Build your own AI image generator API with a free, open-source stack
An image generation API that apps, shops and agencies call to create product shots, ads and artwork, billed per image.
fal raised $1.3 billion at a $16 billion valuation selling AI image generation to apps, and Midjourney makes $200M+ a year without taking investor money.
The stack
- Qwen-Image ↗The open image model that draws every picture, licensed for commercial useApache 2.0
- Claude ↗Writes the API, the queue and the billing codePaid API
- A rented cloud GPU ↗Runs the model on demand and switches off when the queue is emptyPay per hour
How to build it
- 1Start from Qwen-Image, a free open-source image model you are allowed to use commercially.
- 2Have Claude write the API: prompts in, images out, with keys and usage limits per customer.
- 3Run it on a rented GPU that scales to zero when nobody is generating.
- 4Charge apps and shops per image, with volume tiers.
- 5Add a safety filter before launch so nothing harmful leaves the API.
About 2 cents an image. 100,000 images a day across your customers is $2,000 a day.
- E-commerce product photos
- Real estate staging
- Restaurant menus
- Print-on-demand stores
- Ad agencies
- Private ChatGPT for companies →
- LibreChatfree
- Claudepaid
- MCP connectorsfree
- AI employee for one niche →
- Claudepaid
- OpenClawfree
- Lightpandafree
- AI receptionist →
- Chatterboxfree
- Whisperfree
- LiveKitfree
- Claudepaid
Common
questions.
Straight answers. If yours isn't here, ask on a 20-minute call.
What is this list?+
Every week our reels break down an AI product a real company is making money with, and the free, open-source stack you could build your own version on. This page keeps all of them in one place, newest first, with the tools, the licences, the money maths and the reel.
Is the stack really free?+
The software is. Every tool listed is open source or fair-code, and the licence is shown next to it so you can check commercial use. You still pay for hosting, GPUs and the AI model's API, which for most of these products is a few hundred dollars a month at launch.
Which licences allow commercial use?+
MIT and Apache 2.0 allow commercial use with attribution. AGPL-3.0 does too, but if you change the code and offer it as a service you must publish your changes. Fair-code licences such as n8n's Sustainable Use License allow internal and client use but restrict reselling the tool itself, so read them before you build on them.
Can Axionry build one of these for me?+
Yes. We build AI products on open-source stacks with $0 upfront: each checkpoint is invoiced only after you have seen it working. Book a 20-minute call and bring the niche you want to sell to.
Want your own AI image generator API built for your niche?
Twenty minutes, straight to the engineer. No sales rep, no deck.