How to run Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium locally

Stability AI · Text → image · 2.5B params · Stability AI Community License (commercial OK)

The lightweight 2.5B SD3.5 variant tuned to run on modest consumer GPUs while keeping commercial use free under the $1M revenue threshold.

What it costs to run — $0 markup

On your own machine — $0. Runs free if you have about 6.0 GB of VRAM (~6GB; designed to run on consumer GPUs), via ComfyUI / Diffusers.
Rent a GPU — from $0.26/hr. Fits RTX 3090 24GB at the direct vendor price ($0 markup) — pay only for the minutes you generate.
Download the weights — free. Open weights at stabilityai/stable-diffusion-3.5-medium.

Note: generative-media models are billed per image / per second / per minute on hosted services — not per token. Running locally or on your own rented GPU is usually far cheaper and keeps your data on your machine.

Key facts

Does	Text → image
VRAM to run	~6.0 GB (~6GB; designed to run on consumer GPUs)
Download	~5 GB
Parameters	2.5B
License	Stability AI Community License (commercial use OK)
Run with	ComfyUI / Diffusers

Get Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium on Hugging Face →

More image models

FLUX.1 [dev] — Text → image, ~12 GB VRAM
Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 (SDXL) — Text → image, ~8.0 GB VRAM
Stable Diffusion 1.5 — Text → image, ~4.0 GB VRAM
FLUX.1 Kontext [dev] — Image editing, ~12 GB VRAM
FLUX.1 [schnell] — Text → image, ~12 GB VRAM
Qwen-Image — Text → image, ~24 GB VRAM

Browse: all media models · chat / LLM models