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How much does an image cost you?

I don't quite understand why some image generators are free and others charge credits, assuming the non-free ones aren't just goldrushing.

Is it just free until oops it gets too popular?

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I run a custom Stable Diffusion bot for a small community that has generated many tens of thousands of images. The community wanted to know what it was costing me, so I dug into it a bit and have a fairly "literal" answer to that question (generally). With the RTX3060 I'm running it on, using a kill-a-wat, I very roughly calculated that generating a 512x640 image consumed ~ +170 watts for about 6 seconds (on top of the baseline power consumption of the PC when idle). This comes out to a little over 1,000 Watt-seconds or 0.000295 kWh per image. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to look up their current cost per kWh and work out what that comes out to. This is extremely, extremely rough, but helped me wrap my head around the amount of energy we were using to generate all these images and roughly how much of my power bill I had to thank my friends for, haha.

Of course running on rented/hosted GPU's, it's a simpler, but much more expensive story — basically however much you're paying for GPU instances to run Stable Diffusion divided by how many images you generate. :)

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