TL;DR: Civitai Apps is coming. Before the public launch, we're picking ~10 indie devs and creative builders to ship the first wave. Sign in with Civitai, hit the API, build a creative AI app — your users bring their own Buzz to pay for what they generate. Apply here.
Why we're doing this
Every indie dev who's tried to ship a creative AI app has hit the same wall. GPU bills eat the side project before it has users. Hosting a model is a second job. Stripe, refunds, fraud, compliance — that's a third job. And you need users before you can afford any of it, but you can't get users without shipping the thing.
The result is that the best creative AI ideas mostly die in someone's experiments/ folder.
Civitai Apps takes all of that off your plate. The infrastructure is ours. The model catalog is the community's, and you get it all. The payment rail is Buzz, and your users top it up themselves. You build the experience. That's the whole deal.
How it works
Step 1. You build. Use OAuth and the Civitai API. Full access to everything the orchestrator can do — image, video, training, chat completion, all of it. Same engine that powers the site.
Step 2. Users sign in with Civitai. They set their own spend limit — per day, per week, per month — so they're always in control of what your app can pull from their balance.
Step 3. They generate, they pay. Buzz flows from their account, scoped to the limits they set. You don't touch payments, you don't front compute. You focus on the experience.
What you can build
The point is breadth, not a checklist. Some shapes that fit:
Games that use AI generation as a core mechanic, not a sidebar.
Creative tools — storyboarding, character design, world-building, comics, music.
Niche workflows for specific creative communities that the big general tools never reach.
Chat and character experiences where the visuals and voices are part of the story.
Training tools and dataset utilities — anything that helps people make better models.
What we're not interested in: another generic prompt-to-image wrapper. The bar is "something playful, useful, weird, or genuinely new." Pick one of those four words and chase it.
The launch partner program
We're picking ~10 launch partners for the first wave. Partners get:
Buzz grants to fund development and early users.
Featured placement in the upcoming Civitai Apps section.
Direct support from the team while you build.
Who we're looking for: solo devs, vibe coders, hobbyists, small teams. The shape of the team matters less than the shape of the idea.
This is an application, not a signup. We're reading every response. If your idea is the kind of thing that makes someone in the room say "wait, show me that again," you're who we're looking for.
Getting started
If you want to poke at the API before you apply (or instead of applying — we don't gate the platform behind the partner program), the path is real and well-paved:
developer.civitai.com is where the docs live.
App starters are ready to clone. They're built to work beautifully with AI coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, etc., so "vibe code your way to a working prototype this weekend" is a real option.
OAuth setup lives in your account settings. Create an app, get your keys, you're rolling.
Example apps we're having our own little team hackathon next week to put together a variety of example apps, but here's a little app I put together during our last hackathon in January that you can review and play with. Check out the Stickerize codebase.
The bigger picture
We've always wanted Civitai to be a platform, and technically people could have built on top of it for years, it just wasn't easy. This is us finally making it easier.
We have the GPUs. We have the orchestrator. We have a payments system that creators actually use. What we don't have is the long tail of weird, specific, joyful apps that someone in the community is going to build the second they have the keys. Civitai Apps is us handing over the keys.
Users only pay for what they use. Builders never front infrastructure costs. The platform grows by the count of people building on it instead of by the count of features we ship.
This is still the developer-flavored version of that vision. You still need to know how to host an app and stand up your own infrastructure to ship one. The next phase is making even that part go away — a world where anybody, developer or not, can spin up an app on Civitai without thinking about servers. We're not there yet. This is the start of the road, not the end of one.
What about monetization
The question we already know is coming: how do builders make money from this? Honest answer, we have a plan, we're just not ready to commit to the specifics in writing yet.
Current working ideas: letting app builders participate in the Creator Program, letting builders mark up generations going through their app, or take a portion of what their users spend. Probably some combination. We want whatever we land on to actually work for the people building, not just on paper.
For now, this is a "calling-all-developers post". The monetization details follow as we land them.
Thank you
Every interesting thing on Civitai started with someone saying "wait, what if?" and then actually trying it. The same people who've been training LoRAs, making images, and inventing workflows for the last three years are the ones we want building on top of all of it now.
Apply if you've got something to build. Open the docs if you just want to look around. Either way, this is the beginning, not the announcement.
Apply to be a launch partner. Open the developer site. Go build.