FLUX 3 Image costs $0.048 per 1K image on the BFL API, and the 5.6B Klein variant ships as open weights from $0.009. Video clips run to 20 seconds with native audio, and the company lists SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001:2022 certification for enterprise buyers.
Black Forest Labs builds image and video models from Freiburg, Germany, and was started in 2024 by the creators of Stable Diffusion. It raised a $300M Series B at a $3.25B valuation in December 2025, then launched the FLUX 3 multimodal family in July 2026.
Founded: 2024 · HQ: Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany · Team: Small team (headcount not disclosed) · CEO: Robin Rombach · Funding: $300M Series B (1 Dec 2025, co-led by Salesforce Ventures and AMP) plus a roughly $30M seed (2024); about $330M in disclosed rounds · Valuation: $3.25B post-money (December 2025)
About Black Forest Labs
Black Forest Labs is a German-American visual AI research lab founded in 2024 by Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, Patrick Esser and Dominik Lorenz. BFL's own About page says its founding team includes the people behind Latent Diffusion, Stable Diffusion and FLUX.1, which makes it the clearest spin-out from the Stability AI research group. It works from labs in Freiburg and San Francisco and describes itself as a small team.
The product line changed shape in 2026. FLUX 3 arrived in Early Access on 23 July 2026 as one multimodal model trained jointly on images, video and audio, built on an approach BFL calls Self-Flow. Video came first (with native audio and clips up to 20 seconds), then a 4 August video write-up, 4K video upscaling on 20 August, FLUX 3 Action on 23 September (an open-weights 7B model for robot control) and FLUX 3 Image Klein on 15 October. The earlier FLUX.2 family is still sold alongside it, and the newer FLUX 3 record tracks the model itself.
The API bills by usage, with no subscription or seat fee. Rates are per image and rise with output resolution, failed generations and outputs withheld by moderation are not charged, and the pricing FAQ below carries the current figures. For teams that want weights, the licensing page sells Builder, Platform and Professional tiers with monthly image allowances, plus custom Enterprise and synthetic-data terms.
BFL's customers and partners include Adobe, Canva, Meta and Microsoft, according to its Series B announcement, and the pricing page logo wall adds Mistral, Magnific, Picsart, Gamma and OpenArt. The $300 million Series B of 1 December 2025 valued the company at $3.25 billion post-money. Salesforce Ventures and Anjney Midha (AMP) co-led, with Temasek, Bain Capital Ventures, Air Street Capital, Visionaries Club, Canva and Figma Ventures joining, and a16z, NVIDIA, Northzone, Creandum, Earlybird, BroadLight Capital and General Catalyst continuing. Adding the roughly $30 million seed raised in 2024 gives about $330 million in disclosed rounds.
Where the other side wins: the headline FLUX 3 comparisons are BFL's own, labelled preliminary and run on early-access builds. In them FLUX 3 was preferred over Kling v3 Pro in 60% of comparisons and over Seedance 2.0 and Gemini Omni Flash in 52%, which is a thin margin that independent leaderboards have not yet confirmed. Teams that want a finished creative app rather than a model API are better served by Midjourney, Adobe Firefly or Runway. Buyers who need a closed video model with a long track record may still prefer Kling 3.0, Seedance 2.5 or Veo 3.1. BFL sells models, not an editor, so non-technical users usually meet FLUX through partners such as Picsart and Krea.
Licensing is split by model. FLUX 3 Image Klein weights ship under the FLUX Kommunity License, which BFL says allows free commercial use for individuals and companies under $5 million in annual revenue, with larger organizations going through self-hosted licensing or the API. Compare the field in the AI image generator guide and the AI video generator guide, or take the Ideogram and Qwen-Image 2.1 pages as the closest image-side rivals.
Mission
To build the next generation of visual intelligence models that understand creative intent and transform imagination into reality.
Products
- FLUX 3 Image
- FLUX 3 Image Klein
- FLUX 3 Video
- FLUX 3 Action
- FLUX.2 and FLUX Tools
- BFL Dashboard and Playground
Black Forest Labs Models on Hokai
Compliance
SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001:2022
Links
Frequently Asked Questions
What are Black Forest Labs's pricing plans in 2026?
Usage is billed per generated image, without seat fees. FLUX 3 Image is $0.041 per image at 768 x 768, $0.048 at 1K, $0.07 at 1.5K, $0.10 at 2K and $0.607 at 4K, while FLUX 3 Image Klein costs $0.008, $0.009, $0.011, $0.014 and $0.036 at the same sizes. Failed generations are not billed. Open-weights licences run through Builder, Platform, Professional and Enterprise tiers with 10K to 100K images a month, and enterprise API volume pricing is by quote.
Can you use Black Forest Labs without paying?
Partly. Klein weights can be downloaded from Hugging Face, and the licence terms let individuals and companies earning under $5 million a year use them commercially at no cost. The hosted API and the larger FLUX 3 models are billed per image, and BFL does not advertise a free API quota on its pricing page.
What are the best alternatives to Black Forest Labs?
For polished image generation with an app around it, Midjourney and Adobe Firefly suit creators who do not want to call an API. For video, Kling 3.0, Seedance 2.5 and Veo 3.1 are the closed-model rivals FLUX 3 is benchmarked against. If open weights are the point, Qwen-Image 2.1 is the other small open image model BFL compares Klein with.
Black Forest Labs or Ideogram: which should you pick?
BFL's own evaluation puts FLUX 3 Image Klein ahead of Ideogram V4.5 in text-to-image, a result that comes from BFL's internal tests and has not been independently replicated. Pick BFL when you need downloadable weights, fine-tuning or self-hosting, since Klein runs locally in 8GB of VRAM. Pick Ideogram when you want a finished web app for typographic designs and have no use for weights.
What does it take to start using Black Forest Labs?
Create an account at dashboard.bfl.ai, add credit and generate an API key, then call a model such as flux-3-image-klein; the documentation lives at docs.bfl.ai. To run locally instead, download the Klein weights from Hugging Face and load them in ComfyUI or Diffusers on an NVIDIA GPU with at least 8GB of VRAM using the INT8 build.
Top Alternatives
- Stability AI: Same research roots; BFL now concentrates on one multimodal FLUX 3 family, so choose it for the newest image and video work.
- Midjourney: Choose BFL for API access and downloadable weights; choose Midjourney for a finished creative app.
Hokai guides that mention Black Forest Labs
- Best Free AI Image Generators in 2026: What the Free Tier Really Gives You: Free tiers of 7 AI image generators read from vendor pages: daily limits, public galleries, and which free plans allow commercial use. Checked 31 Oct 2026.
- Best AI for Generating Pictures of People in 2026: Best AI for generating pictures of people in 2026: prices from $0.0336 an image, keeping one face across scenes, rights, watermarks and who should skip it.
- Nvidia Just Bought Hugging Face for $12.93 Billion. Here's What Actually Changes.: Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, closing in 2027. Here is the concrete tripwire to watch, and the smaller precedent nobody is citing yet.
- Best AI Image Generators in 2026: Pricing, Licensing, and the Real Cost Per Image: Midjourney sells no team plan; Ideogram charges $30 per user and Leonardo $24 a seat. Solo, team and per-image prices for 8 AI image generators, checked.