How to run Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 (SDXL) locally

Stability AI · Text → image · 3.5B params · CreativeML OpenRAIL++-M (commercial OK)

The 3.5B base model that defined the modern open image-gen era and still anchors the largest fine-tune/LoRA ecosystem on consumer hardware.

What it costs to run — $0 markup

On your own machine — $0. Runs free if you have about 8.0 GB of VRAM (~8GB at fp16; runs comfortably on consumer GPUs), via ComfyUI / Diffusers / Automatic1111.
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-xl-base-1.0.

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	~8.0 GB (~8GB at fp16; runs comfortably on consumer GPUs)
Download	~6.9 GB
Parameters	3.5B
License	CreativeML OpenRAIL++-M (commercial use OK)
Run with	ComfyUI / Diffusers / Automatic1111

Get Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 (SDXL) on Hugging Face →

More image models

FLUX.1 [dev] — Text → image, ~12 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
Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large — Text → image, ~12 GB VRAM

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