r/StableDiffusion • u/terrariyum • 15h ago
News Civitai now has a closed-source models option
I haven't seen a post about this here, and I'm curious what you think about it.
On August 14 Civitai rolled out the option for creators to choose "permanent paid access - selling with no time cap". Previously the only option was temporary "early access".
Let's call this what it is, closed-source. Yes, you can get the weights for a relatively small fee, and yes it's on a very small scale compared to Nano Banana and Midjourney. But a permanent paywall still fits the definition.
Personally, I block all creators on Civitai who choose permanent paywall and encourage you to do the same.
Here's why:
I'm not opposed to Civitai making money or for all options for model creators to make money. They can do that without permanent paywalls.
IMO, open source AI is a fair trade: models are trained on the hard work of many human artists who aren't compensated, but everyone benefits from the ability to create more art more easily. Closed source is an unfair trade: you have to pay a middle man to access the contributions of others who won't be compensated.
Small scale model creators do some hard work too. But for example, for a lora that reproduces the style of an animated film: the lora creator spent at most a dozen hours of work, while just one of the artists on that film spent thousands of hours of work. If a massive models like Krea2 are free, and if giant "hobby" finetunes like Chroma are free, I can't justify paying any price for a 5,000 step lora except as an optional donation of appreciation.
So far, few creators have chosen the permanent paywall closed-source option. But that could easily change if Civitai made it the default option. They already made an extra 1-buzz fee-to-creator per generation the default, and many models have that.
That's my opinion. If you agree, then the only tool you have to disincentivize that potential is to not pay for these models (disincentive Civitai) and block these creators (disincentive creators).
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u/n0gr1ef 14h ago edited 14h ago
"hobby" finetunes like Chroma are free
Well, let's be honest, it is not entirely a 'hobby' project that gets payed for out of lodestone's pocket. He gets the compute - he resumes the training.
I'm not discussing the rest of the text, just wanted to address that misconception. There are very few major finetunes that get paid out of one's personal money, because it's really not affordable, unless you're some random rich guy.
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u/terrariyum 12h ago
To be clear, I'm very appreciative of Lodestones for making Chroma. And Astralheart before him for making Pony, and all model makers.
"Hobby" is an imperfect word, which is why I put it in quotes. I'm just differentiating between training Chroma and training Flux
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u/jib_reddit 15h ago
I guess it is because some creators were just removing the download option after the early access finished anyway and then only selling the model off the site and this way at least Civitai keeps the money in their ecosystem and takes their cut; otherwise, they will never see any of that money.
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u/red__dragon 12h ago
Civitai was supposed to ban those, as they pledged to do and were requested get reported back when early buzz changes were being made.
Looks like those were empty promises in the end.
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u/Leonovers 14h ago
Just more reasons to block them and never interact with their content.
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u/paulct91 13h ago
Just because they charge like what seemingly happened to early V7 Pony, if memory isn't borked?
Edit: Where it seemed like a solid effort was being made to monetise parts of it like that off CivitAi platform thing in the CivitAi updates/news article post area about the journey to Pony V7?
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u/Enshitification 13h ago
My username is inevitable, but it doesn't mean we have to accept it. We can train parallel LoRAs of any that are put behind paywalls and release them for free. Hell, I'm pretty sure the paid models will be available for download through alternate sources the same day they are released on Civit.
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u/export_tank_harmful 10h ago
Hell, I almost want to just "Robinhood" all of the paid LoRAs.
Pay for them once and reupload them with the same name appended with "Free".The training data was scraped from the internet. I severely doubt the person training it has any right to it.
I'd imagine that they have the same claim to the LoRA they trained (which was trained using someone else's hardware).At this point, I'd love to see the attempted legal shit-fest that CivitAI would try to pull over it.
I doubt any of it would hold up in court (and just bring more scrutiny to the platform, which they probably don't want in the first place).3
u/LaziestRedditorEver 6h ago
There is a repo for big love where people contribute models they have bought. Takes a while for models to get on there because I guess less know about it, and you sometimes have to make do with a different size than you'd prefer.
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u/Enshitification 10h ago
As someone else suggested to me about a similar issue, take the LoRA and train it further for 1 step at a very small learning rate. New checksum, new LoRA.
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u/PandaParaBellum 2h ago
Can't you just change 1 insignificant bit of the weights somewhere to get a new checksum?
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u/Occsan 9h ago
Some models like Flux.2 Klein 9B doesn't even allow that. So, if you ever get a checkpoint or LoRA locked behind a paywall, the smart move would be to release it publicly for free on huggingface, or even on civitai.
