Cara
Platform · this deep dive is built from the official pages of the platform itself and of the tools that support it.
Overview
Cara is a social network and portfolio site for artists, built around a single principle: images generated by neural networks are not allowed in portfolios. The platform puts it in its own words: "Cara is a social media and portfolio platform for artists and art enthusiasts. With the widespread use of generative AI, we decided to build a place that filters out generative AI images so that people who want to find real artists and real images can do so easily". Another of its self-descriptions, from the cara.app/explore section: "Cara is a social and portfolio platform for the entertainment art industry".
The project is non-commercial by design: Cara is funded by its creators' own money and by community support through Cara Coffee, is built by a small team of volunteers and was founded by Jingna Zhang, known as zemotion. Almost every limitation of the platform follows from that.
An important warning about availability: the main domain cara.app sits behind a Cloudflare challenge page ("Just a moment…") and responds with a 403 code. The platform keeps its terms, help centre and about page on the open blog.cara.app section. The platform itself is alive, though: the terms were updated on 14 January 2025.
Who's here
The only figure the platform gives about its audience appears in its explanation of why support subscriptions are needed: the platform is "changing the lives of the over one million people using Cara".
The industry is drawn narrowly: during the beta stage, Cara starts by supporting the entertainment art industry; later it plans to open the platform to other communities as well. Among the testers named are art directors and lead artists from Bungie, Kojima Productions, FromSoftware, Marvel Studios, NVIDIA, Riot Games, Sony Santa Monica and Wizards of the Coast — that is a list of the companies the testers came from, not an audience metric.
The blog.cara.app section is served in English.
Getting started
Registration is open: "We are in open beta. Anyone can make an account and share their work".
Login works without a password: Cara uses one-time codes (OTP), because storing passwords is difficult and risky; anyone who wants a password is advised to set up a Google or Apple account.
There are three account types, and the difference between them is about trust rather than features: anyone can create an account, and by default it is "Community"; "Community" and "Portfolio" accounts have access to the same shared features; a Portfolio account is granted to those vouched for by an existing Portfolio holder; Coffee subscribers get access to a private channel on Discord.
Invitations are rationed: a Portfolio holder has 5 invitations a month. Vouching carries a price: if an invitee breaks the terms, the person who vouched for them may also receive a strike, and anyone caught abusing the invitation system is blocked along with their whole chain of invitees.
What you can publish
The profile is built from two tabs: "Timeline" — everything you post, including reposts and quotes; "Portfolio" — a folder of selected work, which contains only what you have ticked "Add to Portfolio". A portfolio can be split into albums, but these can only be edited in the desktop browser version, even though they are visible everywhere. The formats the platform names: feed and portfolio on desktop and phone, GIF uploads, bookmarks and albums, free-form cropping of covers and thumbnails, long text posts.
The prohibitions are strict and specific to the platform's purpose: AI-generated images are prohibited in portfolios; NSFW material is not accepted at this time; AI images are permitted outside portfolios — for news and discussion, provided they are accurately labelled. Attempts to get around this rule are punished: "we do not, for instance, tolerate users circumventing our rules by posting AI-generated images and using the feed as a portfolio". The platform explains the absence of an adult section honestly: a small volunteer team does not have the legal, technical or financial resources to hire moderators. Editing is limited: you can change a post's text, but not its thumbnail or the set of images.
Rights to uploaded content
Cara's terms contain no licensing clause of the familiar kind — "you grant the platform a worldwide royalty-free licence". Instead there is a statement about ownership: "The Cara Site and all artwork ("Art") and other user content… are copyrighted unless otherwise noted and are the property of Cara and/or the individual artist who created the individual work". The "and/or" here is the only one in the sentence, and it divides nothing: the text does not say in which cases the platform turns out to be the rights holder.
What is spelled out, though, is the ban on using other people's work: "No material and no artwork from the Cara Site may be copied, reproduced, republished, uploaded, posted, transmitted or distributed in any way, except that you may download one copy of the materials on one computer for personal, non-commercial home use"; public and commercial use requires the written permission of both Cara and the artist.
On model training the platform speaks plainly: "Cara does not train any AI models on user content. Cara also does not give permission to third-party companies to train on Cara users' data".
How to grow
The only promotion mechanic the platform names is a customisable home feed. The professional growth channel is something else — availability-for-hire status. The profile has an "About" tab with a biography, résumé and links, and next to it an "Open to Work" setting with options: full-time, part-time, contract/freelance, internships; this status is available as a search filter for art directors, clients and recruiters looking for artists on Cara. The platform also has a separate job board.
Self-promotion is restricted by the terms directly: the prohibited actions include "using the Site, any service, any artwork and other user content… for the purpose of promoting or advertising third-party goods and/or services of any kind". The same document prohibits unauthorised harvesting of images and artwork from the site without the artist's written permission.
The stance on NFTs is stated separately: Cara offers no NFT or cryptocurrency integrations and considers advertising such activity to fall outside the terms.
