Leonardo AI: Free Plan, Tokens and First Images

👁 145 reads

Leonardo AI’s Free plan gives you 150 Fast tokens a day, which reset daily, but only the “Auto” model choice and public creations. To pick from its 80+ models, keep images private and own them outright, you need a paid plan: Essential at $12 a month (8,500 tokens), Premium at $30 (25,000) or Ultimate at $60 (60,000), before tax, with up to 20% off for yearly billing. Tokens are not images: Leonardo charges more tokens for heavier actions, so check the cost shown before each generation.

Four individual plans, from free to $60 a month

Premium and Ultimate add unlimited image generation for selected models at a “relaxed” pace once your fast tokens run out, and Ultimate extends that to selected video models. Paid subscribers can also buy top-up tokens, which never expire. Team plans start at $24 per seat a month (Starter, 25,000 tokens per seat). The API is sold separately from these app plans, so an app subscription does not give you API credit.

150 tokens is a budget, not 150 images

Leonardo deducts tokens for every action: generating images or video, removing backgrounds, upscaling. Its pricing FAQ says the charge follows the computing load, and a single token does not correspond to a specific image size or action. The app shows the cost of your current settings before you click Generate, which is the only reliable number.

That makes the free allowance easy to burn. If you spend it on variants, nothing may be left for the final upscale. Decide what the finished file needs to be first, then pick the model and quality.

Free images are public, and Leonardo keeps rights to them

This matters more than the token count. According to Leonardo’s pricing page:

• Paid subscribers keep full ownership and copyright of what they generate. Leonardo may use private images only to provide the service.
• Free users get a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use their creations commercially, but Leonardo holds the rights to use, reproduce, modify and distribute them, and other users can access public images through features of the service.

So do not upload client material or unpublished product shots on the Free plan. For anything confidential, Essential is the cheapest plan with private creations.

Five steps to your first useful image

1. Sign in at leonardo.ai and find the token counter on the app’s main page.
2. Decide the target format first: a blog header needs empty space for a title, a product shot must match the real object, a character series needs the same face in every image.
3. Write a prompt that describes what is visible, for example: “White ceramic vase on a navy background, soft light from the left, empty space on the right.” Object, colors, light and composition, without filler like “award-winning photography.”
4. Read the token cost before generating, then judge the result against your target: wrong shape, extra handles or an unreadable label mean reject, not upscale.
5. Upscale and export only the image you accept, then open the file outside the app to check edges and any text.

Upscaling does not fix a wrong shape; it only makes the mistake bigger. Fix composition and details in the prompt first. More on writing prompts in what a prompt is, and on editing an existing photo in transforming photos with AI.

Where to go next

All Leonardo plans, models and token costs in one place: Leonardo AI guide and Leonardo AI pricing. If you are weighing it against Midjourney, which has no free plan, see Midjourney without a subscription.

// read moreLeonardo AI Pricing: Plans, Tokens & How Many Images You GetGuidesLeonardo AI Guide: Models, Pricing & Tokens (2026)AI ToolsAI Image Generator: How to Choose the Right One for Your NeedsGuides

Kinetyra