Stable Diffusion
Verified Oct 15, 2026 ActiveOpen-weight image models, free to run below $1M revenue
Listed on EffectHub ·
Pricing
- Pricing model
- Freemium
Three unrelated ways to pay. The Community Licence is free for individuals, researchers and businesses under $1M annual revenue and covers the Stable Diffusion 3.5 suite, SDXL Turbo, Stable Audio 3.0 and Stable Fast 3D including LoRAs and fine-tunes; above that line an enterprise licence is quote-only. The hosted API on the developer platform is credit-metered per image, but that page sat behind a bot challenge on 15 October 2026 so no per-image price was confirmed. The pricing URL now redirects to a Brand Studio plans page that returns 404, and Brand Studio is pitched only as contact-only enterprise work.
Use tool ↗About Stable Diffusion
Stable Diffusion names a lineage of openly licensed image-synthesis models whose published checkpoints seeded most of the local generation ecosystem: the fine-tunes, LoRAs and interfaces that run on a consumer GPU without a vendor in the loop. Stability AI still publishes the weights under a Community Licence that is free below $1M in annual revenue, sells hosted access through its developer platform and Amazon Bedrock, and licenses custom image, video, audio and 3D models to enterprises. Since a Series B in August 2026 led by the major music labels and Electronic Arts, the company's public attention has shifted toward audio and enterprise custom-model work; the old public plan pages for its Brand Studio app have been taken down.
- API
- Yes
- Last verified
- Oct 15, 2026
Verified sources
- Community Licence free for researchers, developers, small businesses and creators under $1M annual revenue, covering Stable Audio 3.0, the Stable Diffusion 3.5 suite, SDXL Turbo and Stable Fast 3D; LoRAs and fine-tunes are not foundational models; enterprise licence at custom pricing above $1M (15 October 2026)stability.ai ↗
- stability.ai/pricing returns a 301 to /brand-studio-plans, which returns HTTP 404; no public plan table is reachable (15 October 2026)stability.ai ↗
- Terms effective 30 September 2026 name Stability AI Ltd, incorporated in England and Wales at 9 Pembridge Road, London, for UK/EU customers and Stability AI US Services Corporation, Delaware, for the rest, under California law (15 October 2026)stability.ai ↗
- Company page: Stable Diffusion announced August 2022; CEO Prem Akkaraju since June 2024; backed by Electronic Arts, Sony Music Group, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group (15 October 2026)stability.ai ↗
- Series B of $76M announced 25 August 2026, total funding $232M, new investors including EA, the three major labels and AMD Ventures, existing investors including WPP (15 October 2026)stability.ai ↗
- Home page routes API buyers to platform.stability.ai and cites customers running Stable Diffusion in Amazon Bedrock; the developer platform pricing page answered with a Cloudflare challenge to fetches (15 October 2026)stability.ai ↗
Is Stable Diffusion legit?
We don’t label tools safe or unsafe. Below are the records we checked ourselves, each with the date we read it.
- Domain registered
- Nov 6, 2019 (6 years ago)Registry record (RDAP), registrar CSC Corporate Domains, Inc., looked up Sep 6, 2026
- TLS certificate
- Issued by Let's Encrypt, valid until Dec 8, 2026Seen in our own connection to the site on Oct 15, 2026
- Last checked
- Oct 15, 2026The site answered
- On the market since
- 2022The vendor's own material, read by us
- Operated by
- Stability AI Ltd, United KingdomOur research, card verified Oct 15, 2026
Pros & cons of Stable Diffusion
The reason a local generation ecosystem exists at all, and still the right answer when you need weights on your own hardware with no per-image meter. Just be clear about what you are adopting: the models are open, the licence is not unconditional, and Stability's own commercial attention has moved to enterprise custom models and audio, with the public plan pages for its hosted apps now gone.
Pros
- Weights genuinely run locally, so cost per image after hardware is electricity
- The community licence explicitly permits derivative LoRAs and fine-tunes
- An enormous body of community checkpoints, tooling and interfaces exists around these models
- Hosted access exists through the developer platform and Amazon Bedrock for teams without a GPU
Cons
- The $1M revenue threshold turns a free licence into a quote-only negotiation with no public price
- The pricing URL redirects to a Brand Studio plans page that now returns 404; no public plan table remains
- Hosted API prices sit behind a bot challenge on the developer platform, so budgeting needs a signed-in account
- Running locally means owning the GPU, the updates and the safety tooling yourself
Best for
- Developers and studios that need generation on their own infrastructure with no per-call cost
- Anyone fine-tuning or training LoRAs on a specific style, product or character
- Privacy-sensitive or offline workloads where images cannot leave the building
Not for
- Companies over $1M in annual revenue that assumed open weights meant free commercial use
- Teams wanting the strongest available prompt adherence without evaluation work
Watch out: The Community Licence is free only below $1M in annual revenue, and that ceiling applies to the organisation, not the project. Cross it and even a self-hosted fine-tune you trained yourself needs an enterprise licence at a price Stability will not publish — a compliance question worth settling before the models are embedded in a product.
Alternatives to Stable Diffusion
Stable Diffusion head-to-head
Side-by-side fact sheets against the competitors our research or their makers name — pricing, platforms, API and both verdicts on one page.
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