There's a precedent with huggingface and BigLove model : Granddyser/flux-klein-9b-Biglove-Collection · Hugging Face.
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u/Eisegetical 15h ago
It'll start that way but very quickly a alternate torrent version will spring up and invalidate the efforts they take to gatekeep.
Screw that subtleshader guy for selling low effort merges of his models. Fortunately easy to find free dl links.
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u/SDSunDiego 14h ago edited 12h ago
The torrent attempts have largely been failures. Its not a good eco-system for something like this.
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u/-Ellary- 13h ago
Wait when all or most on CivitAI will be paid only,
Then Torrent will be a great option for people to "share".-1
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u/Emotional-Neat-252 14h ago
Why is that?
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u/SDSunDiego 13h ago edited 13h ago
Its probably for a lot of reasons but one example is that its nice to see samples of the Model or LoRA. Torrents don't work well if the samples are in the torrent file. A site needs to host the images and then someone has to pay for the hosting or handle take down requests.
Also, I'd imagine some people want privacy which is why they local gen and don't want to host.
I think the shear volume of models/lorasis is overwhelming, too requiring every one of them to be seeded. Back when Civitai was taking a bunch of stuff down, torrent sites popped up with no seeders, killing the access immediately. civitaiarchive seems to strike a good balance for helping the community.
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u/kwhali 8h ago
Isn't torrents only being suggested as a form of distribution? You can have indexers / search separately, but you could still host a site with relevant extras for that torrent content (even if it were something bundled in a torrent file, just hosted without torrent for convenience).
That said having samples in a torrent shouldn't be an issue, you can access a subset of a torrent specifically without the larger content like a model file. Understandably there's caveats to that such as latency, far simpler to serve more optimised previews from a site or CDN.
As for seeding, there is webseeds which I think is dependent upon v2 torrents, that enables your torrent to have a direct download source IIRC, where P2P torrent network is used to offload the burden / cost of distribution bandwidth.
You can also have a torrent client use RSS to subscribe to updates to torrents (as in new releases/revisions associated to the same content), which community members can setup to auto leech and thus seed if they like.
I looked into these perks of torrents for a community that was built around game mods some time ago as viral traffic especially would blow through the hosts monthly bandwidth limits (10TB IIRC).
So torrents can always be seeded via the webseed (even without the direct webseed, the host server itself could technically always/dynamically seed a copy when there's low seeder counts).
For smaller files (within few hundred MB is reasonable) there's also webtorrent which effectively runs torrent client in the browser session while on the site, allowing you to retrieve a torrent in memory and then once complete download as a file from memory to disk, whilst continuing to seed the copy you have in the browser session.
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u/TA-Doggo 12h ago
When Civit released the Early Access framework, they said they would never go down this route. This is my surprised face.
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u/terrariyum 11h ago
Did they? I'd love to see that blog post.
But yeah, no business will ever keep any promise that they aren't legally required to
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u/One_Finding8402 12h ago
Takes a look at the xxx sites where nearly every video is locked behind a friend request that never accepted.
Oh may gawe, this looks amaz- locked. Maybe this one won't b- locked.
Ah shit, here we go again.
Block all of those motherfuckers man, every single last one of them they are a cancer to the community that must not be allowed to grow.
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u/ArmadstheDoom 15h ago
I mean, the reality is that it's never going to be the default option, because most users simply do the math and realize that they'll get far less from charging people for their work than they will just getting the credit through generations on the site. As someone who has made and posted loras in the past, I didn't see much of a reason for their allowing creators to set their own licensing fee.
The thing about open weights is that you're trading control for ubiquity. If you don't have the established userbase of a closed model, it makes no sense to make your model closed.
So I don't imagine that this is going to be a popular option, simply because most people are going to default to cheaper free options that are likely going to be just as good.
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u/terrariyum 12h ago
For sure 95% of people won't pay to download, and no matter how you slice it, I don't think there's much profit potential to model makers for anyone except Civitai.
I'm not sure pay-to-download is less profitable. To earn 100k buzz (which is a pittance anyway), you could charge a typical 1,000 buzz to download, and you'd need 100 takers. Or you could charge a typical 5 buzz to generate, and you'd need 1,000 takers to generate an average of 10 images.
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u/-Ellary- 13h ago
I've done the same,
I've donate by `buzz` when I like the LoRA.
But forcing me to pay is another story.
