TL;DR: Two front doors. We're giving Civitai a second front door so both sides of this community can actually thrive.
Next Wednesday, civitai.com becomes the SFW front door (what civitai.green is today). Credit cards, memberships, Creator Program, the whole mainstream-friendly experience.
civitai.red becomes the freedom-first front door (what civitai.com is today). All NSFW content, crypto payments. Fully invested in.
civitai.green will redirect to civitai.com. Your bookmarks keep working.
Your account, your Buzz, your content: all of it stays exactly where it is. Nothing is reset, deleted, or clawed back.
What's actually happening
Next Wednesday, Civitai gets a second front door.
Civitai.com will become the SFW platform. It's the experience we've been building on Civitai Green since August, now graduated to the main address. Credit card payments, memberships, the full Creator Program, and a mainstream-friendly surface that payment processors are actually willing to work with.
Civitai.red is where everything civitai.com is today will live. The full catalog, the full generator, the full community. Crypto payments. No new restrictions. If civitai.com is your home right now, civitai.red is where you're going. The only thing changing is 3 letters in the URL.
Civitai.green will 301 redirect to civitai.com, so every bookmark, every link in an old article, every share you've ever sent a friend, still lands in the right place.
The short way to say it: if you only ever use Civitai for SFW, you won't notice a change. If you use Civitai for everything else, update one bookmark to civitai.red and you're done. Everything you already have comes with you, untouched.
Why now
I'm not going to re-litigate the whole payments fight. If you want the long version, it's in "Three Years of Building in the Storm" and the original Civitai Green upgrade post.
The short version: we've lost every mainstream payment rail except crypto. Not because our moderation is weak. It isn't. The real problem is the shape of what we do.
Anyone can upload a model. Anyone can generate with it. What comes out the other side isn't something we can promise in advance, not with the precision a risk department wants to hear. That kind of open-endedness, on a site that also hosts mature content, is a line Visa and the processors downstream of them won't cross. It doesn't matter how much of our safety work we show them. It doesn't matter how many bad outputs we catch. The shape of the platform is the thing they won't touch, as long as mature content lives anywhere on it.
We made the case all year. The answer didn't change, because the real question was never about the quality of our safety work. It was about whether a platform like ours could exist on their rails at all, and that question was answered before we ever walked into the room.
What we've learned over the past few months is that fully walling mature content off from the mainstream surface is something those same processors can actually get comfortable with. Not "filtered." Not "gated by age verification." Not on the same domain. Completely elsewhere. That's the deal the industry has been telling us exists, and civitai.com and civitai.red is us finally taking it.
Crypto has grown, and I'm genuinely grateful to everyone who stuck with us through gift cards, Coinbase, and NowPayments. But crypto alone can't fund the team, and it can't carry the platform where we want to take it. We've known for a while that the only real path back to normal payments was a clean domain separation. A place where nothing on the page is going to make a processor's risk department nervous.
So that's what we're doing. Green was the experiment. Green worked. Rather than keep Green in the corner as "the other site," we're giving it the front door, and we're finally giving the other side of Civitai its own real home instead of leaving it as "the main site, but with caveats."
For the first time, the freedom-first community gets a URL that isn't apologizing for itself.
We didn't want to do this. I'll own that. But we didn't want to keep shrinking, either, and this is the best shot I see at getting back to building instead of surviving.
What is NOT changing
I want to be really specific here, because I know how this kind of announcement reads if civitai.com is your home today.
Your account, your Buzz, your models, your images, your posts, your follows. All of it stays exactly where it is. Your account works wherever you go. Nothing is being deleted, migrated, or reset.
Our stance on NSFW AI creation has not changed.
civitai.red is being invested in. Features, moderation, generation, creator tools. Same roadmap energy you've been seeing on civitai.com.
The practical change next Wednesday is that you'll type civitai.red instead of civitai.com. That's the change. Update one bookmark and you're done.
What you need to do
Honestly? For most of you, nothing.
If you use civitai.com today, bookmark civitai.red and keep going.
If you use civitai.green today, you don't even need to update your bookmark. It'll redirect.
If you pay with crypto, keep paying with crypto. That's on .red.
If you've been waiting for credit cards to come back, they're on .com next Wednesday.
That's the whole checklist.
Thank you
A lot of you have carried this community through a year that tried to break it. The creators who kept uploading when the rails were shaking. The people who learned a new payment method because we asked you to. The folks in the comments who caught us when we got something wrong, and stuck around while we tried to get it right. You are the reason any of this is still here to be rearranged in the first place.
We're not doing this because it's easy or because it's what we planned. We're doing it because it's the move that lets us keep building, on both sides of the door.
Two doors. See you next Wednesday, on whichever side you walk through.
FAQ
Does my account move? Do I have to refollow people?
No. Same account on both sites, same follows, same uploads, same stats. The two domains are filtered views on the same database, the same way Civitai and Green work today.
Can I convert Buzz between sites?
You can't convert between Green Buzz and Yellow Buzz: Green is bought with cards and has to stay tied to SFW, Yellow is bought with crypto and lives on Red. But Blue Buzz (the earned rewards currency) works on both: SFW gen on either site, and NSFW gen on Red if you have a Membership. The reason Green and Yellow can't mix is that card processors don't want any path, direct or indirect, where a card purchase funds NSFW generation. Memberships are a separate product with their own terms, which is why Membership perks carry over to Red even though Green Buzz doesn't.
Does Blue Buzz still work on Civitai.red?
Yes. Blue Buzz gets you SFW gen on either site, and NSFW gen on Red if you have a Membership.
Do I need two accounts?
No. One account, both domains.
Do my Membership perks work on Red?
Yes. Your Membership itself travels with you: priority, higher concurrent generations, creator payouts, and the ability to use Blue Buzz for NSFW gen all work on both sites. What doesn't travel is the buzz itself. Green Buzz stays tied to SFW content (so you can spend it on Red, but only on safe content), Yellow Buzz lives on Red, and Blue Buzz works on both but only does NSFW if you're a Member. Memberships are only purchasable on Civitai.com for now.
Will my gallery get split across the two sites?
No. Same account, same gallery, same models and LoRAs, it's all one database. The only difference is visibility: Civitai.com is locked to PG through PG-13 content, so anything above that simply won't show up there. Civitai.red lets you choose what you see. If you post a SFW image anywhere, it appears on both sites. If you post a NSFW image anywhere, it only appears on Red (to people who've opted in). You post once, it goes where its rating allows.
Can I get a Membership on Civitai.red via crypto?
Not yet. We've tried selling Memberships for crypto before and they were a support nightmare (fixed-price crypto charges don't work reliably, people send the wrong amount, price swings break the math). We're still looking for a model that doesn't collapse into support hell. For now, grab a base-tier Membership on Civitai.com and all the perks carry over to Red, including priority, higher concurrent generations, and creator payouts.
Will content restrictions on Red loosen now that it's not tied to card processors?
Nothing is changing today. That said, a number of policies were put in place specifically to satisfy high-risk card processors, and now that Red is no longer tied to them, we're going to review those policies. We're not going to list specific categories because these are thoughtful calls the mod team needs to make properly, not promises made in a comment thread. When we have concrete changes to share, we'll share them publicly.
Does the REST API change?
No. The API continues to live on civitai.com and will also be accessible through civitai.red. Existing integrations don't need to change.
Will geo-blocked countries be able to access Civitai.com?
The countries currently blocked aren't blocked because of mature content. They're blocked due to compliance requirements around social features and identity verification (e.g., the UK's Online Safety Act). The .com/.red split doesn't change that.