Runware

Overview

Runware is a tool for making AI images and videos. Founded in 2023 out of San Francisco by Flaviu Radulescu. Backed by big names like a16z and Insight Partners. They built custom GPU servers with BIOS-level tuning so inference is nearly instant. And it's working. Devs have already made over 4 billion assets through it.

You can do image and video generation but also edit stuff, upscale it, wipe backgrounds and throw in captions. It’s got a free tier where you get  $2 worth of credits, or 1000 images on signup (and email confirmation), then it’s pay-per-use after that. Just $0.0006 an image.

Runware is known for speed and price. Most folks run this stuff on rented cloud GPUs but Runware built its own gear. They call it the Sonic Inference Engine and it slashes cost and time. It’s plug-and-go through an API so you don’t need to know a thing about AI or mess with servers.

It’s also green tech running on solar and hydro and it scales for whatever size app or team you got.

Image tools. Includes text-to-image, image-to-image, upscaling, background removal, captioning and in/outpainting.

Video tools. Text-to-video, image-guided video, camera control, lip sync, LoRA and ControlNet support. Starts at $0.14 a clip.

AI Models. Use over 300K models from places like Stable Diffusion, Google, KlingAI and CivitAI. You can also upload your own.

API access. Full REST API plus WebSocket for real-time stuff. Sub-second speeds for images and much faster than typical cloud setups.

Extra bits. Playgrounds for testing model library browsing and integration with tools like Make.

As a bonus, Runware offers a bunch of AI workflows to make stylized art that stays consistent. One makes sharp line drawings good for coloring books. The lines stay even and clean. Another builds portraits and avatars from several photos so faces look the same across scenes. A third makes emoji-style stickers with bold outlines and white edges using a model setup built to keep things steady. For game devs there's a pixel art workflow that mixes edge detection with style tools to turn assets into pixel form without messing up shapes.