Recraft

Recraft is two things sold together. The first is a browser canvas, Recraft Studio, where you generate and edit raster images, editable SVG vectors, mockups and video, create color palettes, inpaint and outpaint inside frames, and build reusable custom styles from reference images. The second is the model line underneath it: Recraft V2 through V4.1, including Flash, Pro, Utility and vector variants, which the vendor trains and serves itself.

Studio also runs external models. The Basic plan description lists Nano Banana, Seedream, GPT Image, Flux and others for images, and the Pro plan adds video models including Kling, Veo and Seedance. So a subscription buys both the house models and a front end onto other vendors' models, metered from the same credit balance.

Vector output is the part that is hard to find elsewhere. The export dialog writes PNG, JPG, TIFF, PDF, SVG and Lottie, and generated vectors arrive as editable SVG layers rather than traced raster.

Every plan is an allowance of credits that resets monthly and does not roll over. Basic is 1,000 credits, Pro and Teams start at 2,000 with 4,000, 8,000 and 16,000 steps, and Teams counts the allowance per seat. Credit cost per action is not fixed: the pricing FAQ says only that "Credit costs vary depending on the type of action and the model used", with external model pricing listed separately.

That makes chat the expensive surface. Agentic mode charges credits for each exchange with the language model on top of the image cost, and the vendor's advice is to start a new session when switching tasks because accumulated context costs more. The Design Agent, which builds a full kit of about twelve assets, says plainly that "a full project can add up".

Top-up packs come in 200, 400, 800 and 1,600 credits, never expire, and are used automatically once the monthly allowance is gone. They are not available on Free. On Teams the top-up pool is shared across seats while each seat's monthly allowance is its own.

The REST API is prepaid and pay as you go: one dollar buys 1,000 API units, units do not expire, and every response reports what it consumed. Published prices run from $0.007 per image on V4.1 Flash to $0.30 for a Pro vector, with editing operations from $0.002 for erasing a region to $0.25 for a creative upscale. The surface covers generation, image to image, inpainting, outpainting, background replace and remove, vectorize, upscale and prompt enhancement, with an OpenAPI description and OpenAI-client compatibility.

The hosted MCP server at mcp.recraft.ai is a separate path with nine tools, OAuth sign-in and no local install, usable from any client that speaks Streamable HTTP. Its billing is the catch worth knowing: MCP calls deduct from subscription credits, not API units, so an "Insufficient credits" error from Claude or Cursor is fixed in the web account rather than by buying units.

API units are non-cancellable and non-refundable, and API generation results are deleted within 24 hours.

Recraft trains its own models on user content by default. The data use page says images, prompts and chat content may be included, that free and paid accounts are included by default, and that Teams are not. The opt-out is a toggle called "Help improve Recraft" in profile settings, and the same page states it "is not available on the Free plan". API inputs and outputs are never used for training.

Two pages read as if they disagree. The compliance FAQ answers the question "Does Recraft use my data to train AI models?" with "No. Generated or uploaded assets are not used to train external models." That answer is about external providers, and the privacy policy backs it up: external image and video providers "operate under zero data retention or equivalent contractual terms". Read alone, the FAQ overstates the position on Recraft's own models.

Free output carries a second cost. Images made on the Free plan are owned by Recraft, appear in the public community gallery, and are not generally removed on request outside legal obligations.

The published audits are real and named: SOC 2 Type 2 and AIUC-1, both with linked announcements, plus GDPR alignment and PCI DSS Level 1 through Stripe and Google Pay. The security page adds role-based access, annual penetration testing, daily encrypted backups and a disaster recovery target of 24 hours. No ISO 27001 or ISO 42001 certificate and no data processing agreement document are published.

Two governance claims are thinner than the enterprise page suggests. That page lists "audit logs" among enterprise controls and promises "SLA-backed stability", yet the Teams admin documentation describes only seats, two roles, billing and a delete-workspace action, and no uptime figure or service level document appears anywhere on the site. Single sign-on is concrete by contrast: it is a listed Teams plan feature, so individual Basic and Pro subscribers do not get it.

Data location is undisclosed. The privacy policy says information is processed in the United States and other countries where providers operate, and names transfer safeguards rather than a region a customer can choose.

Recraft is strongest for designers and marketing teams who need many on-brand assets, especially vector work: logos, icons, illustration and typography-bearing layouts, with custom styles built from reference images and reused across a kit. The plugins keep that work where it already happens, in Figma, Framer, Google Docs, Google Slides and a Chrome side panel, all drawing on one credit balance. Developers get a cheap per-image API and an MCP server that needs no hosting.

It fits badly in three cases. Anyone who needs commercial rights cannot use the free tier at all, since Free output is public and owned by Recraft. Teams with a fixed monthly budget will find credit consumption hard to forecast, because chat and agent sessions spend credits per exchange and no Studio calculator is published. Buyers with a data residency requirement, a self-hosting requirement or a need for a signed service level agreement will find none of the three stated.

Recraft, Inc. is based in San Francisco with a UK subsidiary, Recraft AI Limited, and its about page claims more than 3 million users and 350 million images generated, a vendor figure with no independent source attached.