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Comment by slig | Hacker News Reader

Congrats, I'm going to sign up and try. Where are you renting the GPUs from?

Thank you! I'm renting from banana.dev, which poses an interesting technical challenge:

Image generation takes 5 sec, but loading the model takes 120 sec. There's some time you can keep the model "alive" for, to wait for another image generation request, but if I have too few users, it means everyone gets image generation times of 120 sec and I pay for 120 sec per image, which is a lot.

With enough users, though, I can always keep the model up, and everyone gets 5 sec generation times and the economics for this make sense. Hopefully if this picks up steam I'll be able to rent a dedicated server to generate things on, but it's just a sideproject for now.

At least I hope it will be useful/fun to some people.

Thanks for the explanation! If I may offer a suggestion, the GTA 5 Poster prompt that was on /r/stablediffusion recently was really good.

Would you happen to have a link? I'd love to add it.

EDIT: Added, good shout, thanks!

Great, just tried!

Uh oh this seems way too expensive ? It seems to cost like $22 per day if the GPU runs all the time!

Yeah, GPUs are quite expensive, unfortunately.

Would it make sense for you to query whether the model is up and idling and if so show a demo widget on landing, both making it possible for potential customers to try (if they are lucky to have landed at the right time) and keeping the model alive?

Yes but it's bad UX if people can't see their prompts right away, basically :/ So they're just likely to bounce.

A few days ago I was generating images using my home desktop, and had a Web push notification notifying people when it was on. That was much cheaper, but very bad UX, as it could be hours before you got your image (and you were long gone by then).

With a marketing hat on I can see a flow where you (still only if the model is already up and not busy) ask for an email in the "try" prompt, both using it to send the results subsequently and offering an option to subscribe to a newsletter (thus generating new leads).

However, I can see why you might choose not to bother with that and find another way to keep the model alive without the try prompt.

Edit: didn't you mention it takes 5 sec if model is alive?

Ah yeah, that's a good idea for when the model is very async, thank you! I'll keep that in mind.

How'd you compare banana.dev to inferrd and paperspace which seem more affordable at a glance?

I don't really have much experience with the ML/Torch side of things, so Banana was simpler to get started with. I'd like to switch to something cheaper, but I couldn't get Paperspace set up.

Also, Inferrd doesn't really look cheaper, a 16GB GPU is $600/mo, which is about the same as Banana, except Banana doesn't bill for the time the model isn't working.

For my needs, with the few images I need to generate, the difference is between paying $50/mo (admittedly, with worse UX for my customers) and paying $600/mo for a card that's mostly sitting idle.

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