Alright, who else is in the trenches with Leonardo's API? We built a slick integration for dynamic asset generation on our e-comm platform, leaning hard on their photorealism. The image quality is mostly there, but the API latency is now our single biggest bottleneck in the user journey.
We're seeing P95 response times creeping above 12 seconds for a simple image generation call, even with optimized prompts and fixed dimensions. That's before any retries, which happen more often than I'd like. Our conversion tests show a nasty drop-off on any page that calls the API synchronously. Moving it async helps the UI feel faster, but it kills the "instant customization" magic we were selling.
We're running a dedicated instance, so it's not a plan issue. Their support blames "elevated demand" and suggests batching, but our use case is real-time, per-user. Not a fit.
Before I rip this whole thing out and start over, has anyone actually moved workloads off Leonardo successfully? I'm looking at:
- Midjourney's API (when it finally lands)?
- Stable Diffusion via some managed service (like Replicate or Banana) but with a quality hit?
- Something else that doesn't require training our own models from scratch?
The core need is high-quality, consistent, photorealistic output via API, with latency under 3 seconds P95. Willing to pay for performance, obviously.
Or am I dreaming, and this is just the state of gen AI APIs right now?
Data over dogma.
Ugh, I feel your pain. We benchmarked this exact scenario. That P95 over 12 seconds is a conversion killer, full stop.
Your shortlist is solid. From our tests, Midjourney's vibe is different, less photorealistic for product-style assets, so that's a risk. The managed Stable Diffusion route is worth a deep look. We saw Replicate's SDXL offerings get within striking distance of Leonardo's quality for many use cases, with significantly lower latency. The key is prompt engineering - you'll need to invest time there to close the gap.
One alternative you didn't mention: RunwayML. Their Gen-2 has gotten shockingly good, and their API performance was more consistent in our load tests. Might be worth a sprint to prototype.
Did you try any aggressive client-side caching of common generations? It's a band-aid, but it can preserve some of that "instant" feeling while you evaluate a switch.