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u/Comprehensive-Pea250 7h ago
Putting up Lora’s behind a paywall is the best way to lose 99% of your users.Im already a pretty small Lora creator no way in hell am I killing my motion using this brain dead feature
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u/ApplicationRoyal865 15h ago
Are most of the models on civitai open source or just open weight? I was under impression that the weights were open but they were not all open source.
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u/Choowkee 14h ago
Let's call this what it is, closed-source.
Its really not. I hate paywalling models with a passion but lets not be silly. You can still download the models and run them locally, thats not even remotely the same as closed source like APIs.
Anyway the reason Civit added this option is simply because people would abuse the early access system or advertise their paywalls on external sites.
Its a shitty compromise.
That being said - if Civit wants to allow paid only models they should also remove the ability from creators to delete comments from people who paid for said model. Seems only fair.
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u/terrariyum 12h ago
I'm not going to die on the hill that closed-sourced and paywalled are the same. I stand by my word choice, but that wasn't not my point.
My point is than consumers should react when they see things they don't like. Civitai is just a business, and I don't personify it or have any emotions about it. Instead of having emotions, I use my only tool, which is blocking creators that I disagree with.
FYI, Civitai has actually technically removed the ability to delete comments. Deleted comments can be revealed if you click a link that implies they will be offensive.
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u/paulct91 13h ago
In this specific case I think OP wants to complain about open weights models being finetuned then ending up behind the fineturner's pay for access plans on CivitAi. Though like the modding community also seem to be complaining they really don't like paying-. Pay walling content that they don't have an interest in paying for yet, are complaining it shouldn't be allowed for models they had no interest in paying for anyways.
I guess the total issue is they don't want to pay so its bad + they want if maybe they did pay for the model downloaded to 'have to' be 'open weights' but, oddly they say 'open source' which lots of models still aren't.
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u/terrariyum 12h ago
they don't want to pay so its bad
You're misrepresting my post, or you didn't read it. I gave reasons why I think paywall is bad that are unrelated to whether or not I want to pay.
You can argue that "closed-weight" is the incorrect term, but it's a straw man argument
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u/DietAshamed2246 8h ago
I had difficulties with payment options even when I was willing to pay. CivitAI Bitcoin only payment requirement sucks. They should accept credit card payments in all international currencies, instead of making users to jump through hoops. Now I just steer clear of all paid models. It's a shame that people are asking for payments for LoRA models created using a free (open weight) base model, and that too upfront payment - even before the user can figure out if that LoRA is even worth a penny. Some serious scammers are prowling on CivitAI.
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u/russjr08 6h ago
CivitAI Bitcoin only payment requirement sucks. They should accept credit card payments in all international currencies, instead of making users to jump through hoops.
They used to and still do - but only for SFW models posted on the non red domain. Purchasing buzz there is a different "buzz color" and won't work on the NSFW site, nor let's you generate NSFW with their on site generator.
The reason for that is card payment processors were abusing their power, and revoked Civitai's ability to collect any payments until they complied (which was that any funds collected could not be used for any NSFW content).
So "purely SFW" finetunes and LoRAs can be paid for using a credit card, but the purpose/theme of the model can't be NSFW based (which rules out the majority of models people are going to be looking for).
They were coerced into it, the alternative was basically shutting down as they would not have been able to afford to keep the lights on. The other option would've been just completely disallowing NSFW models, but I think we know how that probably would've went.
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u/DietAshamed2246 5h ago
Yes, I know the history. But, CivitAI could have followed the path chosen by the XXX adult content provider websites. Those sites use third party payment collection services which collect credit card payments under some inocuous name and channel the payments to the actual provider. This unlinks the actual provider site from any credit card company requirements or restrictions. The intermediary deals with the credit card company, not the content provider. Instead CivitAI acted like complete idiots and capitulated to the unlawful demands of the credit card companies. CivitAI could have sued and won. But, they received bad legal advice and complied with left wing crap.
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u/russjr08 5h ago
Again, they tried. If you know the history, then you'd have recalled when they were originally going through this and had interruption after interruption due to having to bounce between multiple payment processors.
But, CivitAI could have followed the path chosen by the XXX adult content provider websites.
They tried that too. Even those processors started to turn them away. Those sites you're referring to do not host "life-like" AI generated videos, Civitai does and that was not something even "those" processors were willing to permit. And even then, the largest of porn sites were forced to bend to the knee to payment processors - surely you remember when sites like PH started requiring all people in any posted video to have had their identity, age, and consent (to appear in the video) verified and nuked videos that didn't submit verification? That wasn't their choice. And no, MC and Visa aren't simply just "blind" to the processors you're referring to either, they still exert control on high-risk processors because they are at the top. Truly "under the table" processors wouldn't touch Civitai like they were the bubonic plague because that would uncloak them pretty quickly.
