Stable Diffusion 1.5.
The original viral image-gen model — still searched heavily.
1× Nvidia Titan V.
Most-aggressive quantisation we have a working recommendation for. Lower precision = less VRAM = cheaper hardware, at a small accuracy cost.
Cheapest hosted endpoints.
| Provider | Access | $/M in | $/M out | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Replicate | hosted inference | — | — |
Variants in the Stable Diffusion family.
Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large
Stability AI's latest open-weight image-gen — 8.1B params, MMDiT architecture.
Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium
2.5B SD 3.5 — fits on 12 GB consumer GPUs.
Stable Diffusion XL
Workhorse open-weight image-gen — 3.5B params, runs anywhere.
Frequently asked.
How do I run Stable Diffusion 1.5?
Where can I access Stable Diffusion 1.5?
How much does it cost to run Stable Diffusion 1.5?
Is Stable Diffusion 1.5 open-source or proprietary?
Cheapest hardware per quantisation.
Each row is one quantisation tier (the same weights compressed differently). Lower precision → lower VRAM → cheaper hardware, at the cost of small accuracy loss. $/hr refreshed hourly from each provider's API.
| Quantisation | Cheapest GPU config | Total VRAM | Live $/hr | tokens/sec | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
FP16
FP16 — half precision (default)
|
3 GB | — | — | Compare → | |
|
FP8
FP8 — 8-bit float (Hopper / Blackwell)
|
3 GB | — | — | Compare → | |
|
INT4
INT4 — 4-bit integer (~4× VRAM saving)
|
3 GB | — | — | Compare → |
What it costs per month across providers.
Estimate your monthly bill for Stable Diffusion 1.5 across every host that publishes per-token pricing. Slide your token volumes; the chart + table re-rank cheapest-first.
No priced API access rows on file for Stable Diffusion 1.5 yet.
Rent the GPU instead of paying per token.
For an open-weights model like Stable Diffusion 1.5, you can rent a GPU and serve inference yourself. The math: cheapest GPU rental × 730 hours/month + your electricity rate × power draw.
Assumes the GPU runs 24/7 at ~85% utilisation. If your traffic is bursty, you'll pay less for the API and probably more for the GPU (idle hours still cost rental). The breakeven analysis lives on the Self-host vs API breakeven tool.
About Stable Diffusion 1.5.
Stable Diffusion 1.5 is the model that started consumer AI image-gen in 2022. 860M parameters, runs on any GPU with ≥4 GB VRAM. Largely superseded by SDXL / SD 3.5 / FLUX, but retained here because the search volume is still enormous and many tutorials reference v1.5 specifically.