Ideogram 4.0, Explained: Open Weights, License, Price

Ideogram 4.0 is a text-to-image model from Ideogram, the company known for rendering readable text inside images. Released on June 3, 2026, it is the company's first model with downloadable weights, and Ideogram says it was trained from scratch rather than fine-tuned from another checkpoint.

The design goal is controllable, design-grade output. The model was trained only on long, structured JSON captions that describe every object, text region and style choice in an image. At inference you mirror that format: a high-level description, a compositional breakdown, optional bounding boxes that pin each element to a position, and a hex color palette. Ideogram 4 also renders multilingual text and outputs native 2K images.

One naming note: Ideogram has since listed Ideogram 4.5 as a newer model. Version 4.0 remains the open-weight release, which is why it is the one developers download, fine-tune and build on.

Pick the route by what you need to own. The Ideogram app is the fastest test: choose 4.0, pick Turbo, Balanced or Quality and spend 3, 6 or 10 credits per image. The Ideogram 4.0 API gives hosted commercial access at $0.03 to $0.10 per image with no subscription, which is the simplest way to put it inside a product.

To self-host, accept the license gate on the Hugging Face model page, download the nf4 or fp8 weights and run Ideogram's inference code. For the highest quality, Ideogram suggests 2048 × 2048 with its V4_QUALITY_48 sampler preset. The model expects JSON prompts, so most setups use a language model to turn a plain request into the caption schema.

Remember the license line: free weights are for research, evaluation and personal projects. Ideogram's licensing table marks production and commercial use of them as not permitted, so a commercial self-hosted deployment needs the self-serve or enterprise license.

Supavisual does not run Ideogram's model. It is a separate hosted tool with its own generator, for teams that want finished product and marketing images without GPUs, JSON schemas or a second license. In the generator you write a normal sentence, add up to 6 reference images, choose a ratio and get up to 4 images, at 1 credit each.

For text-heavy work, the infographics tool lays out graphics, and translate rewrites the text already in an image into 37 languages. The editor removes backgrounds for transparent cutouts, upscales and expands, and batch applies one edit to up to 10,000 images.

Hobbyist is $19 a month for 800 credits, about 2.4 cents per image, and $9 the first month. Unlimited is $99 per seat per month. Both include a commercial license, so there is no extra licensing step. New accounts get 3 trial credits with watermarked previews.