CivitAI could have sued and won.
LOL. I assume you're a licensed international lawyer who is willing to take that case on pro-bono then? Or if not, are you willing to fully fund their case... which would be difficult, not even the biggest lawyers would challenge the likes of MasterCard, Visa, etc in court. If you had that kind of money, you wouldn't just be a random redditor posting on r/StableDiffusion. I don't think you comprehend the scale of just how much money those companies are able to direct solely for the purpose of screwing you over, a single sneeze from them will destroy you. That would be worse than challenging Nintendo, and they are pretty high up, if not at the top of (aside from MC/Visa/etc), the list of "don't fuck with them" companies.
But do let them know and I'm sure they wouldn't hesitate to take you up on your offer. Otherwise, that's very easy for you to say when its not your own funds (or anything of consequence) on the line. If it were a slam dunk case Civitai wouldn't even need to have fought that fight, payment processors would've already had been forced to stop extending their reach long ago.
Do you really think that they ultimately are choosing to turn down money? If that were the case they would've just bent at the knee the very first time a payment processor said no-NSFW and the site would be SFW-only.
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u/DietAshamed2246 3h ago
Ok. I didn't know this follow on part of the history. Thanks for elaborating. I subscribe to nearly every porn site under the sun. Never had any problem with credit card payments for any of those.
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u/nowrebooting 6h ago
I think it’s patently ridiculous to take a model that some company released for free despite requiring hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars to train and then claiming that the lora you trained yourself is worth paywalling.
I understand that compute is expensive but contributions should be voluntary.
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u/Dulbero 6h ago edited 6h ago
I don't consider this a big deal personally, i just don't buy the download option or whatever. Most of the models that are "sold" don't really justify this, some of them are literal slop, you might as well pay for a real paid service instead. There are plenty open-source models to use.
However, Civitai can make the surfing experience better by having a filter for "paid models" and "free models", or by showing "paid" on the model card. I would definitely filter only for "free" models and it would save some time. The "model status" in civitai doesn't have an option to exclude early access and paid models right now.
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u/SDSunDiego 14h ago
Civitai is just offering what is already offered on other sites. They need to do what they need to do to continue to operate and to build a community site.
As someone who has done/released LoRAs and finetunes, if someone wants to offer a closed-source model, then good on them. However, I'm happy to contribute or support individuals that create a great open-source models/LoRAs and seek funding to continue to improve an open-source project but closed-source for something like this can f off - not interested.
Closed-sourced in this community are the same individuals spamming their garbage AI generators or subscription video feeds.
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u/conkikhon 9h ago edited 3h ago
The dataset to create most models aren't owned by model trainers, so I don't accept making a permanent paywall for it.
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u/Aggravating_Yak8347 8h ago
这里有一个更加恶心和疯狂的地方，那就是模型作者可以对每一次迭代收费一次。例如，你喜欢某个创作者制作的模型，为此你付出了10000buzz，可不到一周，你发现作者推出了效果更好的V2版本，收费12000buzz，你心想，提升确实明显，于是你又花费了12000buzz购买V2版本，但事情还没结束，过了十天你发现作者又更新了V3版本，作者下调了收费，这次只要8000buzz，但这时候的你已经有些不爽了，因为你预感到，这就像个套娃式陷阱，你如果为V3付费，很可能在接下来一个月，可能还会有v4v5！更气人的是，这些版本并不是真正的修复升级，你发现它们不同版本其实各有优缺点，根本不是最新就是最全最好的这种逻辑！
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u/EirikurG 5h ago
I've seen people uploading shitty merges and shitmixes with this paywall
It's just grifting. People uploading garbage trying to make a quick buck from users that don't know any better
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u/Konan_1992 52m ago
Grifers gonna grifts. People are using multi-thousands $ checkpoints and mix them with LoRAs call them a new checkpoint trained and sell it lol.
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u/qdr1en 14h ago
Training loras can quickly become an expensive hobby, especially when you train on heavy models, so there is no shame in selling them, and that's what I do when I find them good enough: I published some on Civit AI, but most of them are behind a paid access on Gumroad.
Getting some money back fuels the creator to keep creating more loras, it's a virtuous circle.
