Krea 3 edits one region at a time, and every speed number is Krea's own
Krea 3 claims under 8 seconds and $0.06 per image edit against Nano Banana Pro, on figures only the vendor has published and nobody independent has checked.
Vlad Makarovreviewed and published
Krea released Krea 3 on 15 October, its first model built for editing images rather than generating them. The launch page calls it a frontier editing model, four times faster than Nano Banana Pro. Every performance and price figure behind that sentence comes from Krea, and no independent editing benchmark existed on release day.
What the page actually claims
The pitch is narrower than the headline. Krea's own FAQ names the model's strengths as product scene changes, object removal and photo cleanup. The claim underneath is architectural: most edits change a small part of an image, so Krea 3 finds that region first, renders only what changes, and leaves the rest alone.
Native output is 2736 by 1536 pixels. Up to eight reference images can be combined into one scene, a named hex code matches a colour on a product only, and a face survives a change of setting.
Krea's own head-to-head numbers:
- Krea 3: under 8 seconds per edit, about $0.06
- Nano Banana Pro: about 26.8 seconds, about $0.135
- GPT Image 2: about $0.21
Four times faster, or ten
The page's title says four times faster than Nano Banana Pro. An animated banner on the same page says 10x faster and 3x cheaper, and its comparison selector names GPT Image 2 and Nano Banana Pro. Faster than which model is the vendor's choice, not a checkable fact. The runtime and cost row carries its own footnote: the outputs are pre-generated rather than a live benchmark, and the price listed for GPT Image 2.5 is "a draft estimate pending validation". Krea's press kit dates the launch to 12 October, three days earlier.
The speed is the design, and so is the limit
Rendering only the changed region is why the edit is cheap and quick, and it is also the boundary of the claim. Edits that rebuild the frame, such as relighting, a new camera angle or a new scene, are not what those eight seconds measure. The fast examples on the page are a jacket colour and a re-titled poster.
Alibaba shipped Qwen-Image-2.1 and an 8-step turbo checkpoint on a similar bet this autumn.
Reaction on Hacker News, where the launch drew 338 points and 107 comments, was friendly but not uncritical. Krea's own post calls it "a frontier image model in terms of quality, but at a fraction of the speed and a fraction of the price", and a commenter replied that the phrase is normally read as meaning slower. Asked whether text-to-image had become an afterthought, Krea said editing was the gap in the previous model and that text-to-image stays first class.
The FAQ says the launch price is the list price and that "We expect it to go down, not up"; self-hosting stays on enterprise plans. What would settle the comparison is a third-party harness running the same edits.
