Luma AI Review: Is It Free? Plans, Credits and Ray3.2

Luma AI is Luma Labs' creative studio for video, images and audio: you describe what you want to an agent on a canvas, and it generates with Luma's own models (Ray3.2 for video, Uni-1 for images) or with third-party ones like Veo, Kling and Nano Banana. Dream Machine, the name many people still know it by, is now part of that app. Is Luma AI free? Not really. There's no free plan, just 3,000 trial credits that unlock when you verify a mobile number. Paid plans are Plus at $30 a month, Pro at $90 and Ultra at $300, or $25, $75 and $250 a month if you pay for the year.

What Luma AI is today

If you remember Luma as an iPhone app for 3D capture, that's what this page used to be about. Luma has moved on. Its homepage now calls Luma "your creative partner," and the product is built around agents that "research, generate, and refine across video, image, audio, and text." Even the old Dream Machine address on lumalabs.ai now lands on the page for the app.

Inside, you work on boards, a canvas where you can drop images, notes, text and shapes, with the agent's chat on the right and buttons at the bottom for Create Image, Create Video and Create Audio. There are also Skills, which Luma describes as workflows you build once and run again, and Solutions such as Art Style Match and Shot Coverage on the start screen.

Luma builds its own models. Ray3.2 is the current video model, and Luma pitches it as a way to "direct every frame" and hold continuity across cuts. Uni-1 (Uni-1.1 in the app menu) is the image model, aimed at keeping a brand's style consistent. Around them sits a long list of third-party models: Veo 3.1, Kling, Seedance, MiniMax, FLUX, Nano Banana, GPT Image, Seedream and Ideogram, plus ElevenLabs for voice, sound effects and music.

The 3D capture app hasn't disappeared, by the way. Luma 3D Capture is still on the App Store, next to an app called Luma Dream Machine, both from Luma AI, Inc. If you're looking for Luma on another app store, check that the developer name is Luma AI, Inc. before you install it.

How I tested it

I opened app.lumalabs.ai with an account signed in with Google, set to US English. The Usage page said "No usage data found," and Billing showed a "Luma Trial" with a Start Trial button above the three paid plans.

Then I did what any new user would do and gave the agent a prompt:

"A 5-second cinematic shot of a vintage red pickup truck driving down an empty desert highway at sunset, slow drone follow shot."

Luma opened a new board and, before generating anything, asked me to verify my account: "We'll text you a one-time code," with "3,000 free trial credits, unlocked the moment you verify." A banner across the top asked the same: "Verify your phone number." I didn't hand over a phone number, so there's no clip of mine on this page. What I can tell you is what the account looks like on this side of that wall.

Which models you can use without a plan

With no plan on the account, I opened the Create Video menu. Scenes and Luma's own Ray3.2, Ray3.14 and Ray3.14 HDR had no label. Everything from other companies (Veo 3.1, Gemini Omni Flash, Kling 4.0 and 3.0, Seedance, MiniMax H3, FLUX 3) was grayed out with "Upgrade." I clicked Veo 3.1 and got the plans window with a red banner: "Upgrade your plan to use Veo 3.1 and other premium models."

Before verifying, only Luma's own Ray models were free of the "Upgrade" label, so expect trial credits to go mostly on Ray video. The image menu was more relaxed: Uni-1.1, Nano Banana, GPT Image, Seedream and Ideogram were listed with no "Upgrade" label.

What do 3,000 credits buy? Going by the cost table on the pricing page, a 5-second Ray3.2 clip costs 100 credits at 720p and 400 at 1080p (30 more without keyframes, and double in HDR), and a Uni-1 image costs 30. If the trial covers Ray3.2 at those resolutions, that's roughly 23 to 30 clips of 5 seconds at 720p, or 6 or 7 at 1080p.

Luma AI pricing: Plus, Pro and Ultra

These are the individual plans on the pricing page and in the app, in US dollars. The page doesn't say whether tax is included. Luma says yearly billing saves up to 20%; on these prices it's about 17%.

Plus includes Luma's and third-party image and video models, edit access for guest collaborators and commercial use. Pro adds 4 times the credits and "4x usage with the Luma Agents," and Ultra 15 times. For teams there are Team and Enterprise plans on request, with shared credits and SSO.

That estimate is the most useful number Luma gives you, even if it doesn't say which model or resolution it assumes. Sorry to be blunt: about 100 seconds of video a month on Plus is not a lot if video is why you're here. At Ray3.2 prices, the same 10,000 credits stretch to about 125 seconds at 1080p or 500 at 720p. Some third-party models cost a lot more: Veo 3.1 is 140 credits a second, against 20 for Ray3.2 at 720p. Images are a different story: 350 a month is plenty for most people.

Is Luma AI worth paying for?

If you make video and image variations every week, for clients, ads or social, Luma puts a lot in one place: its own video model, the big third-party models next to it, an agent that, Luma says, can push several directions at once, and a canvas to keep everything together. Plus at $30 a month (or $25 billed yearly) is the plan to start with, and it already lists commercial use.

If you just want to see what AI video can do, I'd skip it for now. A phone number for a trial, then $30 a month, is a steep way in when other tools give you free credits every day or every month. And if Ray is the only model you want, check how far your credits go in the trial before you commit to a plan.

Luma or something else?

Runway is the closest match: its own video model plus others, with free starting credits and paid plans that start lower than Luma's. If you have a Google Account, Google Flow gives you 50 free credits a day for Veo and Nano Banana. Kling AI is the budget option for short clips, with a free plan that adds a watermark. Higgsfield is another app that puts Kling, Seedance, Veo and its own models together, with plans from $19 a month. And if your work is mostly images with an occasional clip, Leonardo AI has a free plan with daily tokens.

Written by Miguel Ángel, with help from an LLM to verify facts.