I have used it mainly for dreambooth, textual inversion and hypernetworks, just using it for stable diffusion. For models i have used the base stable diffusion models, waifu diffusion, dreamshaper, Anything v3 and a few others.
The 0.79 USD is charged only for the time you use it, if you turn off the container you are charged for storage only. So, it is not run 24/7, only when you use it. Also, have you seen the price of those GPUs? That 568$/month is a bargain if the GPU won’t be in continuous use for a period of years.
Another important distinction is that LLMs are a whole different beast, running them even when renting isn’t justifiable unless you have a large number of paying users. For the really good versions of LLM with large number of parameters you need a lot of things than just a good GPU, you need at least 10 of the NVIDIA A100 80GB (Meta’s needs 16 blog.apnic.net/…/large-language-models-the-hardwa…) running for the model to work. This is where the price to pirate and run yourself cannot be justified. It would be cheaper to pay for a closed LLM than to run a pirated instance.
The point about GPU’s is pretty dumb, you can rent a stack of A100 pretty cheaply for a few hours. I have done it a few times now, on runpod it’s 0.79 USD per HR per A100.
On the other hand the freely available models are really great and there hasn’t been a need for the closed source ones for me personally.