We've all been waiting for an announcement about DALL-E 2 pricing since it was opened up in beta in April this year. DALL-E is an incredible model to produce images and it seems to do a better job of producing human realistic images than that of Stable Diffusion in its current form. The frustrating issue with DALL-E is that it has only been available via the OpenAI website, first for beta users and then slowly for everyone else. If you haven't tried it, click here to signup today.
Since DALL-E launched, one of the most common questions in the developer community has been, "when API?" or equivalent. OpenAI has been pretty quiet on this front saying that it will come but hasn't been released yet. They have struck deals with Microsoft and Shutterstock and given access to a select few Silicon Valley startups to use the tool prior to the public release.
Now, it seems that these early users are scrambling to tell their audience that the good times are over and that DALL-E is no longer free to use! This leads to the main topic of this article, what do we know about DALL-E 2 API pricing and rollout?
The free preview of the OpenAI API by select companies is coming to an end so if you are involved in any of these products or have access, consider trying to get as much value from their DALL-E offerings as possible before the 1st of November. After this date, there will be a charge.
The charge will come into effect as stated in this Discord message from 1st November so we're expecting OpenAI to make a wider announcement about the rollout of DALL-E on this date or before as we expect it to be publicly released. This will be great for developers to be able to build on top of the technology. You may be wondering now, what about the pricing?
From what we've gathered from Discord, each of the 1024x1024 images will cost $0.02. You can also use the API to create 512x512 images and these cost a bit less, we're unclear on the actual pricing of the 512x512 at this time but will update as we find out.
What is clear, is that the API pricing is slightly cheaper by about a third than purchasing on OpenAI's website to use their UX. Will OpenAI drop its pricing on its website? I would bet they probably will in due course.
We're excited when DALL-E is released to the general public to use via API and we've got some ideas on what to build with it. Compared to the Stable Diffusion DreamStudio offering, it is competitive, but once you factor in self-hosting Stable Diffusion and offering it via your own GPU or cloud GPUs then it becomes more expensive by a considerable factor.
OpenAI has been known to have quite strict going-live procedures for companies that want to implement their technology. The process for GPT-3 apps is long and cumbersome. You are also required to put the OpenAI filter on your text generative product to get it approved. We think the same process with a filter will apply or it is something they have already built into their endpoint.
Getting access to a version of DALL-E without a filter will be impossible and some of the safety filters can be a little overbearing at times.
DALL-E and OpenAI have a large audience and making more people aware of AI technology and the use cases and benefits it can bring to society is only a good thing, so we're excited to see how this release affects the AI space also you can bet we're excited to implement a DALL-E integration into Riku.
If you've enjoyed this article and are interested in the one place online which aggregates all of the best text and image AI for you to learn, experiment and deploy with or without code, consider checking out Riku today!
