Topaz AI Pricing 2026: Gigapixel ($149/yr), Photo AI ($199/yr) & Video AI ($299/yr) Compared

Two patterns hold across Gigapixel, Photo AI, Video AI, and Studio. First, the no-commitment monthly price is always the most expensive way to pay — see the payment-term sectionbelow. Second, none of the four offers a no-commitment monthly option at the Pro tier — Pro is sold only as an annual commitment, billed monthly or upfront. Astra is priced on a different ladder: Standard, Plus, and Pro are its own credit tiers rather than a Personal/Pro split, and each is simply monthly or annual, with no middle "annual billed monthly" rung.

The apps solve different problems, and picking the wrong one is the most common way to overpay. Here is what each is actually for, before the pricing gets more granular.

Gigapixel — image upscaling only

A dedicated upscaler: it increases an image's pixel dimensions, up to 16x, using AI models chosen for the source type (photo, art, text-heavy scan, low-resolution source). It does not denoise, sharpen unrelated defects, or remove objects — those are Photo AI's job. If the only thing you need is a bigger image, Gigapixel is the cheaper of the two desktop apps at $149/yr. Topaz notes that its predecessor, Gigapixel AI, was the first commercially available AI image upscaler when it launched in 2019, which is most of why "Gigapixel" is still the generic name people search for even when what they mean is any AI upscaler, ours included.

Photo AI — the full restoration suite

The broader restoration workflow: sharpening, denoising, upscaling, object removal, lighting and color correction, and face recovery in one pass, plus a RAW-specific denoise path for photographers shooting RAW. At $199/yr it costs $50/yr more than Gigapixel alone and includes upscaling as one feature among many rather than the whole product.

Video AI — desktop video enhancement

Frame-by-frame video enhancement — upscaling to 4K or 8K, noise and compression-artifact removal, stabilization, frame interpolation up to 60 FPS, and SDR-to-HDR conversion. It runs locally on a GPU and plugs into Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve. At $299/yr it is Topaz's most expensive individual app, and the only one of the three with no image-upscaling use case at all.

Astra — browser-based, no GPU

Astra is the odd one out: a browser-based video enhancement platform that needs no installation and no local GPU, using the same underlying models as Video AI. Its Standard tier lists at $39/mo, currently discounted to $19/mo as a limited-time offer, or $328/yr billed upfront. Read those two together carefully: Topaz describes the $328 as saving 30% against the regular monthly rate ($39 × 12 = $468), not against the $19 promotional one, so while the promo lasts, twelve monthly payments at $19 come to $228 and undercut the annual plan by $100. Both tiers carry the same 4,800 credits a year. Against Video AI, the annual plan is $29/yr more than Video AI's $299 annual-upfront price, because you are paying for cloud compute instead of your own hardware.

Every Topaz app is sold three ways: no-commitment monthly, an annual commitment billed monthly, and the same annual commitment paid upfront. The gap between the first and the third is large everywhere:

The number Topaz never states directly is smaller but still real: paying the same annual commitment monthly instead of upfront costs more too, not just the same total spread over twelve payments.

Video AI's gap is the widest at 57%, with Gigapixel just behind at 53%; Topaz Studio's is the narrowest at 35%, because more of the bundle's value sits in the flat $399 upfront anchor. In every case, committing to a year and then paying it off monthly is the worst of both options — you get none of the flexibility of month-to-month and none of the saving of paying once.

Topaz's own pricing page runs part of this arithmetic itself: buying Video AI, Photo AI, and Gigapixel separately at their lowest annual prices totals $647/year, against $399/year for Studio — and that $647 does not include the five other apps Studio also bundles in. Add the cheapest way into one of those, Astra Standard at $328/yr, and the comparison gets sharper still:

Video AI, Photo AI, Gigapixel, and Astra Standard bought separately come to $975/yr. Topaz Studio, which includes those four plus Gigapixel iOS, Bloom, Topaz Image Web, and Mosaic on top, is $399/yr — a $576/yr difference, or 59% less. The one case where the bundle does not win outright is narrower than that: Gigapixel and Photo AI bought together, and nothing else, comes to $348/yr — $51 cheaper than Studio. Add a single app beyond that pair and Studio is the better deal.

Topaz publishes no student or education pricing for any app — unusual for consumer creative software, and worth knowing before you go looking for a discount that does not exist. The tier split that does exist, Personal versus Pro, is really a commercial-use gate more than a feature upgrade:

The commercial-use line is the one that forces an upgrade regardless of how you use the software: every Personal subscription restricts commercial use to organizations under $1 million in annual revenue. A studio that crosses that line has to move every seat to Pro — at $499 to $799/yr depending on the app, roughly 2 to 3.3 times the matching Personal price (2.0x on Studio, 3.35x on Gigapixel) for the same feature set plus the removed revenue cap.

Not permanently. There is no free tier for Gigapixel, Photo AI, Video AI, Astra, or Studio. What exists instead is a free trial on every desktop app — Topaz confirms this explicitly for Video AI, whose trial lets you process and preview footage with a watermark on exported files until you subscribe, and the same download-and-try mechanism is present on the Gigapixel and Photo AI product pages.

If what you actually need is an occasional 2x or 4x upscale rather than a subscription you might use twice a year, our image upscaler previews the output dimensions for free, with no trial window and no watermark, before you sign in for anything.

The subscription is not the whole bill. Three things sit outside it, and the first is the one most people forget to budget for before buying.

