Announcing Leighton 1.0 Free: Gaussian Splatting at No Cost
Announcement · 2026-07-26 · 5 min read · by SplatMart Team
Our July 2026 announcement of the free tier. Superseded by Leighton 1.1: the tier is now Leighton Mini, priced at 50 credits with a 16-photo cap and no weekly quota.
Update, August 2026: this announcement describes the free tier as it launched in July 2026 and is kept here as a record of it. It no longer describes what SplatMart offers. In Leighton 1.1 the tier was rebuilt on a new reconstruction engine and renamed Leighton Mini: it now costs 50 credits per generation, accepts up to 16 photos, and has no weekly quota. Every account receives a recurring credit gift that can be spent on any model. See what's new for the current lineup.
Starting today, you can generate a Gaussian splat on SplatMart without paying anything. Leighton 1.0 Free gives every account two generations a week, on captures of up to 40 photos, with no credit card, no subscription, and no trial countdown.
The part we care most about: it is not a stripped-down preview model. Leighton 1.0 Free runs the same full training schedule as Leighton 1.0, our flagship paid tier. Same reconstruction pipeline, same camera solve, same automatic cleanup, same editable PLY at the end.
What you get
- Two free generations per account, per week, on a rolling seven-day window.
- Up to 40 photos per capture.
- The full Leighton 1.0 training schedule, not a reduced preview budget.
- An editable PLY you own, openable in the browser editor and publishable to the marketplace.
- No card, no subscription, no watermark.
Why 40 photos, and why two a week
Being straight about the trade-off is more useful than pretending there isn't one. Generating a splat costs us real GPU time, so a free tier has to be bounded somewhere. We chose to bound the inputs rather than the quality.
That choice is not arbitrary. Most of a generation's cost is the training run, and training cost barely changes with the number of photos. The camera-solve step is the opposite: its cost grows faster than the photo count, so a 430-photo capture spends several minutes solving cameras where a 40-photo capture spends well under one. Capping inputs removes most of the expense while leaving the training schedule, the part that determines how the result actually looks, completely intact.
The second lever is hardware. Free generations run on a smaller, cheaper class of GPU than paid jobs, in their own queue. The reconstruction is identical; it simply takes longer to arrive, typically around 35 minutes rather than 20, and longer still when the free queue is busy.
So what do the paid tiers buy?
Scale and speed, not a better model.
- Leighton 1.0 Lite (200 credits): a shorter training schedule for quick previews, on captures up to 3,000 inputs.
- Leighton 1.0 (400 credits): the same training schedule as Free, but on captures up to 3,000 photos or video frames, on faster GPUs, in the priority queue.
- Leighton 1.0 Max (600 credits): the largest training budget with the full camera solve on large captures, for sets above 120 photos.
There is still no subscription anywhere on SplatMart. Paid generations are charged per job, the first 500 inputs are included in the base price, and every started block of 50 inputs above that adds 10% of the model's base price. You always see the full quote before you commit.
Getting a good result from 40 photos
Forty photos is genuinely enough for a single object, a piece of furniture, a vehicle, a statue, or a small room, as long as the coverage is deliberate. A few things matter far more than the count:
- Orbit the subject completely rather than shooting from one side. Gaps in the camera path become gaps in the splat.
- Shoot at two or three heights, not one. A single ring of photos leaves the top and underside unconstrained.
- Lock your exposure. Auto-exposure swings between frames are the single most common cause of translucent patches and holes in walls.
- Move slowly and keep roughly 70% overlap between neighbouring frames so the camera solve can chain them together.
- Avoid mirrors, large glass panes, and featureless surfaces where you can, since they have no stable features to match against.
If you are new to capture, the photos-to-3D-model guide walks through the whole process in more detail.
What happens to your free splats
They are yours. A free generation produces the same editable PLY as a paid one, saved to My Splats under your account. You can open it in the browser editor to remove floaters and crop the bounds, download it, or list it for sale on the marketplace. Free generations carry no watermark and no licensing restriction that paid generations do not.
Start now
Sign in, open Create, upload your photos, and pick a model. The full quote is always shown before you generate, and a card is greyed out with the reason on it when a capture is too large for that tier, so you are never charged by surprise.
Frequently asked questions
Is Leighton 1.0 Free really free?
It was when this post was published in July 2026. It is not any more: as of Leighton 1.1 the tier is called Leighton Mini and costs 50 credits per generation. There is still no subscription and nothing to cancel, and every account gets a recurring credit gift it can spend on any model.
Is the quality worse than the paid tiers?
Mini uses a different reconstruction engine, tuned for small captures rather than being a large model with its budget turned down. For the captures it is built for it holds up well; for rooms, buildings and detailed product sets, Standard, Pro and Max remain the right choice.
How many photos can I upload to the free tier?
This post said 40. Leighton Mini now accepts up to 16 photos, which is where its reconstruction engine does its best work. Larger captures need Standard, Pro or Max, which accept up to 3,000 photos or sampled video frames.
When does my free quota reset?
There is no longer a quota to reset. The two-a-week limit was removed in Leighton 1.1 — Mini is priced in credits like every other model, so you can run as many as your balance allows.
Why does a free generation take longer?
It did when this post was published, because free jobs ran the flagship training schedule on a smaller, cheaper GPU. Leighton Mini replaced that with an engine built for small captures, so it now finishes in a fraction of the time it used to.
Can I sell a splat I generated on Mini?
Yes. Mini produces the same editable PLY as any other model and can be published to the SplatMart marketplace with no extra restriction or watermark.
Do failed generations use up my quota?
There is no quota any more. If a generation fails on our side, its credits are refunded automatically.