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?
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).
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)!
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.
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.
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.
It's a measure to prevent multi accounts. Some people really overuse free offering. Either your domain/IP is on a spam list or your email server may be misconfigured.
People did that a lot to get new free accounts from disposable email services (You can generate 100 images/mo for free). Around 15% of signups were disposable email multi accounts (40% of email signups).
I use email verification API for this. It states to make decisions based on public email blacklists and lists of disposable emails. Cleary it's not perfect
Came here to point out that my personal email is wrongfully listed as a disposable email address. It must be that it's a three letter url with a .nl TLD.
Saying that it requires login before someone spends time to think up a description for an image would have been nice (because I won't sign-in to try something anyways).
Edit: rephrased to remove overly negative language.
I don't see this as baiting. The link to a tool page was shared. It's transparent on the homepage and in the header. The text to image page just shows how it works without the need to create an account.
No, it's definitely a dark pattern. Everything about the page suggests that pressing the "generate 4 images" button will generate four images. And then it doesn't and tries to lever that anticipation to get a sign-in. It ends up just making users angry.
If you need a sign-in, e.g. to prevent abuse, you could start by explaining that a sign-in is required and why. At least then people won't be angry when they are ambushed by it
Ok, agree about that. Just did not have time to polish the details. It's not intentional. I've added login to the site, after nearly going bankrupt for offering free generations. The UI needs an update.
It's absolutely not transparent. Showing an active "start process" button that leads to a sign up / login form isntead of starting the process is absolutely not what users want or expect.
FWIW, you're not the only one. On our product, we experimented adding login when the user tries to use any of our tools and something like ~60-70% of users dropped off. So essentially, whoever implements that is killing their user funnel at the very beginning which I'm guessing will have larger effects down the road (fewer users experience "magical moments" which leads to less word-of-mouth, etc).
On the flip side though, I'm sure it may help metrics in the short term especially since it's expensive to offer a service like this (which requires expensive GPU servers).
I can't wait for the morally concerned to rail against Stable diffusion once they find the /b/ threads and AI is going to get locked down... Its going to happen. "This AI tool enables sick PREDATORS!!"
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?