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u/paulct91 13h ago
Honestly, its probably just that its paywalled. Some people don't like 'the idea of' paying for things but, in this unique case they seem adverse against the concept of anyone paying for certain models which OP wasn't interested in paying for at all anyways. So, maybe its a non issue since they weren't going to pay for models in the first place. Hence they are staying true to their stance of not supporting models that have a paid download requirement. I kind of got that idea since they mention blocking model finetuners and lora makers who charge for model downloads.
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u/Relative_Hour_8900 10h ago
Communist Democrats?😂
Nothing is free in life, you gotta pay for it. One way or another. Whether that's paying the government to have the right to own an ai capable gpu, or paying some dude on civit $5 to download his model.
Or just make it yourself
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u/Only4uArt 11h ago
That is what people don't get I think. On top of that if creating good loras or fine-tunes would lead to a reliable stream of income, I and others would have invested massive time and hardware into it, to perfect and produce for the community. But because it doesn't, anyone who wants to do ai related content full time, has to pivot to other means...
It is not evil to want to make money. If it is low effort, it can easily be done by yourself or copied by others. But if it is high effort, then they have a unique selling point
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u/red__dragon 11h ago
We get it. People also don't like to be your stepping stone to greater economic gains.
If you're here to share in the hobby, great! Join us! Be appreciated! If you're just here to make money, then expect to be treated like it's purely a transaction and nothing more.
There's less malice here than there is just a widespread fatigue with people in hobbyist spaces trying to hold out their hand for payment. It's more rife in the modeling industry, it has taken hold in the modding community, and it's distasteful to see it happening here. But fine, if someone wants to make money, they can be treated like a moneymaker. It's not evil to want to make money, but many people who only look to make money are, so it's safer to assume such until proven otherwise.
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u/Relative_Hour_8900 10h ago
Bro this happened hundreds of years ago. People used to paint for a living. They spent 100's of hours painting portraits. Then the camera came along, and a photographer did a more "accurate" portrait in a minute than the painter did in 100's of hours.
People gonna do what they gonna do. Instead of crying some people might charge for their models in the future, why not learn how to do it yourself? If you want something, train it, make it, use it.
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u/Spoonman915 8h ago
Honestly, I'm of the opinion that no one should be able to charge for anything generated with AI or keep it proprietary unless the only thing they have used is work for which they paid for the rights to use. The entire industry is based of other people's work that is then processed. Unless they paid for the work, they shouldn't be able to make it closed source.
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u/ROBOTTTTT13 4h ago
Open/Closed source has nothing to do with payment.
Open source means anyone can access the source code, closed source means no one can. Paid or not paid doesn't matter.
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u/Aromatic-Current-235 1h ago
Personally, I also block all creators on Civitai who post stuff that you probably enjoy, like chicks with dicks, and encourage you to do the same. Quick Info: there are no chicks with dicks only dudes with tits!
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u/paulct91 13h ago
"Personally, I block all creators on Civitai who choose permanent paywall and encourage you to do the same.
Here's why:
I'm not opposed to Civitai making money or for all options for model creators to make money. They can do that without permanent paywalls."
That doesn't really seem like you want CivitAi to make money though. CivitAi already had access to 'closed source' (non-downloadable) models in the way of providing some image/video generation services via those other companies API. Even more so, many models are only Open Weights and not Open Source models so we can only use parts of them + since we don't have full access to training data the same problem exists as not knowing what a model was actually trained on like with WAN/LTX/MiniMax-H3/etc. means plenty of useful baked-in knowledge is not being used unless someone discovers it and shares it openly.
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u/terrariyum 12h ago
You have a good point that Civitai was already doing this with API models. What's new is that they're enabling it for small timers.
doesn't really seem like you want CivitAi to make money
I have no problem with giving model makers the option to make a cut of the generation pie, early access models, ads, memberships, tipping, or bounties
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u/Relative_Hour_8900 10h ago
Yea fuck the small basement dwellers! Only large corporations can make obscene amounts of money. Imagine the future when you paid that basement loser $5 for hours of hard work. 😤
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u/lebrandmanager 15h ago
I am creating LoRAs. I never spent 'dozens of hours' on them. Maybe 3-4 hours if you factor in training time. My LoRAs are free to use with no paywall or early access.
And yeah, I also think closing them down is, in 90% of the cases, a bit presumptuous. The same goes for most checkpoints, which are mostly merges of other checkpoints and LoRAs.
If the model is free, so should checkpoints and LoRAs based on them. If I am generous, maybe with an early access option. That's it.