Hardware and GPU

Gigapixel, Photo AI, and Video AI all run their core models locally on your own GPU — that is how "unlimited local rendering" is unlimited. Topaz publishes exact GPU and VRAM tiers per app on its own system-requirements pages rather than one number for the whole lineup, so the real cost here is whatever machine clears that bar, which for video work is routinely a four-figure GPU. Astra removes this cost entirely by rendering in the cloud, which is also the trade our own image upscaler makes — no GPU purchase, at the cost of a per-image credit instead of unlimited local runs.

Plugins and host apps

The Photoshop, Lightroom Classic, Affinity, Premiere Pro, and DaVinci Resolve integrations are real and free to use once you own the Topaz subscription — but none of those host applications are free themselves. A studio already paying for Creative Cloud or a Resolve licence is stacking a Topaz subscription on top of another recurring cost, not replacing one.

Cloud credit overage

Studio's cloud video credits (300/mo Personal, 600/mo Pro) expire at the end of each month with no rollover, and Topaz sells additional credits at $0.10 each once you run out. A studio that renders heavily in Astra inside a Studio plan can turn what looks like a flat $399/yr into a variable monthly line item.

Put together, here is what three common workloads actually cost for a year, using Topaz's own annual-upfront prices.

The middle row is the one worth double-checking against your own usage. Studio beats buying separately outright once Video AI is one of the apps you use — Video plus either other desktop app already costs more than Studio's $399/yr on its own. The one combination where it does not win is Gigapixel and Photo AI together with nothing else: at $348/yr, that pair is $51 cheaper than Studio, and stays cheaper unless you eventually add Video AI, Astra, or another app in the bundle.

Topaz is explicit about some of its own limits, and the rest are true of AI upscaling generally, ours included. Worth stating plainly before a client presentation depends on it:

• It cannot recover detail that was never captured. Upscaling estimates plausible texture from patterns it has seen before; it is not reconstructing the original scene. A window that was a blurred smear in the source stays an AI-estimated guess at a window in the output, however sharp the edges look.
• Tiny text, dimensions, and technical annotations are not reliable. A drawing's dimension strings or a scanned label can come out subtly wrong at high magnification — verify anything a client or contractor will act on before it leaves your desk, the same rule our own upscaler states in its own FAQ.
• Intel Macs lose Topaz's newest models. Topaz states directly that its generative Wonder models require cloud rendering on Intel Macs and cannot run locally there, with previews and exports running "significantly slower" than on Apple Silicon even for the core models that do run locally. A studio still on Intel hardware is paying the same subscription for a slower, cloud-dependent version of the product.
• It will not remove every rendering mistake or compression artifact. Heavy JPEG banding, geometry errors, and lighting mistakes in the source image are separate problems from resolution, and upscaling does not fix them — it can even make a compression artifact more visible by sharpening the edges around it.

Topaz earns its price when the restoration models are doing work you would otherwise pay a person for: recovering footage that was genuinely shot badly, cleaning up decades-old family photo scans, or running a high-volume image pipeline where $199 to $299 a year disappears against a single billable hour. It also earns its price the moment you use more than one app on a regular basis — the bundle math above holds for any two of the three desktop apps, not just all three, so a photographer paying for Photo AI and Gigapixel separately ($199 + $149 = $348/yr) is already close enough to Studio's $399/yr that adding Video AI or Astra on top is close to free.

It is also the right call for anyone who has already crossed the $1 million commercial-use threshold: at that point Pro pricing is not optional, so the question stops being "is Topaz worth it" and becomes "which Topaz apps do we actually use," since every app not in active use is $200–$400/yr of Pro pricing for nothing.

Consider skipping it if the whole job is making one kind of image bigger. Gigapixel's upscaling models are tuned for photography, digital art, and text-heavy scans — categories that do not describe an architectural render, which has no film grain or sensor noise to model in the first place. Paying $149 a year for a model library built around problems your source images do not have is the clearest case of the wrong tool on this whole page.

The same logic applies to Video AI and Astra if you have no video at all: $299–$328/yr buys frame interpolation, SDR-to-HDR conversion, and stabilization that a rendering studio publishing still images will never touch. In both cases, a narrower, purpose-built tool — ours included — costs less and asks fewer questions about which of eight apps you need.

For restoration work — old photo scans, archival footage, genuinely degraded sources — Topaz's model range is deeper than anything bundled into a general-purpose tool, and Photo AI or Video AI at $199–$299/yr is a fair price for it.

The weaker case is the one this whole page keeps circling back to: if the only thing you need is a bigger, sharper version of an image you already like — a rendered elevation for a presentation board, a screenshot for a portfolio — you are paying for Gigapixel's denoise, face-recovery, and RAW models you will never touch just to get the resize.

Our image upscaler solves that narrower problem: 2x or 4x dimension increase with AI-estimated detail, previewed in the browser before you sign in, for JPG, PNG, and WebP files. It is not a substitute for Photo AI's or Video AI's restoration and video pipelines — it does not denoise, remove objects, or touch video at all — but it does the one job Gigapixel is priced at $149/yr to do, starting free at 3 credits a day, with Pro plans at $39/mo, or $312/yr for 240monthly credits shared across every Render a House tool, not metered per upscale the way Astra's cloud credits are. Full plan details are in the pricing docs.

Weighing a different upscaler brand instead? Magnific AI pricing runs the same numbers for a generative-detail competitor with a very different cost structure.