Path to monetization
The platform does not pay creators and takes no commission — there is simply no payout mechanism here. Money moves the other way: users support Cara. The tiers are named: Happy Supporter — 5 USD a month, Cheering Supporter — 10 USD a month, Mega Supporter — 20 USD a month, Patron of Cara — 50 USD a month.
What a subscription gives you: a supporter badge and access to a private channel on Discord. The platform describes where the money goes as follows: server hosting, image storage, development tools; and as it grows, scaling the infrastructure and possibly hiring permanent staff.
Earnings for an artist here are indirect: through the job board and the "Open to Work" status. No commission is charged on such a commission of work, but neither does the platform provide escrow, contracts or transaction protection.
Tools and automation
Cara has no public API: the platform has no developer section and no documentation.
Its own protection tool is NoAI tags: "we automatically apply NoAI tags on Cara by default to protect uploaded images"; in the same place the platform warns that "no image publicly visible on the internet can be fully protected from unethical scraping if companies and bad actors decide to do so".
The second tool is Cara Glaze, a built-in filter based on work by the University of Chicago's SAND Lab. As of our check it is not working: "Cara Glaze is currently unavailable due to a case of abuse. Users can still download Glaze directly from the University of Chicago's site". The platform ties its return to rising server costs.
AI detection is outsourced: Cara uses a third-party service for automatic detection and moderation of AI images, because a small team has no way to review millions of images by hand. There are mobile apps for the App Store and Google Play — the help centre links to them.
Limits and rules
- Moderation and usernames. Cara has the right at its own discretion to remove or change a username, and to suspend and cancel an account "for any reason whatsoever"; prohibited names include those impersonating another person or a Cara employee, vulgar names, celebrity names and names protected by others' rights, and names connected with drugs, sex, alcohol or criminal activity.
- Refunds. No refund is made on accounts that breach the terms; disputing a payment with your bank without first contacting support is in itself grounds for a block.
- Data. When an account is closed, the data associated with it cannot be restored.
- Law and jurisdiction. The agreement is governed by the law of the State of California, and the servers are located in various jurisdictions, including the US: by using the site you consent to cross-border data transfer.
- Crawlers. The main domain's robots.txt sets the content signals
search=yes, ai-train=no, use=referenceand separately bars crawling by ClaudeBot, GPTBot, CCBot, Bytespider, Amazonbot, Google-Extended and meta-externalagent; the blog section's robots.txt bars the same set.
Who it's for
It suits artists in the entertainment industry — concept artists, illustrators, character designers — who care that their portfolio does not sit next to generative images and does not end up in model training sets. It suits those looking for work: the "Open to Work" status and the filter recruiters use for it is a rare feature among art platforms.
It does not suit you if you need income from the platform: there is none of any kind. It does not suit NSFW work or advertising: both are prohibited. It does not suit you if you work with generative AI as part of your process and want to show the result in your portfolio. And it does not suit projects that need automation: there is no API, and harvesting images from the platform is prohibited by the terms.
Verified data
The checked data this deep dive rests on.
About the platform
the platform describes itself as follows: "Cara is a social and portfolio platform for the entertainment art industry."
This is the platform's statement about itself, not an independent assessment
source, checked 2026-07-28
as of the check date the main domain returned a Cloudflare challenge page ("Just a moment...") with a 403 code on every address requested, including the home page, /explore, /terms, /about and /sitemap.xml; we did not circumvent the bot protection · the source is dated 2025-01-14
This is not a sign of closure: the blog.cara.app section is alive and the terms were updated on 14 January 2025
source, checked 2026-07-28
the project is built by a small team of volunteers and was founded by Jingna Zhang (zemotion); it is funded by the creators' own money and by community support through Cara Coffee
source, checked 2026-07-28
the platform describes itself as a social network and portfolio site for artists and art enthusiasts, created to filter out generative AI images
source, checked 2026-07-28
Sources diverge: a discrepancy with the project registry: platforms-registry.csv records a working address https://cara.app/explore for Cara with a 200 code and "live" status (checked 2026-07-27); on 2026-07-28 the same address returned 403
Access depends on who is asking and from where; the "live" status nevertheless remains correct
source, checked 2026-07-28
Who's here
the platform mentions "over one million people using Cara"; it publishes no other audience metrics and no country or language breakdown
The figure is given in the text about support subscriptions, with no date and no measurement method
source, checked 2026-07-28
Getting started
login without a password, via one-time codes (OTP) sent by email; anyone who wants a password is advised to set up a Google or Apple account
The terms state no age threshold
source, checked 2026-07-28
Account and access
three account types: Community (the default, available to everyone), Portfolio (granted to those vouched for by an existing Portfolio holder; the shared features are the same), Coffee Subscriber (access to a private channel on Discord)
source, checked 2026-07-28
a Portfolio account holder has 5 invitations a month; if an invitee breaks the terms the voucher may also receive a strike, and abuse of the invitation system blocks the whole chain of invited accounts
