Start in the 'Try for free' collection
Runs one of a small set of selected models — image generators, upscalers, photo restorers — a limited number of times without setting up billing.
Why this one: It's the one corner of the site where the Run button works before a payment method does. Open a model from search instead and you get a short run of goes and then a billing prompt. Starting here means you find out whether the output is any good before you decide to fund an account.
Tweak: Bookmark the collection page — it's easy to wander into the wider catalog and lose track of which models were the free ones.
Prefer models labelled 'Official' while you're learning
Narrows your choices to the models Replicate maintains itself.
Why this one: The two grades are billed on different clocks. An official model tells you it costs about four cents an image before you press anything; a community model charges for however many seconds the hardware ran, which you can't know in advance. Learning what things cost is far easier on the side of the catalog where the price is a number rather than a stopwatch.
Run one model in the browser before writing a line of code
Uses the form on the model page — type or upload, press Run, see the result on the same page.
Why this one: Each model page generates its form from that model's own inputs, so the browser covers the whole catalog rather than a demo subset, and those runs stay in your account history where you can see what you ran and what it cost.
Go looking for the model nobody made an app out of
Searches the community catalog for the narrow jobs — sharpening a blurred face in an old photo, enlarging a small image, pulling text out of a scan, cutting out a background.
Why this one: These are research models their authors published and never wrapped in a product, so there's no website to sign up to; this catalog is often the only place a non-developer can press Run on one. It's also the clearest reason to be here rather than at a curated model service, which carries the popular models and not the long tail.
Tweak: Run counts are shown on the model cards. One that thousands of people have used is a safer first try than one with a handful.
