Stable Diffusion is Stability AI's family of image models, offered as downloadable weights for self-hosting and through a pay-per-credit cloud API.
✓ Pros
- Weights can be downloaded and run locally, keeping prompts and images on your own machines
- Free commercial use of the weights for organisations under $1M annual revenue
- Open weights can be fine-tuned on your own images and used with community front-ends
- The API lists a fixed credit price per endpoint, so the cost of each call is known in advance
✗ Cons
- Self-hosting needs a capable GPU and the skills to install and maintain the stack
- Organisations above $1M annual revenue need a separate paid Enterprise License
- When self-hosting, content filtering is entirely the operator's responsibility
- The API's free allowance is only 25 credits, so a real evaluation needs paid credits
| Free tier | ✓ Free tier |
| Pricing model | self-host+cloud |
| Price (API（SD 3.5 Flash）) | $0.025/枚 USD |
| Features | |
| API | ✓ Available Docs ↗ |
| Pricing Plans | セルフホスト$0Community License。年商100万ドル未満なら商用利用可 API 従量$0.025〜/枚前払いクレジット（1クレジット=$0.01、初回25クレジット無料）。SD 3.5 Flash $0.025、Stable Image Core $0.03、SD 3.5 Large $0.065、Ultra $0.08 |
| Platforms | |
| Integrations | ComfyUI, AUTOMATIC1111, Invoke AI, Stability AI API, Replicate, AWS SageMaker |
| Homepage | https://stability.ai |
Overview
Stable Diffusion fits teams that need to run image generation on their own hardware or fine-tune models on their own data. The weights are free to use commercially under the Stability AI Community License for individuals and organisations below $1M in annual revenue; above that, an Enterprise License is required. Without GPUs, the hosted API charges per call in credits (1 credit = $0.01), with Ultra the most expensive image endpoint. Self-hosting puts setup, safety filtering and model upgrades on the user, which is the main reason to choose the hosted API or a managed service instead.
