Stability AI's Developer Platform API provides hosted inference (text-to-image, image-to-image, upscaling, inpainting) without requiring your own GPU infrastructure, which is the practical alternative to self-hosting for teams that don't want to manage inference infrastructure themselves.
For self-hosted deployments, inference typically runs through open-source community tools (like the Diffusers library, ComfyUI, or Automatic1111) built around the open-weight models rather than a proprietary Stability-branded runtime, since Stability AI's open-weight approach means the broader ecosystem, not just Stability itself, builds the deployment tooling.
- The hosted Developer Platform API provides inference without requiring your own GPU infrastructure
- Self-hosted inference typically runs through open-source community tools, not a proprietary Stability runtime
- The open-weight ecosystem means community tools, not just Stability AI, build deployment tooling
- Choose hosted API vs. self-hosted deployment based on infrastructure management tradeoffs
Use cases
Intro to runtime usage with Stability AI emphasis
- Deploy fast image generation with Stability AI runtime
- Run multimodal tasks at scale using Stability AI
- Profile latency and optimize with Stability AI tooling
- Enforce access controls during inference using Stability AI
- Audit runtimes for compliance via Stability AI