source, checked 2026-07-28
the app store's age rating is 13+: the Apple listing shows «Age Rating 13+ Years», and the Google listing «Parental guidance»
this is the app store's age rating, assigned from the developer's questionnaire, not a minimum participant age declared by the platform. The rating depends on the storefront: in the Belgian Apple storefront the same app is shown as «13+», and a title with «12+» occurs in search results. The platform's own terms sit at cara.app/terms, which is closed to us by robots.txt. The owner of the figure is the app store, not Cara
source, checked 2026-08-07
What you can publish
feed and portfolio on desktop and phone, GIF uploads, bookmarks and albums, free-form cropping of covers and thumbnails, long text posts; portfolio albums can be edited only in the desktop browser version
The open help centre gives no maximum file size and no list of formats
source, checked 2026-07-28
Content
AI-generated images are prohibited in portfolios; AI images are permitted outside portfolios for news and discussion provided they are accurately labelled; attempts to get around the rule by posting AI images and using the feed as a portfolio are not tolerated
The platform's defining prohibition
source, checked 2026-07-28
NSFW material is not accepted at this time; the reason is stated outright: a volunteer team has no legal, technical or financial resources to hire moderators
source, checked 2026-07-28
the text of a published post can be changed; the thumbnail and the set of images cannot
source, checked 2026-07-28
NoAI tags are applied by default to all uploaded images; the platform notes in the same place that the tags do not guarantee protection against unethical scraping; AI image detection is outsourced to a third-party service; Cara does not train models on user data and does not give third parties permission to do so
source, checked 2026-07-28
the built-in Cara Glaze filter was switched off as of the check date because of a case of abuse; users are advised to download Glaze directly from the University of Chicago's site
source, checked 2026-07-28
Promotion
the profile has an "Open to Work" setting with options: full-time, part-time, contract/freelance, internships; the status is available as a search filter for art directors, clients and recruiters
The platform describes no ranking algorithm
source, checked 2026-07-28
How the money works here
the list of in-app purchases with prices, as the Apple store prints them: Happy Supporter $5.00, Cheering Supporter $10.00, Mega Supporter $20.00, Patron of Cara $50.00, plus the one-off «Buy the dev team a coffee» $5.00, «Buy the dev team 3 coffees» $15.00, «Buy the dev team 5 coffees» $25.00, «Buy the dev team 10 coffees» $50.00
the «In-App Purchases» section of the app listing in the Apple store. This is a user's payment in support of the platform, not the platform's commission from an author and not a condition of publishing. The prices are in US dollars, as the American storefront shows them
source, checked 2026-08-07
the platform does not pay creators and takes no commission: there is no payout mechanism; earnings are possible only through the job board and the "Open to Work" status, with no escrow and no transaction protection
source, checked 2026-07-28
Pricing
the app is free and payments happen only inside it: in the Apple store it says «Free · In-App Purchases» under the name, and in the Google store «In-app purchases»
the app listing in the Apple store, with the developer given as Cara Project; the price information is filled in by the developer, but it is Apple that publishes it, not the platform. The platform's own documents (cara.app and blog.cara.app) are closed to us by robots.txt — see the separate line. We therefore have no direct statement by the platform itself that «publishing is free»: we have only the price of the app in the store
source, checked 2026-08-07
Cara Coffee support subscriptions: Happy Supporter - 5 USD a month, Cheering Supporter - 10 USD a month, Mega Supporter - 20 USD a month, Patron of Cara - 50 USD a month; they give a supporter badge and access to a private channel on Discord
There are no separate subscription terms, cancellation or refund procedures in open sources
source, checked 2026-07-28
Restrictions
using the site, the services and user content "for the purpose of promoting or advertising third-party goods and/or services of any kind" is prohibited; the same document prohibits unauthorised harvesting of images without the artist's written permission
The self-promotion rule
source, checked 2026-07-28
the main domain's robots.txt sets the content signals search=yes, ai-train=no, use=reference and separately bars crawling by ClaudeBot, GPTBot, CCBot, Bytespider, Amazonbot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended and meta-externalagent; the blog section's robots.txt bars the same set
We worked within the general rule for user agents
source, checked 2026-07-28
Legal
material from the site may not be copied, reproduced, republished, transmitted or distributed, except for downloading one copy on one computer for personal, non-commercial home use; public and commercial use requires the written permission of both Cara and the artist
source, checked 2026-07-28
the agreement is governed by the law of the State of California; the servers are located in various jurisdictions, including the US, and using the site means consenting to cross-border data transfer; the address for DMCA claims is Cara Project, 522 W Riverside Ave # 5262, Spokane, WA 99201, USA
source, checked 2026-07-28
the terms contain no explicit licensing clause in the platform's favour; instead there is a statement about ownership: the site and all artwork and other user content "are the property of Cara and/or the individual artist who created the individual work"
The "and/or" does not separate the cases; the terms are dated 14 January 2025
source, checked 2026-07-28
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