What changed in 2026

NovelAI's prices have not moved in years: $10, $15 and $25 a month. What those prices buy has moved a lot, and almost all of it in one direction. On 31 March 2026 NovelAI released Xialong, a 355-billion-parameter finetune of ZhipuAI's GLM-4.6 and the best writing model the service has ever had. It is Opus-only, and NovelAI says there are "no immediate plans for a release to lower tiers." On 21 August came NovelAI Diffusion V5, the first new image model in roughly 15 months - and with it, the end of truly unlimited image generation on Opus.

A month later, on 22 September, Subscription Anlas (the credits that pay for images on the cheaper tiers) stopped surviving a cancellation. Put those three changes together and Tablet and Opus are no longer the same product at two sizes. They are two different products that share a login.

This review covers both halves: the story editor, which is still why most people subscribe, and the anime image generator, which is where the 2026 changes bite hardest. Every price and limit below was checked on docs.novelai.net and NovelAI's journal in October 2026.

Pricing and what each tier buys

Billing is in USD through Chargebee, renewing exactly 30 days after each payment. There is no free plan and NovelAI says there are no plans for one. The trial is a one-time allowance with no refresh: 50 text generations, 30 images up to 1024x1024 and 100 text-to-speech generations, available once you verify an email address.

Text generation is unlimited on every tier. All three get a 20% discount on Anlas purchases. NovelAI does not publish its own Anlas pack prices outside the app; a third-party breakdown from September 2026 (arcanumrpgs.com) lists 2,000 Anlas at $4.79, 5,000 at $8.19 and 10,000 at $13.99.

That official plan table is out of date. It predates Xialong and still marks Opus image generation as "Unlimited*", which stopped being true for V5 in August. Trust the numbers above over the picture.

Scroll is the hardest tier to recommend. Five dollars over Tablet buys 4,096 more tokens of memory and nothing else - the same models, the same 1,000 Anlas. Most writers who outgrow Tablet's context will also want Xialong, and that is a $25 decision, not a $15 one.

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The writing side: Xialong, GLM-4.6 and Kayra

NovelAI is a co-writer, not a chatbot with a document attached. You write, it continues in your voice, you edit or retry. Lorebook entries, Memory and the Author's Note feed it facts about characters and places without you repeating them; Text Adventure mode turns the same engine into an interactive story. A token-probability viewer shows which words the model nearly chose, and a TypeScript scripting API lets you automate the editor.

Xialong is the reason to pay for Opus. It is a mixture-of-experts model with 28,672 tokens of context on the website plus an 8,192-token rollover window, so the effective range runs from 28,672 to 36,864 tokens. NovelAI says it trained Xialong with a form of reinforcement learning aimed at the old failure of repeating itself in loops, while keeping enough variety that a retry gives you a genuinely different continuation. It also treats your input as instructions, which makes "write the argument from her side" work the way you would expect.

Tablet and Scroll writers get GLM-4.6, the untuned instruct version of the same 355B base, rolled out to every tier on 15 October 2025, and Kayra, NovelAI's in-house 13B model from July 2023. Erato, the Llama 3 70B finetune from September 2024, is now Opus-only. Older models are being cleared out: Genji, Krake and Snek leave novelai.net on 20 November 2026, leaving Kayra, Erato and Xialong as NovelAI's own lineup. Training custom AI Modules is no longer supported, and existing modules only run on the long-retired Sigurd and Euterpe.

The recurring complaint from long-form writers is context. One independent review is headlined "Great Until 90,000 Words", and the arithmetic explains why: even Opus sees about 114,000 characters at once, so a novel-length manuscript depends on a well-kept Lorebook and Memory rather than on the model remembering chapter three. If you want an assistant that plans structure and tracks a whole book, our Sudowrite review covers the tool built for that job.

Image generation: V5 and the Opus usage bar

V5 is a real jump. NovelAI says it is more than twice the size of V4.5, trained in-house on 268,000 B200 GPU-hours, with a 32-channel VAE (V4.5 used 16). In practice that means better natural-language prompting in English and Japanese, readable text inside images in English, Japanese and Chinese, up to 22 characters with reworked positioning, native transparent backgrounds and a full multi-panel comic page from one generation. V5 comes as Full and Curated; NovelAI calls Curated "the safest choice when streaming video".

The cost is the Opus usage bar. NovelAI says V5 is "more than twice as expensive for us to run" as V4.5, and chose a limit over roughly doubling the Opus price. The bar holds about 1,730 images and refills around 11% a day for a new subscription (empty to full in nine days) or about 14% a day once you renew (seven days). That works out to roughly 7,000 V5 images a month at 23 steps and normal resolution. Japanese users on note.com are split: some say a daily budget of around 190 images is plenty, others that it kills the trial-and-error way most people actually prompt.

Free Opus generations still have rules: one image at a time, no base image, up to 1024x1024 and 28 steps. V4.5 and older stay unlimited under those rules. Since 8 October 2026 a "medium" effort setting on V5 Full costs about 42% less usage, and NovelAI announced a further Opus usage boost on 13 October. On Tablet and Scroll every image is paid in Anlas: Vibe Transfer costs 2 Anlas to encode, and Precise Reference adds 5 Anlas per generation. A single Trustpilot reviewer (February 2026, a thin sample) complained that $4.99 bought "a sad 50-70 generations" and that character reference was "a complete buggy mess".

Privacy, filters and output rights

This is where NovelAI still beats the general-purpose chat tools. Its privacy policy (effective 10 September 2026) says stories are "encrypted in your browser before they are saved, with a key derived from your password that never leaves your device", and that NovelAI does not store the prompts you send. The slice of a story sent for generation is processed in readable form and not kept. Uploaded images sit in an encrypted cache for up to an hour. The terms add that request content is not logged without explicit consent.

Read the gaps too. Neither document states, in so many words, that your writing is never used for training, and the terms say anything you voluntarily submit for training "cannot be deleted after AI model training has started." Neither names the encryption algorithm.

There is no content-filter clause in the terms, and the homepage promises "No restrictions. No compromises." You keep all rights to what you make, and NovelAI says there are no limits on commercial use and no extra tier to buy for it.

The catches

Refunds are not offered unless NovelAI grants one. Cancel and you keep access until the end of the paid period, then lose it. Since 22 September 2026 that includes your Subscription Anlas, so a Tablet user sitting on several months of unspent credit should spend it or buy Paid Anlas, which never expire. Everything accumulated before the switch-over was converted to Paid Anlas, so nobody lost an existing balance.

There is no native mobile app; NovelAI runs as a Progressive Web App you add to your home screen. AetherRoom, the companion chat product NovelAI spent years promising, was formally cancelled on 8 May 2026. And the official docs lag the product - the plan table above is the clearest example - so check the journal before you buy on the strength of a feature.

Verdict

Buy Opus if you co-write fiction several times a week and value private, unfiltered output, or if you generate anime art in volume. At $25 it is the only tier with Xialong and with V5 images that do not drain a credit balance, and browser-side encryption of your stories is still rare among writing tools.

Tablet at $10 is a fair price for unlimited GLM-4.6 and Kayra text with pay-as-you-go images, but know that it is a step behind Opus, not a smaller version of it. Skip Scroll.

Skip NovelAI altogether if you are drafting a full novel and want a tool that sees and plans the whole manuscript - Sudowrite is built for that. If you need photoreal or general-purpose images rather than anime, look at Leonardo AI or OpenArt instead.

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