A Civitai alternative: one domain, one balance, one set of rules

On 15 April 2026 Civitai split into two front doors, civitai.com and civitai.red. The split was set out in article 28369 on Civitai's own site, labelled an official announcement and dated 9 April 2026, which put the change on the following Wednesday.

The separation is written into the documents rather than left to convention. Each domain serves its own Terms of Service from the same path, and the two prohibited-content lists differ from one another: civitai.red's is a different document at the same path, and both give 26 August 2026 as the date they were last modified. Both were read on 11 September 2026, and either can change, so the one that applies to you is the one on the domain you are actually using.

The reason given was payment. Civitai's own announcement states that it had lost every mainstream payment rail except crypto, and that the separation was the condition for card processing returning to civitai.com. The residue for you is that the door you arrive at decides which document applies and which colour of credit you can spend.

The split runs through the money as well. Civitai's credit currency, Buzz, is divided into colours that cannot be converted into one another: Green Buzz is bought with cards and stays tied to safe-for-work use, and Yellow Buzz is bought with crypto and lives on civitai.red. Credits are not the whole structure either. Civitai charges for generation in Buzz and separately sells monthly memberships, so it is credits plus an optional subscription rather than one or the other. The FAQ in Civitai's announcement (article 28369) says "Memberships are only purchasable on Civitai.com for now"; on 11 September 2026 civitai.red's pricing page said Yellow memberships are no longer available, linked its card membership to civitai.com, and offered a one-month Perks Membership paid in Buzz that does not renew.

Coming from Buzz, the question to ask of any credit is whether it can pay for the run you want. Here it always can. Vellria keeps a single balance with no colours, and neither a domain, a content setting nor the way you paid splits it. You fund it by card, or through another option offered where you live, on the checkout our payment partner hosts; once that payment settles, the same credits drive an image model or a video model alike. No membership is required beside it, so a month without generating costs you nothing unless you have opted into the optional monthly plan. A run is paid for as it starts, and if a provider-side error ends it the credits come back by themselves.

The price of a run is fixed by the model and the size or clip length you choose, and you see it before committing: each model's page carries it, and the pricing page sets out the whole catalog from the very figures the server charges.

Both have an API, so moving would not fill a gap here. Civitai's model listing at civitai.com/api/v1/models answers without credentials, its generation (Orchestration) API requires an Authorization Bearer token, and it is documented at developer.civitai.com; that documentation covers video as well as images, including image-to-video and reference-to-video operations. The ids your code sends are listed on each model page, such as Seedream 5 Pro for images or Wan 3.0 for video, and the NSFW image API page lays out the request.

In some ways that documentation goes further than ours. Read on 12 September 2026, it also covers recipes for audio, chat and LoRA training, callbacks that push a webhook to your server when a workflow finishes, a whatif flag that prices a job before it runs, MCP servers, SDKs and a command-line tool. If those are what your integration leans on, weigh them before anything else on this page.

Mature content over the Civitai API is settled through the currency. The Orchestration guide says workflows are paid in Buzz and only Yellow Buzz is valid for NSFW workflows, while Blue, which is earned, and Green, which is bought, settle safe-for-work workflows only. Setting allowMatureContent to true forces payment in Yellow. If a workflow paid in Blue or Green produces output classified as mature, an upgradeMode setting decides what follows: manual holds that output back and waits on you, automatic charges the difference in Yellow and delivers it. Yellow, per the announcement above, is the colour bought with crypto.

Vellria's API carries none of that currency logic. A key made in the console travels in the Authorization header as Bearer vll_..., and a generation request names a model, supplies a prompt and adds the options that model lists. There is no allowMatureContent to set and no upgradeMode to choose, because no output waits on a second payment: one balance settles every run. The extras Civitai layers on top are absent. With no callbacks, your code polls the generation record until it completes or fails; there is no SDK; and in place of whatif, GET /v1/models publishes what each model costs, so a job can be priced before it is sent. Reference images go to the uploads endpoint first, and the URL it hands back goes into the generation body. Request shapes are laid out in the API documentation.