New Reve Image Generator Beats AI Art Heavyweights MidJourney and Flux at a Penny Per Image

A little-known AI image generator called Reve Image 1.0 is trying to make a name in the text-to-image space, potentially outperforming established tools like Midjourney, Flux, and Ideogram.

The Reve Image 1.0 model, codenamed "Halfmoon," operates on a credit-based system.

Users receive 100 free credits to test the service after signing up, with additional credits available at $5 for 500 generations—pretty cheap when compared to options like MidJourney or Ideogram, which start at $8 per month and can reach $120 per month, depending on the usage.

Reve is great at prompt adherence, visual aesthetics, and typography handling. The model generates high-resolution images across various artistic styles, from photorealistic renderings to abstract art.

There’s only a little information known about the model, its architecture, its team, and the legal intricacies of its service.

But unlike Recraft—which “owns” users’ outputs if generated using free plans—Reve grants users ownership rights over their generated content.

The team at Reve did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The company recently created a GitHub account but has not uploaded any content. In their Discord server, some users speculate there might be an open-source contribution, but such information has not been confirmed.

The idea of giving some love to the open source community may not be so crazy as the company also forked ComfyUI’s—a well-known UI for running open source AI Image generators—GitHub repository today.

Our Review: Hands-On Testing Results

Overall Quality Assessment

Prompt: A high-tech office space with different journalistic elements like a laptop, a telephone, a library, and a vintage typewriter, a cigar, and a mechanical keyboard, with glossy white walls prominently displaying a list of words in multicolor neon lettering. The text elements are arranged vertically from top to bottom, reading "DECRYPT", "EMERGE", "DEGEN ALLEY", "SCENE", "GG", "MYRIAD MARKETS", and "DASTAN". The minimalist room features clean lines, metallic surfaces, and ambient lighting that casts a soft glow across the workspace, with sleek furniture and modern technological equipment visible in the periphery. Wide-angle interior photography with dramatic lighting that emphasizes neon elements against minimalist surfaces.

In our comparative testing, Reve consistently produced impressive results across various prompt types. We tested three key aspects giving equal weighting: prompt adherence, realism, and text generation.

Reve generated images with well-balanced lighting, accurate representation of requested elements, and vibrant multi-colored signage precisely as specified.

The white walls appeared appropriately rendered, and journalistic elements on the desk were arranged naturally.

When compared directly with Freepik Mystic (the best Flux workflow in the market) and Ideogram (the best-closed source model with text capabilities)—on the same prompt, Reve achieved superior overall implementation of requirements, providing the best image when all the aspects were considered.

Freepik excelled in color grading and light interaction but struggled with texture realism and letter placement, whereas Ideogram accurately captured glossy surfaces but mishandled text elements and was the least realistic of all.

Winner: Reve

Illustration Capabilities

Prompt: A detailed hand-drawn illustration depicts a massive black spider with bristling legs and glowing eyes pursuing a screaming woman through a dark jungle setting. The woman, wearing a torn white dress, runs between thick tree trunks covered in vines, escaping from the spider. Dense foliage surrounds the scene, with twisted branches and large leaves blocking most of the dim moonlight filtering from above. The jungle floor is strewn with fallen leaves and gnarled roots. Black and white pen illustrations with rough sketch lines and dark cross-hatching create deep shadows and texture.

We conducted a horror illustration test comparing Reve against outputs from SD3, SDXL, MidJourney, and Ideogram.

All models were tasked with creating a scene featuring a woman fleeing from a giant spider in a forest setting.

Reve's output featured great hand-drawn quality with detailed linework, strong compositional framing, convincing facial expressions, and natural-looking forest elements with appropriate depth.

While each competitor showed distinct strengths – SD3.5's jungle setting, SDXL's sense of scale, MidJourney's atmospheric quality, and Ideogram's color choices – Reve's illustration comprehensively fulfilled the prompt requirements with superior detail and artistic execution.

This is a hard one to evaluate, but overall, Reve seems to be on par with SD3.5. Its hand-drawn aesthetic featured sophisticated texturing and hatching techniques, while the horror elements were effectively conveyed through the spider's threatening posture and the woman's terrified expression.

The forest environment appeared cohesive and natural, with technical execution showing skilled perspective, anatomy, and compositional framing.

Tie: Reve and SD3.5

Content Restrictions

During testing, we discovered that Reve is actually uncensored but implements content filtering that affects specific outputs.

While the model appears to understand concepts related to nudity and violence, such content appears pixelated in the final output after generation.

This is a big difference because it opens the door for a future way of providing uncensored outputs, probably in high-tier plans.

A censored model is not able to generate a specific image because it’s not trained on such content, a filtered model, on the other hand, has actually been trained and understands a concept but restricts its outputs based on a specific criteria.

For users requiring unrestricted content generation, local installations of models like Flux or SD3.5 would likely be more suitable.

Image Edition:

Unlike most of the image generators on the market that feature inpaint/outpaint edit tools, Reve relies on an instruction based system that understands natural language—similar to Google’s approach with Gemini.

For example, here is our result after we instructed the model to change a painting of a daylight scene into a night scene:

Instead of selecting an area and using prompts to get the desired results, users must instead “chat” with the model and write their expected outcomes inside of a text box—and pray for the best.

This is great for novice users who want to interact with the model and get something that just works. However, experienced users in need of granularity may see this as a cool addition but not really good enough to give them proper results.

It’s better than Google’s AI because it doesn’t degrade the image after new generations, however, it does change the overall aesthetic which may not be ideal for users in need of a model that respects character consistency.

Conclusion

Reve Image Generator is a nice entry in the increasingly competitive AI image generation market.

It’s very good at prompt adherence, realistic rendering, and versatility across different visual styles.

At $5 for 500 credits (effectively one cent per generation), Reve undercuts many competitors while delivering comparable or superior results, becoming the best close source image generator for people wanting to pay for making good images.

The flat-rate pricing model adds transparency that many users will appreciate–every image costs exactly one credit regardless of complexity or resolution.

However, it has some limitations. The lack of an edit feature, which has become standard among competitors, may not be a big deal for novice users but may frustrate experienced enthusiasts looking to refine results.

The lack of a mobile app limits accessibility for on-the-go use, and the limited information about the team and technology behind Reve may be uncomfortable for those caring about long-term support and data handling practices.

Still, for users seeking to generate high-quality images without extensive prompt engineering expertise, Reve offers an accessible, cost-effective alternative to more established services. Its versatility and strong prompt adherence make it particularly valuable for users with specific visual requirements.

Edited by Sebastian Sinclair and Josh Quittner