublicensable licence over both your prompts and your images, one that expressly survives the end of the contract. None of this is unusual for a consumer creative tool, but it is worth knowing before feeding in client material.
For individual creators, teachers, students and small marketing teams who want to explore a visual idea quickly and cheaply, Craiyon is an easy recommendation, and the tutorial is unusually good at teaching prompt craft. For developers wanting an API, teams wanting shared accounts, or any organisation with real data protection obligations, it is not yet the right tool. Prices start at 120 USD billed yearly for Supporter, with no refunds of any kind, so the free tier is the sensible place to form a judgement first.
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