Cheapest Cloud GPU to Host FLUX.1 [dev]
FLUX.1 [dev] is Black Forest Labs' state-of-the-art image generation model using a 12B rectified flow transformer architecture. At BF16, the 24 GB model fits on a single RTX 4090. The model produces photorealistic images with excellent prompt adherence and is the recommended choice for production image generation.
VRAM Sizing Matrix
Memory consumption at different quantization levels for FLUX.1 [dev]. Includes model weights only — KV-cache adds 2-32 GB depending on context length and batch size.
| Precision | VRAM Required | Fits On | Quality Loss |
|---|---|---|---|
| FP16 / BF16 | 24 GB | Single GPU with headroom | None (full precision) |
| FP8 | 16 GB | Single GPU | <1% perplexity delta |
| INT4 / AWQ | 12 GB | Single consumer GPU | 1-3% quality degradation |
Hardware Bottleneck Advice
KV-cache expansion, tensor parallelism constraints, and production considerations for FLUX.1 [dev].
KV-Cache & Context Scaling
12B transformer for image generation. No KV-cache in the traditional LLM sense — the model uses a rectified flow architecture with fixed-size latent representations. 24 GB VRAM handles BF16 inference with VAE decoder headroom.
Tensor Parallelism
TP=1. The 12B parameter count and image generation workload fit entirely on a single RTX 4090. No multi-GPU required.
Live Cloud Pricing for RTX 4090
Filtered to RTX 4090-class hardware — the recommended GPU for hosting FLUX.1 [dev].
| Provider | GPU & VRAM | Interconnect | Spot Rate | On-Demand | Monthly | Status | Action | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Community | PCIe 4.0 (64 GB/s) | $0.34 / hr | $0.85 / hr | $208 / mo | Instant | |||
Bare Metal | PCIe 4.0 (64 GB/s) | $0.69 / hr | $1.73 / hr | $422 / mo | Instant | |||
Cloud | PCIe 4.0 (64 GB/s) | $0.74 / hr | $1.85 / hr | $453 / mo | Instant | |||
Dedicated | PCIe 4.0 (64 GB/s) | $0.89 / hr | $2.23 / hr | $545 / mo | Instant |
Production Runbook
Ready-to-deploy vLLM / SGLang launch command for FLUX.1 [dev].
python -m diffusers.examples.flux --model black-forest-labs/FLUX.1-dev --precision bf16Related hosting guides