It's not free for you.

Energy, partial hardware cost, setup time, fine-tuning time.

That's good for you but not 99.99% of the population

I honestly don't think that only 1 in every 10000 people own a modern-ish gaming-capable PC (and that's what's required to run SD as of now). Point being, the fact that you can already run these models on off-the-shelf consumer hardware is very promising, and as time goes on, more and more new hardware will be capable of running this.

I assume that they actually use the hardware /GPU they have and might not be able to run SD next to it constantly without upgrading.

But someone needs to make this possible and maintain such a solution which would cost also money.either you pay adobe what you already do or pay someone else who maintains the model, the infrastructure etc.

Sure some will run it themselves but my guess is that this is a niche group of people as most don't care .

OP will have been exaggerating with 99.99%, but I suspect 90% of people don't have a PC with something equivalent to a 3080.

And designing your software to a minimum-spec of a 3080 would be pretty wild.

But a 3080 is by no means a minimum requirement - not even close. A 3080 will give you a very comfortable experience, sure, but so will a midrange card from the same generation. And people have been squeezing SD on way less powerful hardware - even most cards from the GTX 10 series (that came out in 2016) can be made to run it, although some sacrifices have to be made below 6GB of VRAM.

even consumer GPUs have massive generational speedup. In the mid term, cloud will be hard pressed unless Nvidia aims at depressing consumers (leaving themselves open to attacks from everyone else on that market segment)

yes, but they could just simply add more and more memory to consumer and cloud versions of cards. So, nvidia is safe. More memory, bigger models.

memory is the non linear lever Nvidia uses to charge more for non gaming card.

People using Adobe products tend to have better hardware than the average

I also have a 3080, and there’s no way SD is faster. The best comparison as far as resolution is SDXL and in the time it takes me to generate one image at a reasonable amount of steps Adobe generates 3 options.

This is referring to the Photoshop stuff, which is way better than any type of SD inpainting for removing things from images. Firefly might be slower? I haven’t used it since it first came out.

I agree for just general image generation SD or Midjourney are better options in their own way.

SDXL, 3090, 22its/s 4090, 34its/s

xformers, 1024x1024x diffuser pipeline.

I kind of doubt those numbers, considering my 12GB 3080 gets something like 3 it/s in ComfyUI - though I suppose that's usually with a LoRA. Even if they're accurate, very few people have a 3090/4090. Keep in mind the Photoshop version would have something akin to Controlnet going on as well, which would slow things down.