Stable Diffusion XL.
Workhorse open-weight image-gen — 3.5B params, runs anywhere.
1× Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 · $0.025/hr.
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 | — | — | |
| fal.ai | hosted inference | — | — |
Variants in the Stable Diffusion family.
Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium
2.5B SD 3.5 — fits on 12 GB consumer GPUs.
Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large
Stability AI's latest open-weight image-gen — 8.1B params, MMDiT architecture.
Stable Diffusion 1.5
The original viral image-gen model — still searched heavily.
Frequently asked.
How do I run Stable Diffusion XL?
Where can I access Stable Diffusion XL?
How much does it cost to run Stable Diffusion XL?
Is Stable Diffusion XL 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)
|
10 GB | $0.025/hr | — | Compare → |
What it costs per month across providers.
Estimate your monthly bill for Stable Diffusion XL 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 XL yet.
Rent the GPU instead of paying per token.
For an open-weights model like Stable Diffusion XL, 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 XL.
SDXL 1.0 is the previous-generation Stable Diffusion (released July 2023) — 3.5B parameter U-Net architecture. Mostly superseded by SD 3.5 + FLUX for quality, but remains the most-deployed image-gen model in the world because every major fine-tune ecosystem (LoRAs, ControlNets, IP-Adapters) was built around it.