Leonardo AI is a freemium AI image and video generation platform from Leonardo Interactive Pty Ltd, a Canva company, built around its own Phoenix and Lucid model families used alongside third-party models. Its defining trait is the combination of a Canvas editor for inpainting and outpainting with the ability to train custom style models, aimed at users who want a repeatable, on-brand look rather than one-off generations.
Who builds it
Leonardo AI is developed and operated by Leonardo Interactive Pty Ltd, which operates as a Canva company. That ownership links Leonardo into a larger design ecosystem rather than leaving it as a standalone generator, while the product itself keeps its own brand, pricing and model line-up. Leonardo positions itself around two in-house model families, Phoenix and Lucid, which it develops alongside offering access to third-party models within the same platform.
What it does
Leonardo's platform centers on prompt-based image and video generation, with the Phoenix model family specifically built to render legible text inside generated images. Editing is handled through the Canvas editor, which supports both inpainting (redrawing a selected area) and outpainting (extending an image beyond its original frame), so users can iterate on a generation rather than starting over. Beyond ready-made models, Leonardo lets users train their own custom style models, layering personal or brand-specific aesthetics on top of the general and fine-tuned models already on the platform. Leonardo describes its overall style range as broad, spanning general-purpose models, fine-tuned variants, and these user-trained custom models. Everything the web app can do is also exposed through a pay-as-you-go API, so the same generation, editing and custom-model pipeline can be integrated into external products.
Pricing
Leonardo AI uses a freemium model. A free tier is available for anyone who wants to try image and video generation without paying, and paid plans start at $12/month for higher limits and additional features. Developers who need to call Leonardo programmatically use the separate pay-as-you-go API rather than a subscription seat, letting usage scale independently of the consumer pricing tiers.
Rights and provenance
Leonardo's commercial terms are more permissive than many freemium competitors: its pricing page describes full commercial usage rights on its plans, without the tiered limitations some rivals attach to lower-priced tiers. On ownership, Leonardo's Terms of Service state that users own what they create on the platform. Leonardo's public materials do not describe a specific content-provenance or watermarking standard, such as C2PA labeling, for its outputs, so teams with compliance requirements around visible or embedded AI labeling should verify current practice directly through Leonardo's Terms of Service rather than assume a default. Taken together, the practical pitch is a platform for teams that want more control over visual identity than a generic prompt box offers: in-house Phoenix and Lucid models with text rendering, a Canvas editor for iterative fixes, custom-trained style models for consistency across a project, full commercial rights on paid plans, and an API for production use, all starting from $12/month with a free tier to test the workflow first.