Replicate

The usual way to add AI image or video generation to a product is to sign up with each model vendor separately: an OpenAI key for gpt-image-2, a Google account for Imagen, a Black Forest Labs account for FLUX. The other option is renting GPUs and hosting open-source weights yourself. Replicate's pitch is that you shouldn't have to do either. It puts thousands of models behind one API at replicate.com, and the homepage code sample is short. You install the replicate package for Node or Python (or use plain HTTP), pass your REPLICATE_API_TOKEN, and call replicate.com with a model name and an input object.

The catalog is the main reason to use it. The homepage lists official models from OpenAI (gpt-image-2, with 31.4M runs), Google (nano-banana-2, imagen-4-ultra), Black Forest Labs (flux-2-max, and flux-2-flex with support for ten reference images), ByteDance (seedream-5-lite, and seedance-2.5 with native audio and 30-second generation), Alibaba's Wan 3.0 and Pruna's p-video-2-pro. Community models from contributors like stability-ai, meta and lucataco sit alongside them. Replicate says these aren't just demos and that they "all actually work and have production-ready APIs." You can also fine-tune models or push your own custom model. Switching from one model to another means changing a string, not building a new integration.

The tradeoff is billing. You only pay for what you use, but some models charge by hardware time per second and others charge per output, so your costs depend on which model you pick. The pricing page gives examples: $0.04 per image for flux-1.1-pro, $0.025 for flux-dev and $3.00 per thousand images for flux-schnell. That's cheap enough for prototyping. Before you commit at volume, though, you'll need to check each model's page for cost estimates. If you only ever need one vendor's model, going direct to that vendor may be simpler.