[lumenwrites]

Great project!

I have a question - how can you afford to run this? I looked at the server costs on google compute and runpod.io, and the ones with GPUs powerful enough to run SD are pretty expensive. I'm guessing you don't have a lot of paying users at the beginning, so I don't think you have enough revenue to cover the costs (at least when you're just getting started).

Do you just spend a lot of money to fund this, and hope that once you have enough users it will pay for itself? Or did you find some affordable way to run a server? If yes, and if it's not a secret - where are you renting the server, what are its specs, and how much does it cost?

[synapticpaint]

On AWS, a g5 instance costs $1/hr. I can generate roughly 10 images per minute (should be able to get this down with some optimization), so 600 images per hour, so the cost per image is 1/6 of a cent, before adding overhead (idle time, start up/shut down).

Source: I run a similar project: https://synapticpaint.com/

I also offer dreambooth model training for around $2-$4 / model as well as inference on custom dreambooth models. Inference on custom models is where things get a little tricky because if users are using different models and you're loading up new models all the time just to generate 6 images, then that quickly becomes the majority of the work load, drastically pushing up the inference cost. I haven't solved this problem yet. If you have any great ideas, feel free to email me (email in profile)!

[jkbl]

At the beginning it was just burning money, but it stars to turn into profit.

The only secret to making it affordable is to autoscale based on a current image generation traffic. It runs on a mix of Tesla V100 and RTX 3090 from runpod.io vast.ai and Lambda Labs.

I actually went through a couple of iterations with it, starting as completely free service, then offering one time payments for image credits and now settled on subscriptions as I see there is a demand for the product. Especially AI Editor[1] which I think offers a unique value to the users.

[1] https://getimg.ai/editor

[lumenwrites]

That's amazing, thank you for sharing!

If not a secret, how are you marketing it?

[jkbl]

I try to be everywhere, when I have free time from adding new features ;)

[nacs]

Stable diffusion only needs 4GB of VRAM to run on the low end so you can rent low-end consumer GPUs (nvidia RTX for example) for around $0.10 an hour to do the renders.

[jkbl]

Yeah, but that's only true when you use one model for yourself. More VRAM is needed for running such a service. It currently loads 6 models per single GPU. And I think I have some VRAM left to add even more.

[UncleEntity]

I was running it for free on google colab here and there with no problems.

Haven’t tried the 2.0 out yet so not sure how that’s going.

[raymond_goo]

https://vast.ai/ (not affiliated)

[permanent]

I'd love to know this as well.