*To appear below, a company must **train its own models**, let **you** sign up and pay today with no sales call, and not be one of the giants. Out of scope: OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Apple โ€” those are [the other article](/publications/big-tech-ai-subscriptions/) โ€” plus all Chinese developers. Chinese services get [their own piece](/publications/chinese-ai-services/). Prices as of early October 2026.* ## The list | Developer | Country | Type | Service | Paid plans | Where it falls short | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | **Mistral AI** | ๐Ÿ‡ซ๐Ÿ‡ท France | Text, code | [Vibe](https://chat.mistral.ai) (was Le Chat) | Free ยท Pro **โ‚ฌ14.99** ยท Team **โ‚ฌ24.99**/user | Reasoning is the weak axis โ€” ~43.9% GPQA Diamond, 30+ points behind frontier reasoning. 128K context; "unlimited" Pro has a soft cap near 120โ€“150 messages. [Review](https://www.teamazing.com/blog/mistral-le-chat-enterprise-review/) | | **Cognition** | ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ USA | Code | [Windsurf](https://windsurf.com) + Cascade | Free ยท Pro **$20** ยท Teams **$40**/user ยท Max **$200** | A coding tool, not a general assistant. And Cognition **won't say which open base SWE-1.5 started from**, so lineage is unverifiable. [Announcement](https://devin.ai/blog/swe-1-5) | | **Sarvam AI** | ๐Ÿ‡ฎ๐Ÿ‡ณ India | Text | [Indus](https://indus.sarvam.ai) | Free only | 105B across 22 Indian languages โ€” strong at Indic work, behind leaders at English reasoning, and not built for code. No paid tier to escalate to. [Review](https://theaiquest.in/sarvam-ai-review/) | | **Midjourney** | ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ USA | Image | [midjourney.com](https://www.midjourney.com) | Basic **$10** ยท Standard **$30** ยท Pro **$60** ยท Mega **$120** | Still the benchmark for artistic taste, but **no free tier and no trial** โ€” $10 minimum to see anything. Weaker than rivals at rendering text in images. [Pricing](https://techjacksolutions.com/ai-tools/midjourney/midjourney-pricing/) | | **Black Forest Labs** | ๐Ÿ‡ฉ๐Ÿ‡ช Germany | Image | [bfl.ai](https://bfl.ai) | Credit packs: 100 images **$3** โ†’ 5K **$150** | The photorealism leader and genuinely open (FLUX.2 klein 4B is Apache 2.0). Weakness is product, not model: credit packs rather than a polished consumer subscription. | | **Stability AI** | ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง UK | Image | [stability.ai](https://stability.ai) | 100 images **$6.50** โ†’ 5K **$325** | Open weights and self-hostable, but roughly **2ร— Black Forest Labs' price per image** and no longer the quality leader it was. | | **Ideogram** | ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ USA | Image | [ideogram.ai](https://ideogram.ai) | Free tier ยท API 100 images **$6** โ†’ 5K **$300** | **The one model that reliably renders readable text in images** โ€” that's the reason to use it. General aesthetic quality trails Midjourney and FLUX. | | **Recraft** | ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ USA | Image | [recraft.ai](https://www.recraft.ai) | Free to start ยท from **$10**/mo | Outputs editable **vectors**, which nothing else here does โ€” the pick for design assets. Narrow: not a general-purpose image model. | | **Krea** | ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ USA | Image, video | [krea.ai](https://www.krea.ai) | Basic **$9** ยท Pro **$35** ยท Max **$105** | Real-time canvas and a good front end, but it's **mostly an aggregator** over 60+ models โ€” its own training is limited, so you inherit other vendors' availability. [Pricing](https://www.krea.ai/pricing) | | **Runway** | ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ USA | Video | [runwayml.com](https://runwayml.com) | Standard **$15** ยท Pro **$28** ยท Unlimited **$95** | The most granular creative control in video, and the editor professionals actually use. Raw output quality now trails the Chinese leaders (Kling v3) and Google's Veo. | | **Luma AI** | ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ USA | Video | [lumalabs.ai](https://lumalabs.ai/dream-machine) | Lite **$9.99** ยท Pro **$29.99** ยท Unlimited **$94.99** | Cheap entry and fast iteration. Weaker physics and prompt adherence than the current leaders; credit maths gets expensive at high resolution. [Pricing](https://www.eesel.ai/blog/luma-ai-pricing) | | **Pika** | ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ USA | Video | [pika.art](https://pika.art) | from ~**$8** ยท mid-tier ~**$35** | Cheapest way into AI video and good at short stylised clips. Shortest clip lengths and the weakest of the three at realism. | Twelve companies. **Nine of them are American**, which is worth sitting with: remove the giants and the Chinese labs, and the independent market is still mostly US โ€” one French company, one Indian, one German, one British. ## Where the gaps are - **Text and code is almost empty.** Mistral is the only independent generalist with a real subscription. Cognition covers code only. Sarvam is free, regional and not a dev tool. That's the whole list. - **Images are healthy.** Six genuine options at real prices, with distinct strengths โ€” taste (Midjourney), photorealism (FLUX), text rendering (Ideogram), vectors (Recraft). This is the one category where being blocked costs you nothing. - **Video is adequate but no longer leading.** Runway, Luma and Pika all work and all cost under $30 to start, but the quality frontier has moved to Kling and Veo โ€” both outside this list. ## Who's missing, and why - **Shut down:** Naver's CLOVA X closed 9 April 2026; AI21 halted Jamba development in May 2026 after cutting 61% of staff. - **No self-serve signup:** Cohere (North has no public price), LG AI Research (ChatExaone needs corporate email), Upstage, Reka, NVIDIA, IBM โ€” own models, but enterprise or API only. - **Japan has a real ecosystem, and none of it qualifies** โ€” worth spelling out, since it's the obvious question. **Sakana AI** runs [Sakana Chat](https://efficienist.com/sakana-ai-launches-free-sakana-chat-but-only-japan-gets-to-try-it/), a free consumer chatbot, but it's **geo-restricted to Japan**, and its Namazu models are post-trained on Kimi K2.6 and DeepSeek V3.1 โ€” so it fails on access *and* lineage. **Preferred Networks' PLaMo 3.0 Prime** is trained from scratch but keeps weights private and sells API access only. **NTT's tsuzumi** and **SoftBank/SB Intuitions' Sarashina** are enterprise. **Fujitsu's Takane** is Cohere-based. And **Rakuten AI 3.0** is a ~700B MoE under Apache 2.0 โ€” genuinely open, but there's no subscription to buy, so it belongs in [the downloadable survey](/publications/local-ai-models-2026/) rather than here. - **No service to subscribe to:** Ai2 (OLMo), EleutherAI, OpenGPT-X/Fraunhofer (Teuken), and Switzerland's Apertus โ€” all publish weights, none sell a product. Apertus in particular is reachable only through a partner platform, which makes it self-hosting. - **Wrong lineage:** **Cursor's Composer 2 is built on Kimi K2.5**, a Chinese open model, with about three quarters of the compute Cursor's own. **Writer's Palmyra X6** is reportedly post-trained **GLM-5.2**, also Chinese. **Perplexity's** Sonar is fine-tuned Llama. All excluded on provenance rather than quality. That last group is the uncomfortable one. Two prominent "Western" coding products run on Chinese open weights โ€” disclosed by Cursor, undisclosed by Cognition, who are *on* this list. **Vendor nationality does not establish model lineage.** If that distinction matters to you, ask what the base model was, and accept that sometimes the answer is withheld. ## My take For images, being cut off is a non-event โ€” pick from six. For video you'll manage at a quality cost. **For text and code, the independent market is one French company at โ‚ฌ14.99.** That isn't a diversified supply chain. So the honest answer to "what if they block me" is still the one nobody markets: hold the weights. See [the multi-GPU survey](/publications/local-ai-models-2026/) for what's downloadable and [the Strix Halo loadout](/publications/strix-halo-128gb-fifteen-models/) for running it on one machine. After two shutdowns inside six months among the names that would have been on this list a year ago, that stops reading as paranoia and starts reading as planning.