Stable Diffusion
Open-weight image models you can run, fine-tune and ship on your own hardware
Overview
Stable Diffusion is Stability AI's family of open-weight text-to-image models, first released in August 2022; the current flagship is Stable Diffusion 3.5 (October 2024) in Large, Large Turbo and Medium versions. The weights can be self-hosted free under the Stability AI Community License below US$1 million in annual revenue, and the models are also sold through Stability's credit-based developer API.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 14 Oct 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
- Research, non-commercial and commercial use
- Covers the SD 3.5 suite and SDXL Turbo
- Registration required for commercial use
- SD 3.5 Large 6.5 credits, Large Turbo 4, Medium 3.5, Flash 2.5
- Stable Image Core 3 credits, Ultra 8
- Edit, upscale and control services
- Commercial use
- Implementation support
- Optional custom model training and consulting
Use cases
What you can produce with Stable Diffusion
- Text-to-image generation on your own GPU with SD 3.5 Large, Large Turbo or Medium
- Fine-tuned checkpoints and LoRAs trained on your own style or product images
- Hosted image generation through Stability's API, from 2.5 credits per SD 3.5 Flash image
- Inpainting, outpainting, object erasure and background replacement via the edit API
- Upscaling to 4K with the Creative, Conservative or Fast upscalers
- Image generation guided by sketches, structure or style references
Stable Diffusion is still the image family to pick when you need to run, fine-tune and control the model yourself: SDXL and SD 3.5 run on your own GPUs, the API is cheap per image, and the licence is free for most individuals and small businesses. Check which licence your version carries, because SD 3.5 needs registration for commercial use and an Enterprise deal once revenue passes US$1 million.
The caution is momentum. No new image family has appeared since October 2024, DreamStudio is gone, and Stability's energy has moved to audio, Brand Studio and entertainment partnerships, with copyright cases still open in the UK and US. A sound foundation for technical teams, not a beginner's first image tool.
What we found
Stable Diffusion is Stability AI's family of open-weight text-to-image models. The first public release, in August 2022, grew out of work with the CompVis group at LMU Munich and Runway, and it mattered because it ran on a consumer graphics card rather than only in someone else's cloud. SDXL followed in July 2023, and Stable Diffusion 3.5 arrived in October 2024 in three versions: Large at 8 billion parameters, Large Turbo for four-step generation, and Medium, sized for consumer hardware. Stability's image page still calls 3.5 its most powerful image model, and no newer image family has been released.
Licensing depends on the version. SD 3.5 is downloaded from Hugging Face under the Stability AI Community License, which is free for research, non-commercial use and commercial use by people or organisations with under US$1 million in annual revenue; commercial users must register, and larger ones need an Enterprise licence. SDXL base and SD 1.x carry the more permissive OpenRAIL licences. The hosted route is the developer API, priced in credits at one cent each: 6.5 credits per SD 3.5 Large image, 3.5 for Medium and 2.5 for the newer Flash variant, with 25 free credits to start. DreamStudio, the old consumer app, now redirects to Brand Studio, a login-only platform for enterprise creative teams.
The company has changed more than the model. Under chief executive Prem Akkaraju, appointed in June 2024, Stability has steered towards entertainment and enterprise work: partnerships with EA, Universal Music and Warner Music, Stable Audio 3.0 in May 2026, and a $76 million Series B in August 2026 that it says takes total funding to $232 million. The legal questions are not settled. In November 2025 the English High Court rejected Getty Images' secondary copyright claim while finding limited trademark infringement, and Getty has permission to appeal; in California, cases brought by Getty and by a group of artists are still pending.
Compiled by RECATOOLS from public sources: vendor documentation and pricing, code repositories and published reporting.
Notable facts
- Stable Diffusion's initial weights were released to the public within 48 hours of its announcement — a deliberate choice to maximise adoption over revenue.
- The model was trained on LAION-5B, a dataset of 5.85 billion image-text pairs scraped from the internet — the largest openly documented training set at the time.
- Within 6 months of release, the Stable Diffusion community had created over 40,000 custom fine-tuned models on Hugging Face and Civitai.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Stable Diffusion's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Stable Diffusion unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
For the latest details, please refer to Stable Diffusion directly →
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