FLUX 3 Image is live on Black Forest Labs' API: up to 4K, ten references, from $0.041 an image

FLUX 3 Image, the still-image half of Black Forest Labs' FLUX 3 family, is out on BFL's API. Its release notes date it to October 1, 2026, ten weeks after FLUX 3 was announced on July 23 with Image promised for "the following weeks". It is now listed on OpenRouter and Vercel's AI Gateway too.

WHAT IT DOES

Per BFL's docs, one endpoint does text-to-image and editing:

- Up to ten reference images, which you name by position in the prompt - Bounding boxes at the end of the prompt to place each element, and pixel-exact local edits that leave the rest of the image alone - Output from 768 × 768 up to 4K (about 16 megapixels), at 15 aspect ratios

THE PRICE

BFL's docs list it per image by resolution: $0.041 at 768 × 768, $0.048 at about 1 megapixel, $0.10 at about 4 megapixels and $0.607 at 4K. BFL's own pricing page and Vercel's gateway both show half of that today ($0.024 for a 1-megapixel image), which reads as a launch discount. BFL has not said how long it lasts.

WE WERE LATE ON THIS ONE

Our launch alert went out October 5 at 19:40 UTC, four days after the release. OpenRouter carried the model from October 1, but only in its image-output listing, which the catalog feed we sweep leaves out. That blind spot is now on our fix list.

WHAT WE DO NOT KNOW

There are no independent quality results yet, and BFL has published no benchmark table for Image. FLUX 3 Dev, the promised open-weight model, is still unreleased.