Stability AI announces paid membership for commercial use of its models

Stability AI, the maker of the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, is now offering a subscription service that standardizes and changes how customers can use its models for commercial purposes.  

The company said the membership “redefines” how it grants commercial rights to users, aiming to strike a balance between profitability and openness. Stability AI’s membership offers three tiers: a free one for personal and research use; a $20 per month subscription for “creators, developers and startups with less than $1 million in annual revenue, $1 million in institutional funding, and one million active users”; and an enterprise plan. All three offer early access to new AI models, but only members of the two paid tiers are allowed to use them commercially.

“As our company continues to mature and scale, the Stability AI Membership will play a pivotal role in funding our future research and development of core models,” the company said in a blog post. The Verge reached out to Stability AI for further details, including how it previously dealt with commercial use.

Stability has so far been distinguished by its openness. And Stability CEO Emad Mostaque told Venture Beat the company remains committed to releasing “open models” with code and weights that anyone can access. He compared this announcement to Meta’s release of Llama 2, which is billed as open source because it’s available on different platforms for free but also doesn’t meet all the requirements of the Open Source Initiative’s open source definition.

But posters on the Stable Diffusion subreddit expressed confusion about what commercial use entails — including whether it applies only to people using the models to produce their own generative AI services, or if anyone who uses Stable Diffusion-generated images commercially will have to pay a fee. This is complicated by the fact that AI-generated work so far has been denied copyright protection, making its value less certain.

Mostaque acknowledged on X, previously Twitter, that the company “is still figuring out pricing to keep it simple.”

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Stability AI already makes users pay for some of its models. It announced a pricing structure for access to Stable Audio, it’s text-to-audio AI model, in September.

Other AI companies also offer paid tiers to access more features. OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus lets people use the more advanced GPT-4 model and faster response times.