Why make generations cost buzz?
A few reasons, but mostly because it costs a lot of money to support the generation of millions of images each day. We're very grateful the site has become so popular and continues to see more users every day, but serving that many people comes with a cost, and value needs to be added to offset that. We had considered just continuing to lower the generation limits but that would be a temporary fix, requiring more and more cutbacks over time. This way we can remove all generation limits, but in exchange for community content or revenue to keep the site running.
How can I generate now without buying buzz?
We wanted to have an option for free users to continue to use the generator. To that end, all users get free buzz every 24 hours, just for logging in and opening the generator. Additionally, we have tons of ways (and more coming) for users to earn Buzz daily by reacting to images, posting content, having people like and collect your posts, and engaging with other's content.
How much Buzz does it cost to generate?
Buzz costs vary based on how complex the generation request is, specifically, the base model, the resolution, and the number of steps. On average, an SD1.5 image will cost ⚡1-2 and an SDXL image will cost ⚡4-6. We've also added a new "Draft Mode" to the generator that utilizes SDXL Lightning and LCM so you can test your generations more quickly and at half the price. The trade-off is that the outputs are slightly lower quality.
How does this improve the site?
Since Buzz can be earned by engaging in various activities on-site, you should expect to see more engagement with your posted images and models. Additionally, we should be able to add much requested features like adetailer, hires fix, regional prompting, and img2img that were just too expensive to add previously. With Generations having more value and buzz incentives for engagement, higher quality images are encouraged to be posted over sheer quantity.
Everything we do at Civitai is about creating a sustainable future for open-source AI. We appreciate your support and feedback.