[GusRuss89]

Yep, NightCafe has struggled for years with the expense of running algorithms on GPUs. It started out free, but as soon as you start to get any kind of volume, costs balloon.

I almost gave up on NightCafe when I was trying to make money from selling prints to people. Then, one user generated 3,000 creations in a week, which cost him nothing and me $300. I decided to spend the weekend implementing a credit system to prevent abuse, and was surprised to find that more people were willing to pay for credits than I expected.

It's still not much and I've had to spend a lot of effort on reducing costs in various ways just to be able to break even. But I love working on this app and have high hopes that _one day_ it will become profitable enough for me to work on it full time.

[wyldfire]

Interesting. I suppose if it takes minutes on a GPU, it might take ages to generate one on a mobile ML/NN chip? If it were able to be optimized to somewhat-less-than-ages, it would be a different business model w/o the need to manage credits and worry about abuse.

[GusRuss89]

Yeah it would, but aside from the cost there are other benefits to cloud computation. It can be done in the background (i.e. it's ok to close your tab) and you can run multiple at once.

Style transfer on NightCafe has a bulk-create mode that has been used in the past to create 500+ creations at once and they all finished in 10 mins.

[pathsjs]

Is the option to buy prints still there? Some services offer the possibility to buy prints on canvas tied on a wooden frame, possibly manually retouched, which look much like an actual picture you can hang in your living room

[GusRuss89]

Yeah you can still buy prints but they're not manually retouched. You'll get product mockups and a buy option for your first 5 creations.