Yeah, I defintely agree with that haha. I'm new at this and haven't even run my own SD or any open source model on my own hardware yet. I'm sure it's not that hard, but I don't think my CPU-rated Linode is up to the task. Haven't looked into renting a cloud machine that can do it quickly but I'm sure it exists. I absolutely want to move the LLM away from OpenAI GPT and the image generated away from DALL-E. But for right now this was the fastest way I could get the idea online, so APIs it is.
But I'm 100% on board with the open source models and I definitely want to get that going. Yeah the DALL-E 3 images are 4 cents per image! Phewph!